The Blog Studio

WordPress 2.9 ‘Carmen’ just hit the street, and this update has some really useful new features. We’ve spent some time with Carmen (named for jazz chanteuse Carmen McRae), and have written a short rundown to let you know what to expect when you upgrade, aimed at the everyday end user. This update is an especially big win for media heavy bloggers and inexperienced WP users.

The most exciting improvements can be found in the way WordPress handles images. While we love WP, we’ve always found the image handling a little clunky, and it’s the most common complaint we hear from users. Carmen adds a feature packed image editor to the WP dashboard. It’s now possible to resize, crop, flip and scale images right inside the program. This is a huge improvement that will save you time and trouble of having to edit images in a 3rd party app, and the fly them into WP.

The image editor works beautifully, and photos fit painlessly into the post. Images look the way you’d like them to look in your posts on the first try. Say ‘Goodbye’ to the old system of editing, inserting an image into the post, viewing the post, and going back to do it all over again. This feature is a huge win for bloggers that include many images in their posts, or users who aren’t familiar with image editing software.

Carmen also makes it dead simple to handle video embedding, which was a bit of a nightmare before.  Video embeds usually required a plugin, and many times the video formatting ended up looking funny in the post. Now, you just paste the video URL on its’ own line in the post, and the video will show up. That’s it’s. It couldn’t be simpler. WordPress 2.9 supports most popular video upload services including YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler and many more. We gave this a quick test this morning with some videos from YouTube and they went up without a hitch. This is a big time saver, and will let users add video with zero hassle or technical skill required. If you can paste a link, you can embed a video in WordPress 2.9.

Though not as flashy, Carmen overhauls the WordPress Plugin upgrade and compatibility system. One of the best things about WP is the staggering amount of useful plugins available, and most users have at least a few installed. The new system allows you to update your plugins as a batch, up to 10 at a time. It also improves the way WP checks plugins for compatibility with WordPress updates. As time goes on, the feature will become more useful as more plugins, and WP itself continue to release new versions. You can upgrade without having to suffer through plugin/WP compatibility issues.

At one point or another we’ve all accidentally deleted a WP post, and lost some sleep because once it’s gone, it’s gone. Not anymore. Carmen includes a powerful Global Undo feature. Now, when you delete a post or a comment, it goes into your trash, where it can be resurrected. As developers we LOVE this feature, because we no longer have to tell clients that the post spent hours working on is gone into the ether forever.

There quite a few less glamorous technical improvements going on in the background too. The most useful is that WP now supports rel=canonical, which is nice bonus in the SEO arena.

WordPress 2.9 Carmen has only been out for a couple days, but we’re already deeply impressed with the new features. Carmen takes two of the most frustrating aspects of WP, image and video handling, and completely overhauls them to make your life easier. The next time you create a post, you’ll immediately notice a difference in how simple it is to get media into your posts. The next time you accidentally delete a post, and can recover it, you’ll want to kiss Carmen on the mouth. The other improvements, while aren’t as obvious will become useful over time. As usual the brilliant people working on WP have cleaned up the code, stomped out some bugs and tightened things up all around.

Should you upgrade? Absolutely. The only reason not to upgrade would be if you rely on a certain plugin that is currently incompatible with Carmen. Other than that, you should switch over as soon as you can. It will simplify your blogging, and make using WP an even better experience.

If you’re currently using a previous version of Wordpress, you’ve got a lot to gain from this update. At The Blog Studio, we’re currently offering an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress for $150! The service includes a backup of your current site and database (an essential, yet often ignored step), as well as performing the upgrade itself.

If you are comfortable performing the upgrade yourself, upgrading to WordPress 2.9 couldn’t be easier. Login in to your WordPress Dashboard, and you’ll see a link that asks if you’d like to upgrade your installation. Click it, and in 30 seconds you’ll be ready to go. We didn’t have any issues at all, and the process was ultra fast and painless. You can also go the more technical route and download the package and perform the upgrade manually.

As always we’d like to take a second to extend a huge ‘Thank You’ from The Blog Studio, to the wonderful people who write, update and improve WP. You’ve done another excellent job and we appreciate your efforts. 

Google Chrome, has recently become available for OSX, and we’ve spent some time taking it for a test drive.

The first thing you’ll notice is how fast Chrome opens and launches your homepage. It starts noticeably faster than Firefox or Safari. The address bar, is by default, a Google search box. You can type in what your looking for, and Google will start displaying results in the bar. The search also feels extremely snappy, and it’s a nice convenience to be able to search without having to open an additional tab.

