The latest version 3.3 has made a bunch of usability improvements. The most important one, to me, is the new drag-and-drop media uploader to add content, such as photos, to a post. I always try to incorporate photos to my post, and the old interface was, at best, cumbersome to navigate to get at content in my computer. The new drag-and-drop interface makes it so much simpler and straight-forward.

The version 3.3 announcement also describes a bunch of other changes which I’m sure will be particularly welcoming and useful to new users of WordPress. When I first started using WordPress in 2007, I would not say it was complicated to use then. However, WordPress has gotten a lot more feature-rich since. To a new user, the things you could do with WordPress could be mind-boggling and overwhelming. So it’s a good thing that version 3.3 remembers about new users, making sure they are not left too far behind.

Recently, I’ve realized that when I write, I like to do so with a visualization of how the end product will look like. Yes, that’s what we’re all used to: Microsoft Word is a WYSIWYG editor. But I thought I could focus on content first, then fix up the grammar, style, layout and other stuffs later.

It turns out that while I can hammer out main points, I find myself always needed to visualize the final product. For example, I’ll be thinking about what photo to incorporate. Or how the page will be laid out.

So what happened recently was this. I was trying to write a draft of a blog post for Omy.sg in Microsoft Word, then later upload it to the Omy.sg blog site. Microsoft Word is still a visual editor right? Well, I somehow terribly unproductive. It’s not that I don’t know or don’t like using Microsoft Word. I’ve written plenty of documents with Microsoft Word. But this one was going to end up as a blog post on a website. I kept wanting to visualize how it would look like on the web.

I gave up doing the draft in Microsoft Word, and just wrote directly on the Omy.sg blog site. I had wanted to do the draft in Microsoft Word first so that I can work while being offline (i.e. disconnected from the Internet).

Back on the topic of this WordPress site, I’ve been making some theme changes recently. I’ve been wanting to do so for like a whole year already, but just never got around to doing it. Progress is still slow, but you’ll see the front page is now laid out quite differently. I’m trying to achieve a blog-magazine sort of look and feel.

This is a hand-coded theme. Just like my last theme coding project, I just couldn’t find any ready-made ones that I like. Oh, I’ve given up, at least for now, trying to code this to be generic and universal enough for the theme to be released for public download. It’s just too much hassle. So it’s sort of totally customized to my site specifics.

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For some years, we have been inundated with so many new social media platforms. Although Friendster and Myspace didn’t really catch up in a big way here (or at least not in my social circle), there were enough of others: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. All these cloud-based services were drowning out personal blogs. Blogs as this one. Yes, I’m definitely posting in here much less nowadays than say one or two years ago. Not surprisingly, Facebook and, more recently, Google+, has been taking up blogging time.

For some people, they have simply taken their blog postings to Facebook, or other similar social web platforms. Some others have simply changed the way they share, long posts (i.e. anything over 100 words) have been reduced to just a few sentences, often even less.

I’m just wondering how the social web landscape will change in the next year or two. The myriad of social web platforms are probably going to consolidate. Just Facebook and Google+. Or maybe, well, predominantly Google+. Or perhaps we will continue to see fresh waves of niche services spring up, before they are once again consolidated by some big-name player.

Personal blogs are on their way out. Or they need to re-invent themselves. Perhaps, to re-integrate with the current trend of the social web.

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It’s even more so when you consider that the deal also includes a free Positive SSL certificate from Comodo that would have cost you US$9.95 to get separately.

Well, it turns out this offer doesn’t apply to domain name transfers. It’s only good for a brand new domain registration. But anyhow, since I’ve already started writing about domain transfers from GoDaddy to Namecheap, I’ll just tell you all about it.

If you want to transfer your domain out of GoDaddy, remember to do these things:

1. Make sure your domain is unlocked: Click on My Account, then Domain Manager. Click on the domain name you want to transfer under the My Domains list. On the Domain Details page, look on the left side under the Domain Information heading. The Locked field should read Unlocked, otherwise click on the Manage link to unlock it. It may take a few minutes to unlock the domain.
2. Further down the above list, look for Authorization Code. Click on the Send by Email link. You will receive an email from GoDaddy giving you the Authorization Info. This code is more accurately called the EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) code.

Once you’ve received your EPP code, you can go to Namecheap and start the process to transfer your domain. Go to Domains, then Transfer a Domain. There is a big text box to enter the domain name(s) to transfer. Type your domain name, a comma, and then the EPP code. You also have the opportunity to enter the EPP code later, if you prefer, but you can do it right here. On the next page, click on Add to Cart, then just follow through to checkout. It should be pretty self-explanatory.

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You can read my GreenGeeks vs Bluehost review. There were a few good things going for GreenGeeks, but once my priorities were sorted out, Bluehost was clearly the winner. (Different people have different needs, and obviously some people will find GreenGeeks is the better choice.)

I’ve signed up a 3-year plan, but with anytime money back guarantee, there’s basically no real contract involved. After so many years running my own website, taking care of every detail of it from data centre co-location to server administration, I’m now letting a web hosting company sell me a service that I know perfectly well how to do myself. I hope I won’t be disappointed.

In the last month or so, I’ve been evaluating a bunch of Internet services, the sort of services that enable me to have a website, have my email, and generally have my presence on the Internet. For a start, I’ve started to change my domain name registrar to Namecheap. I’ll move my domains progressively as and when their current registrations expire.  Subsequently, I’m also exploring DNS hosting services.

I’m even thinking about email hosting… such as moving to Google Apps.

Cloud services are finally beginning to win me over. I’ve been slow to adopt hosting services. It’s because I know how to run all the services myself. I have the infrastructure to run the services myself. I don’t need to outsource. But, it’s beginning to get tiring, inefficient, and expensive to do it myself. Expensive isn’t necessarily in monetary terms, but more so in terms of effort.

