Jeremiah Owyang makes a number of great observations in this post that he interprets as the end of the golden era of tech blogging. I strongly recommend reading it as it’s indeed hard not to see a pattern after the sale of TechCrunch, of ReadWriteWeb or the departure of Ben Parr or Marshall Kirckpatrick.

Is this related to Tech only or is it a larger trend? Is blogging itself – and not just tech blogging – coming to an end?I think it’s fair to say that a number of these observations are valid for the whole blogosphere: lack of attention span of readers, news and content remixing, fatigue of some personal brands, emergence of new business models, etc…

Blogging will not disappear but new forms of expression are definitely stealing the show from blogging platforms. Curation among them.

Full post

The editor has a new Zen mode, where in full-screen mode all the buttons, bells and whistles disappear from the screen (until you move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen again, that’s when the most commonly used functions are accessible again). Like… this:

So tell us…seriously…what could be less distracting than a completely empty page, eh? (Okay, it may also be a bit intimidating if you have writer’s block, but let’s not go there. )

What’s new? Well…it’s a bit faster, again, support for PHP4, old versions of MySQL and Internet Explorer has (finally) been dropped. Without having done any benchmark tests, it feels like pages load somewhat faster, and the administration section seems to be snappier, too. It certainly looks cooler than in the previous version! The default Twenty Eleven theme gives you an idea of some of the possibilities of HTML5, and I’m sure that in the not-so-distant future we’ll see many more themes popping up everywhere that will make the most of HTML5.

And oh yeah, from now on they’ll start doing partial upgrades – no need to upload the entire installation anymore, every time there’s an upgrade. While we at LLIT don’t really have anything to complain about with our current provider, people working elsewhere might not be as lucky as us. (An example, you ask? Well… FTP’ing the contents of an archive as small as that of WordPress from the comfort of your home to the servers there can easily take 4 hours to complete. Obviously the auto-update function doesn’t work, for “security reasons”.)

So far, this upgrade has been a good one – no broken plugins, etc, and everything seems to work just a bit better. Again. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got planned for 3.3…

While others need not worry immediately, it’s always a good idea to install security upgrades. You can download the latest version from their site.

As always, and since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). According to their site, here’s why you should upgrade:

This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts.

These issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.

And the good news is that those nice folks at WordPress.org (the organization which offers you the downloadable version of their software) have released a new version.

Here’s what’s new, according to their site:

WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional:

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements. Big thanks to Vladimir Kolesnikov for detailed and responsible disclosure of the security issue!

Since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). If you happen to work for an organization where the system administrator doesn’t know how to manage a server park properly, though, and the upgrades aren’t possible due to server configuration mistakes (and we don’t have any specific organization in mind here, COMU), you can always download 3.0.2 and do the upgrade manually.

Ping.fm has support for the wordpress.com sites, but not for the wordpress.org sites (which is what we use). They’ve promised us that they’re working on a solution, though. Nice folks, those at Ping.fm.

This minor upgrade fixes 34 problems, and if you’ve experienced problems with any of these problems before, then now is a good time to do the update. And if you don’t want to download the upgrade, then you can always go upgrade automatically via the Tools > Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

The latest version can be downloaded from their site, and contains the following changes:

WordPress 2.8.6 Security Release

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.