Chrome supports tabbed browsing, and when you open a new tab you’ll be brought to a favorites page that displays your most visited sites and recently closed tabs.  The tabs can also be dragged visually to arrange them in any order, and you can pop them out to start a tab in an entirely new window. This seems to offer a nice combination of the way Safari and Firefox handle tabs.

In our completely unscientific tests, Google Chrome does seem to load nearly every page much more quickly than Firefox, and is about as fast as Safari. Plenty of people have done head to head browser tests for speed, and Safari seems to show up as slightly faster in technical tests. We found Chrome very fast overall.

The user experience with Chrome is fantastic. It’s clean, uncluttered and very easy to find and tweak the settings. There is no fluff in the user interface, and Chrome seems built for simplicity. Either choose a favorite site from your thumbnails, or type what you’re looking for into the search bar. It all happens in one place, so you don’t need to jump around.

The Preferences pane is the most well organized we’ve encountered. It has three tabs: Basics, Personal Stuff and Under the Hood. You can change every setting that matters right here, and each setting is clearly explained. The preference panel here is much more user friendly than Firefox or Safari, where you sometimes need to dig a bit to find the setting you’re looking to change, and the function of these settings can be somewhat confusing for inexperienced users. Google has done a solid job of highlighting the setting most users need to change, and eliminating some of the more confusing setting you find in other browsers.

There’s one feature we really love and have been getting a lot of mileage out of. You can set Chrome to open up a few sites in separate tabs whenever you start the browser.  When Chrome launches, Google Wave, Co-Tweet and some of the other web apps we use open automatically. Basically, you can pop open the browser and get ready to work.  This is especially helpful when you’re trying to get used to using a new app, like Wave.

There’s also some interesting technical stuff going on under the hood as well. Each tab in the browser is it’s own separate entity. What’s going on in one tab, doesn’t effect the others, which is an added layer of malware protection.  If you have the bad luck of opening up a data stealing site in one tab, and happen to be purchasing something or looking at your bank account in another, your personal information is safe. It’s a solid security feature that is built right into the design of the browser.

The one place where Chrome for OSX fails, at least for now, is with addons. Firefox and Safari have an enormous amount of plugins, addons and hacks available that can make your life much easier. Chrome doesn’t currently support any extensions, although this is set to change in the future. If you’re a power user, who has a suite of plugins you can’t live without, Chrome isn’t the browser for you. Yet. We’ll reserve our judgement in this area until Chrome starts adding extra functionality, but it will be difficult to replicate the large hacker community surrounding Firefox, that are always adding new functions.

However, there is a hacker build of Chrome, called Chromium that addresses some of these shortcomings. Chromium has a full suite of extensions available, features daily updates and removes the Google branding from the browser. Chromium is a good choice for tech savvy power users, and does a great job of showing the future potential of Chrome.

Chrome does offer some very cool themes to change the look of the browser, including ones by Jeff Koons, Karim Rashid and Anna Sui. These are wonderful looking, but just window dressing. Very cool attractive stuff, but they don’t add any functionality.

Overall, Chrome is a very light, solid and fast browser. Safari users may be tempted to jump ship, as it seems more stable and nearly as quick. Firefox users will enjoy the speed increase Chrome brings to the table, but without the plugins, Chrome won’t be the best choice for geeks who live inside their browser. Our feeling is that Chrome is a great choice for casual web users, especially those that aren’t very tech savvy.

Chrome is still in beta. When the community expands, plugins become available, and Google tightens things up, we imagine Chrome will become the number one browser on the web in the near future.

When you’re building a new site, it’s common to spend considerable time brainstorming, planning, wire framing and conceptualizing. You want your site to be perfect. So do we. When it comes to hosting your site, you probably give a hundredth of the amount of consideration to the company you use. This will make your developer grouchy because it makes their job much more difficult. Choosing poor hosting companies is extremely common. Sadly, we deal with substandard hosting outfits on a daily basis.

Choosing the right hosting company will make all the difference in the development and success of your site. A bad hosting company can cause the development process to drag on much longer than it should, knock your site off line for extended period of time and cost you lots of money with little return. Bad hosting can turn your dream site into a nightmare in a few seconds.

Here are the three most important factors to investigate when looking for a hosting company for a new site.