I’ve been hesitant to trust the cloud or hosting services. You might have heard about the recent AWS outage (see more). That there was downtime was just a minor inconvenience. What was worrying was data loss. Yup, so much for redundant data storage.

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Now, you get to see the products of the 10 finalists, and vote for your favourites. The effort put in by the students is phenomenal. The final product is a one minute video. As you might know, there are 25 frames in one second of video, so there are 1500 frames in the final product. It’s quite a painstaking process to build the entire 1 minute video. The results are all amazing. The animations are really good, and the story lines behind the animations are pretty touching too, especially the… erm, okay, you go view them yourself, I shan’t try to influence.

Here’s how the voting works. You get to vote once on each of 4 platforms: the full website at nemation.sg, the mobile website (at the same URL), on the Facebook page, and SMS. Each time you vote, you need to pick 3 favourite clips. Vote by 6th February. If one of your vote turns out to be the winning entry, you stand to win prizes… like an iPad. More details on the website, of course. There are just 10 clips, each about a minute long, so including think time and clicking time, it won’t take you more than 11 minutes to get through all of them.

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Then, of course, there are still so many more gadget and other techie things to talk about. Yeah, they are never ending. (The current project is about battery calibration… you know, “drain till flat then charge till full” is correct in principle, but doesn’t quite work out that way in practice.)

It seems blogging has given way to micro-blogging. I’m posting more on Facebook than on my blog. Yeah, I realize I’m a bit slow… many others have already moved on from long-winded blogs to micro-blogs. I’ve read about how youngsters nowadays don’t have blog sites anymore… they just micro-blog on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. But I always thought (and I still do) that long-winded stories are a lot more meaningful than the phrases, which often hardly even form a complete sentence, being shared in a rather disorganized manner.

I suppose there’s a place for both. Micro-blogs have sometimes become almost like asynchronous instant messaging. The line starts to get fuzzy. It’s like your offline GTalk messages end up being delivered via GMail. Micro-blogs can probably capture a lot more thoughts, some of which would have slipped away if we had to put in the effort to write a proper full blog post.

Well… so basically, this blog site didn’t get updated as much as I would have liked. I don’t even think I would catch up with the queue of things I had thought to write about. I need to sort and prioritize the ideas… got to find some time to post about them… otherwise many things of 2010 will just fall into a void.

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I think WordPress is excellent… as a blogging platform. It could serve as a CMS too, if your CMS requirements are simple. Indeed, many people actually use WordPress as a CMS. Even people at my work place. But my idea of a CMS is so much more, and trying to make WordPress that sort of CMS I have in mind will require too many plugins, hacks, and various other kludges… if at all possible, to make the entire setup so complicated that one might as well have considered other software that had set out to be a CMS in the first place.

It’s just so strange that people continue to see WordPress as a CMS.

WordPress is really superb. I have to say that again. I use Drupal too, and I can tell you, the administration and maintenance of WordPress is so much more fun than it is on Drupal. (I still use Drupal because it’s a better CMS.) I always think software, like any good tool, should help you get your work done. Not get in your way.

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It’s just so strange to me that WordPress would be considered seriously as a CMS, let alone winning a CMS award. The core functions of a CMS (which stands for Content Management System in case you did not know) is about managing the authoring, editing, publication and maintenance of content such as articles and stories. WordPress, as a blog, would definitely qualify as a CMS in it simplest form.

However, we typically expect many more features out of a serious CMS. No doubt WordPress will still fit the bill in some limited areas, but seriously, I expect a lot more out of a CMS: media management, multiple authors, multiple editors/moderators, workflow, revision, staging, etc. I have no idea if the multitude of 3rd party plugins will turn the core WordPress software into something I would be comfortable to call a CMS, but I imagine even if it were possible, it would have been so much simpler to adopt something that was designed to be a CMS at its core. Something like Drupal, or Joomla.

Drupal works really great as a CMS, and I chose to use it at work. While it is great as a CMS, it does have many things to learn from WordPress in the area of site administration. Something I really loved about maintaining a WordPress site is the ease of upgrading plugins just be clicking through the web interface. With one click, an updated plugin can be downloaded and installed, automatically, including all the other administrative steps that has to go along with a plugin upgrade. In fact, with one click, the core WordPress software can also be upgraded. It’s simply amazing.

I wasn’t actually going to blog about this WordPress award, until I heard something at my work place, that someone had actually considered using WordPress as a CMS for their website. I was thinking that, wow really, people do think very highly of WordPress.

It didn’t take me very long to choose WordPress as my blogging platform when I launched this current blot site about 2.5 years ago. It’s a lot harder to choose a CMS. But if you are just looking for a blog software, WordPress is it. Now oddly affirmed by winning a CMS award.

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It’s an interesting question, and full time blogging sounds like an interesting proposition too.

I looked at the math. Nope, unfortunately not. My current Adsense earnings, divided by the approximate number of blogging hours a month, multiplied by 22 x 8 working hours a month, does not earn me enough money.

At least, not at the current rate I’m earning from Adsense. Something has to radically change to make the math work. (My assumption that Adsense earnings would increase proportionally to the amount of content I author could be flawed in the first place.)

There could also be other sources of advertising income. Or some other sources of revenue generation that replaces Adsense. But it is still unlikely to make an appreciable difference. I need something big. Like being so famous that everyone wants to read my blog, and whom can be convinced to click on some ads. Or when a brand name wants to buy sponsored space on my pages.

I think at this time I should be happy enough that Google Adsense feeds me a little pocket money. Full time blogging is not going to work for me, at least not now. But it’s a nice thing to dream about.

I wonder how has Google Adsense worked for other casual bloggers?

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