Hey Everyone,

Here’s what I found to be interesting in the world of WordPress this week:

Planet WordPress Canada
To showcase Canada’s variety of knowledgeable and enthusiastic WordPress bloggers and developers, Peter Keung has launched Planet WordPress Canada, which is an aggregation of posts from various blogs (this one included) on the topic of WP and all things related.

Draft Posts Widget
How cool is this? Website developers and bloggers are always looking for ways to keep their audiences anticipating for more. With the Draft Posts Widget, you can do just that. It will show a list of your draft posts so that people can see what’s coming up on your blog and they can anticipate your upcoming writings. I really like this idea and will start using it on a few sites I own.

WordPress Security Issues
According to TechCrunch, WordPress has a tonne of vulnerabilities and has been the object of attack by numerous hackers, especially in the last few weeks. Some people have responded in the comments that the current (2.5+) version is not affected, but still something to be checked out for those rocking the old versions.

BuddyPress Theme Previews
BuddyPress is the upcoming social network platform based on WordPress Mu. Developer Andy Peatling has provided a preview of how it will look on his website. I’m really excited about this product because it will integrate WordPress blogs, BuddyPress discussion forum, and social networking.

WordPress Essential Training
For those of you who are new to WordPress and would like to start a blog on WordPress.com, you can take advantage of new WordPress.com blog tutorials on Lynda.com. There are a few preview tutorials, but in order to view the whole collection you have to be a member.

ComicPress - WordPress theme for Artists, Cartoonists, etc.
A great new theme has been released by Tyler Martin called Comic Press, which, combined with the ComicPress Manager plugin, allows you to maintain a WordPress blog that exclusively showcases your comics, artwork, or any other type of images. It is a very nice tool for people who want to have a blog along with a daily illustration or comic.

God FTW!
Apparently, God (the Christian version at least) has a blog, and S/he’s using WordPress.

That’s all for now - have a great weekend :D

-k.s.

Hey Everyone,

Here’s what stood out to me in the news about Facebook this week:

Facebook as a Corporate HR or CRM
Imagine instead of your company discouraging the use of Facebook, actually implementing it as a system within the corporate network for the purposes of Human Resources Management or Customer Relationship Management. Well such solutions may be on the way as the brainstorming sessions at Facebook are starting to include ideas about rebranding FB as an enterprise software application or something of the sort.

Facebook as a Social Network Platform
Recently, Facebook started to make certain parts of its platform open source, allowing for individuals to use the infrastructure of Facebook for their custom setup. As a result people could connect to Facebook and develop their own niche social networks without having to recreate the whole system. If you think something like this is new, think again. Ning has been around for a while providing exactly this solution, but with the powerful Facebook engine behind it, the Facebook social network platform might provide competitive challenges to Ning.

Rate Ads on Facebook
Recently Facebook has opened up its advertisements to public opinion. You can thumb up or down an ad based on its quality and provide further feedback on the advertisement. By learning about users preferences, it is hoped that ads can be targeted more appropriately and result in higher conversions.

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.

Image Source: Javier Aroche

Very glad to read in Business Week today that Facebook is planning to do an overhaul of the profile designs so as to reduce clutter and improve user experience. Most people have very long profile pages, and some have a variety of applications that can be distracting and annoying. Business Week predicts in this article that some of the profile content will be split into tabs. I think this would be cool as it would give individuals’ profile pages the feel of a personal website. In fact what would be great is if you could add one or two custom tabs of your own (of course these should be limited so as to avoid the ugliness of MySpace profiles).

Now… if only Facebook could pay attention to my wish list :)

Social networking websites such as Facebook are more effective than the emergency services and media at dealing with disasters, a new report claims. - Telegraph.co.uk