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This is one of those articles that, upon its existence, will spark a new trend on web visual design. So go read it.

This news piece from Telegraph tells about an experimental website that would change its design (color, fonts, etc.) according to user’s behavior.

This blog was supposed to be many things: design, code, and a bit of WordPress love. Recently, though, the content I wrote tend to gravitate to the latter; not that it’s something bad, I do love talking about WP. I just think that, hey, maybe it’d be a good idea to grow that interest into its own blog.

And so, WPLover is born.

Having a goal of providing “bite-sized WordPress news, and then some”, I hope I could grow that blog as well as this one. Managing multiple blogs is hard, so I cheated a bit by keeping in mind that WPLover will mostly contain snippet of news update instead of fully-blown article every time.

From now on, this blog will focus more on web design and code, so stay tuned for more articles on that area.

Oh, and thank you very much for reading. No, honestly.

Here’s the announcement. What makes me glad the most from this post is this:

Finally with regards to theme and plugin compatibility, we’ve had no reports of any broken themes in this upgrade, which makes sense because we didn’t really change anything core about themes, just added new optional capabilities like Gravatars.

So, it’s safe to say that we can just use this release for local development of future themes. Yay!

Delayed one week from the initial release date of March 10, 2008, WordPress 2.5 RC1 is finally out. Here are a few points worth mentioning from the announcement post:

For the past few months, we’ve been working with our friends at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — to redesign WordPress from the ground-up.

Yes, yes, yes. Music to my ears. Here’s my old post regarding Happy Cog’s involvement in redesigning WordPress’ backend.

You might also notice there are some new colors, the dashboard feels much fresher and lighter. If you’re jonesing for the old look under your user options you can now select the “classic” colors and get those old blues back. (It’s also pluggable so people can easily add or share their own color schemes.)

So, you can change the admin’s color schemes by creating plugins. Interesting. Here’s Ozh explaining how to do that in details. Now, I’m just itching to go to Colour Lovers and grab a few lovely schemes for this.

The software is basically done and stable, and could be released today

So, this is it. What I’m waiting the most from 2.5 is the redesigned admin, and if you’re like me, it’s probably quite safe to believe that the new design is there and ready to test. Now, let’s play!

I use the utterly useful XAMPP from Apache Friends for local development environment. Recently, however, I came across the strange behavior in which everytime I try to open a certain (not all) php page via the Firefox, it will try to download the file (the “Open With/Save As” popup window opens) instead of executing it. This is despite the fact that I’m opening it correctly (apache running fine, no error logs, accessing with “http://localhost/” instead of “c:/xampp/”). An it gets even weirder because I am dead sure the same page opens flawlessly just a few days before.

After two days of looking around, I finally found the cure: clean the browser cache!

Now, I don’t have any idea why this works, but it does. I’m happy, and I hope if you came across the same problem, this might help you as well.

Don West nailed it:

Public criticism from your competitors is the best publicity you can get. When they point out their competitors’ weaknesses it ALWAYS causes people to find the weaknesses in their own products and services and investigate the competitors’ product. Many switch to the competitor.

The moral of the story is: Keep your mouth(and keyboard) shut, and make sure your product is better than theirs by a long shot. The market will decide who is best and score is kept by sales…or users in the case of OS software.