The latest WordPress, 2.3.2, frustrates me. It used to be where I could add any plug-in and it would work just fine. A few weeks ago after I upgraded to 2.3.2 I noticed that many of my more interesting plug-ins no longer worked, such as the comment preview plug-in, a few Flickr photo plug-ins, etc. After trying to get them to work on my own without success, I simply de-activated them.

I’m not sure if removing the comment preview plug-in was helping, but now I am getting more comment spam than ever from bots. I’ve tried a few plug-ins documented on the WordPress spam plug-ins page, but nothing seems to really work with 2.3.2. I have tried Did You Pass Math? which did not work (generated an error upon activation), Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin which also did not work (showed the form, but did not enforce the math), as well as Ajax Comments which changed nothing.

I’m not a bozo when it comes to this stuff, or at least I don’t think I am. I am a web developer by profession. I understand PHP and how WordPress works, and all I know is that it’s not working very well these days. I have a ton of plug-ins that I have de-activated because they no longer work with this update.

Is anyone else having problems with WordPress? I am using Akismet for spam protection which works great, but I still have to delete a lot of spam marked as suspect at the end of the day and I’m hoping another plug-in like a math or CAPTCHA question will help.

I’m in geek heaven.

Check this out… with the help of iBrickr and the Dock iPhone mod I can happily take screen shots from my iPhone and blog them via email and the Postie WordPress plug-in.

It takes full screen shots and saves them in my camera roll so I can then transfer them to my PC or email them.

Here’s my first one!

Plus, the Dock mod provides a very innovative menu option that I think the iPhone should adopt as a standard feature. Makes app selection a helluva lot easier!

A great list of other third-party apps for the iPhone can be found here at lifehacker.com.

As I mentioned yesterday, Chris Harrison was very kind to respond to my request for his WordPress template that he made it available this morning. I implemented it and it works great as you can see!

I am still tweaking a few things, adding a few things I used in my previous template, but all-in-all I’m very impressed with it. A new site design was necessary since I changed this site over from my mobile tech blog “FullyConverged.com” to become a more personal blog.
Thanks Chris! You rock dude…

Update: I think I’m done implementing Chris’ bitchen WordPress template now. I ended up having to sacrafice a few unnecessary plugins which is no huge deal.

Well I’m super stoked… the WordPress template I’m currently using worked great for my FullyConverged.com website, but for my personal blog I wanted something different. I found Chris Harrison’s blog through my RUNNER+ website (he wrote an incredible review for RUNNER+) and asked him if wouldn’t mind sharing his template with me. Initially he replied saying that he would give it some thought, so I was happy to return to his blog tonight to read that he had made the decision to make his “Effercio Blue 1.0” template available this weekend!

I’ve decided to turn my current design into a distributable theme for Wordpress. It’ll be available over the weekend after I clean up some of the rough edges.

I hope to be the first to use it, as it’s got an extremely clean look that I think will be perfect for my blog. Why don’t I just develop my own? I could, I suppose… but I have so many other projects that need more attention than my blog and I was hoping Chris would hook me up with his sooner or later. What a nice guy…

Stay tuned for a face lift!

I spent the evening “pimping out” my WordPress blog scripts a bit more. I found a cool Flickr badge replacement that is not Flash (shown to the right), added in a plug-in to easily add videos to my blogs, added in my Nike+ run widget, Twitter summary, and perhaps the coolest thing ever: the ability to blog by email/phone with photos.

I first tried the Flickr WordPress integration, but it didn’t work well at all. It did post a blog, but it completely ignored my text and for some reason ended up making 3 posts instead of 1! Weird! I ended up going with a WordPress script called Postie that does the job, and does it extremely well. The only problem I ran into was I don’t have access to cron with my current Unix host, so I found a web-based cron service that was easy to set up and works great.

This means that not only can I now send messages to Twitter using SMS on my iPhone, but now I can also snap a photo and email it to my blog, along with a headline (email subject) and a description (email body). Now that is some cool stuff.