The Mystic Bird

If you’ve read this blog any recently, you’ll remember I bought a new laptop with Vista as the OS (operating system) on it. Well, the laptop in itself is great! I love the look and feel of it and the keyboard layout works well for my hands. I’m using it mostly for my projects plus a few games and I was enjoying using it even with Vista’s annoyances. Until lately that is.

The Toshiba has 2 gigs of memory from the factory installed and is the same amount I have on my desktop machine that runs both Ubuntu and XP Pro. Thing is, the laptop will nearly run out of memory while running Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Notepad++ along with having some open windows for searching for images, docs, etc.

I’ll get a warning box telling me that Vista is low on memory and I need to save then close any open applications. That’s a load for Vista? I never get this on my desktop and I’ve had way more apps and windows running on it no matter if I’m in Ubuntu or XP!

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, right now as I type this…Vista’s memory is hovering right around the half-way mark. All I have open is Firefox and Google’s desktop app. That’s it. (more…)

I gotta hand it to the folks at Wordpress. This is one sweet upgrade they rolled out. 2.5 Rocks guys!

The one-click upgrade for my plugins is sweet! Before, I had to download the upgrade, extract it, then upload it and re-activate it. PITA sometimes….especially if there seems to be plenty of upgrades going around.

The new layout is awesome too. It’s light and airy instead of the dark blue we were all accustomed to. Things have definitely been re-arranged too so be sure to look carefully before thinking you’ve lost a function somewhere.

There’s selections for media, audio, video and the usual image. Audio huh? Hmm, maybe a little voice to go with the post soon. Heh, now that’d be scary!

They’ve seemingly tried to think of the user when they created this new version. It’s become even more user friendly than before. This is what blogging is all about folks. A user-friendly platform that has the author in mind when it comes to writing a post or page. This is just awesome.

For more information on what 2.5 can do for your blog’s backend, visit Wordpress.org’s blog and see for yourself!

Photoshop has come out with a new web-based way to upload and edit your images plus show them off to the world. Cost? Absolutely free! That’s right. For the cost of a little time needed to learn the ropes of how to upload, create an album, add images to the album, edit them, etc., you have a flash-based gallery to show off to your friends.

They call it Photoshop Express and it’s still in beta so there may still be some bugs that Adobe will need to work out but there’s a feedback link so that you can help them out with this.

All one has to do is to join the service (free) and wait on the verification email. Once this arrives, click the link and you’re taken to your new account to begin creating galleries. The limit at this time is 2 gigs but that may go up in time. (more…)

But it doesn’t accept widgets! What to do? A friend is having a similar issue with a blog for his customer and I came across this post over at Automattic.com about Widgetizing Themes. Maybe this might help some others looking for some help with this. I believe Wordpress is creating a plugin for this too if they haven’t already.