gRSShopper

Congratulations to Stephen on the release of gRSShopper (ace name BTW :)

“a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing. “

Here’s a demo and here’s the project page.

Great shame that the .com is a domain squatting page :(

To mac or not to mac?

Have been toying with getting a MacBook Pro to replace an increasingly clunky Vaio.

But being a M$ user since, well, forever… I’ve gotta weigh up a heap of stuff.

First up, as this is basically my business and livelihood (in a very literal sense) what will the cost to me in figuring everything out all over again.

I mean, I can fix pretty much anything on XP… am I gonna be wasting hours/days/more on a Mac?

And will the change in OS be inspiring or just a pain in the arse.

And what of my beloved EditPlus :(

Bizarrely it’s the ipod touch that got me thinking of making the switch, it’s just so much fun to use.

Also, what are the chances of something new coming out that’s, well, better in the next 6 months?

Anyway, just weighing this up myself as much as anything, but if anyone has any thoughts I’d love to hear them!

100 WordPress themes – that you don’t need to edit!

I released a new WordPress / WPMU theme pack yesterday with 100 themes, lots of them new and some old favorites (like Mandigo) reworked to allow for custom uploaded headers.

What’s really really cool about these themes though is that because they’re all set up to work on Edublogs, they require absolutely no code editing at all.

Every sidebar is widgetized, every big header can be replaced through the backend of WP and (hopefully almost) every bug has been squashed.

So with any luck it’ll be of a lot of use to regular WP folk as well as WPMU-ers.

Incidentally, did you know that ‘Farms’ theme packs have been downloaded over 20 thousand times!

Edublogs gets prettified!

Go check out our new makeover at Edublogs.

You can let us know what you think of it here.

I’m pretty happy we’ve been able to finally get it out, it’s been a while!

But if you really can’t be bothered to click above, then here’s a grab of it:

Although I reckon it looks much nicer in person!

I absolutely love this

I’ve gotta say, first looks at the new admin design made me freak out a bit but in actual use WordPress 2.5 is so very very nice it makes me smile. It’s like the iTouch of blogging aps, so full of beautiful detail that I’m, yet again, counting my blessings that I’ve build my entire professional life at the moment entirely around this gorgeous thing.

I mean yeh there are all the big new elements which rock (galleries etc.) but these other things really show some love …

  • I love the extra links next to log out
  • The extra level of tabs where Dashboard is (not to mention the new dashboard, how much are we gonna enjoy dashboard widgets!)
  • Splitting Manage / Options into Manage / Settings and putting settings over on the right is just plain sensible
  • Comments-in waiting (and the calendar icons) are just lovely
  • Making the uploader an optional click is about the best thing I could think of for so many many reasons
  • Tag suggestion is a nice touch

Cannae wait to implement this on Edublogs – people are gonna freak out!