Support
What type of support does your hosting company offer? Ideally, you should be able to get someone on the phone who you feel comfortable communicating with 24/7. When you are first developing your site, there are numerous minor tweaks and changes that will need to be made to your hosting account to get things up and running. Most aren’t very time consuming. Having to send an email, get a ticket number and wait for someone to contact you can severely cripple the development process. Having to wait 4 hours or 3 days to have a change made that should take a few minutes is unacceptable. You may need to put your hosting provider in touch with your developers directly, so enquire if they are comfortable and capable of working with developers. They should be. In the best case, you will have one or two support people that are assigned to your account, that understand your site and become an extension of your development team.

Reliability
If your site goes down, you are temporarily out of business. Most hosting companies will tell you they have ’99% Uptime’. This isn’t always the case.  Things happen at even the best hosting companies, and sooner or later your site may go offline for one reason or another. Ask about the safeguards your hosting company has in place to prevent this. More importantly, find out how they have handled outages in the past.  Get a reference from other users, and get a first hand account of their recovery procedures.  A really solid hosting company will admit when they have had issues in the past, and will be proud to discuss how quickly and how well they have corrected them. If a hosting company tells you they never have issues, and have never had a server go down. Run away. Quickly.

Pricing
It’s really, really easy to get ripped off when you are paying for web hosting. Unlike many other things in the world, the most expensive hosting companies aren’t necessarily the best. Strangely, we’ve had nearly the opposite experience. Many of the less expensive hosting companies are some of the best we’ve dealt with. This is economies of scale in action. Larger hosting companies can offer very competitive pricing because they have so many clients. Some smaller hosting companies charge exorbitant prices, but not necessarily superior service, features or support. Take advantage of this, and shop around. Don’t make a decision based solely on the lowest price you can find, but there is no need to pay through the nose either. Investigate the amount of disk space, data transfer and other extras that are actually included in the available plans. In many cases, a low price upfront can easily soar out of control with data and transfer costs, or other fine print extras.

You do the research for every aspect of your business. Please do the same with your hosting company. It makes the job of a developers much easier, and in the long run it will benefit your pocketbook, your business and the people who visit your site. We’re always happy to help with any suggestions, so get in touch or leave your questions and favorite hosting companies in the comments. 

Working on a development project can be complicated. The days where everyone is sitting just a cubicle away are long gone. You need to keep the project manager, the clients, the copywriter, the developers, the marketing people, the designers and the SEO team in the loop. Every decision that’s made effects every part of the project. There are lots of project management tools available, and they all fall short. Email chains get unwieldy after a few replies and sharing files can become a burden quickly.

Google Wave might be the answer we’ve all been waiting for. It’s a combination of email, social networking and file sharing that brings people and ideas into one place. We’ve been playing around with Wave for a few weeks, and it’s impressive. It especially excels as a way to keep complicated projects moving along while removing the bulk that comes with other methods of project management.

Here’s a few reasons why we’re using Wave:

Media Handling Forget attachments

• Wave handles every media file we’ve thrown at it in an elegant way. Relevant links, videos, audio files, copy and code can be shared right in the message. You seem them right in front of you without having to click around. That’s efficient. There’s also an option to browse media files which is very cool. Clicking through the various stages of a design, or every photo being used on a project is very convenient when making design changes.

Latecomers at Different Points in a Project

• It’s sometimes necessary to bring a new person into the mix. Getting them up to speed can be a difficult dance of dredging up old emails, zipping groups of files and filling them in on past conversations. With Wave, simple include the new people working on the project in the Wave and they can get briefed on thier own time, see all the past revisions and discussions, and view the various iterations and changes that have been made. This is a gigantic time saver.

Tags

• Tagging your projects gives you the ability to build an archive of your work over time, making it easy to see how problems were solved in the past. If you’re diligent about tagging specific issues and solutions, when you run into a similar issues, just search Wave and see how you developed a working solution in the past. That’s something so valuable you can’t put a price on.

Contacts

• Having your contacts right in your project management software is very convenient. There’s no imports that fail, no proprietary data formats, and since Wave is spreading quickly, after you’ve collaborated with someone, you’ll be able to add them to new projects with a click. Over time you’ll build a database of old and new collaborators expanding your business network.

Fast

• Wave is fast. Really fast. It swallows big media files, updates in real time, and is hosted by Google, who overall have a solid record of data integrity.

Is Google Wave the perfect project management tool? Maybe. It’s still new, but so far we’re really impressed with it. So impressed we’re about to start a huge new project involving a big team in many different locations, and we’re using Wave to keep it together. We’ll keep you updated.

What are your experiences with Wave so far? We’d love to hear how you’re using Wave for business or fun.