Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

When WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this year the development team spent a lot of time focusing on the commonly overlooked administration area. Anyone running their own WordPress blog knows how much time you spend on the backside of things, and so this update was very much appreciated. WordPress 2.6 is due out in mid-July 2008, and with it comes even more new features for blog administrators!

What kind of new things will WordPress 2.6 bring? For starters it will have early support for Google Gears. You might be thinking that since it supports Google Gears authors will be able to write articles offline that can be published later on, but that’s not the case at all. Instead, WordPress 2.6 utilizes Google Gears to increase the online performance for administrators, and it does this by downloading frequently used images and static files onto your computer via Google Gears. That way when you’re navigating around the administration area of your blog it won’t need to load the JavaScript files or images since they’ll already be on your machine. This is therefore supposed to increase the responsiveness of the online interface.

One of the other more interesting features WordPress 2.6 will have is a post revision history. This will save copies of your posts as changes are made to them, and you’ll be able to restore a post back to any of the states available. Plus WordPress will even highlight the changes for you, which is especially handy if you have multiple authors working on a blog. This is all very reminiscent of how Wikipedia handles revisions.

Those are two of my favorite features in the upcoming WordPress 2.6, but you can expect to see some other new stuff as well:

• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• and more…

All of this is currently available in the WordPress 2.6 Beta, or you can wait for the final release of the content management software which is due in mid-July.

WordPress 2.6 Features [via ReadWriteWeb]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 25, 2009 by CyberNet.

I’m sure you guys will get a kick out of this one. Microsoft has posted a “Get the Facts” page that has a chart comparing some general areas of IE8 versus Firefox and Chrome. Naturally IE8 comes out on top… way on top!

If you quickly just glance through the chart your initial impressions would be that Firefox and Chrome are insecure, can’t manage your privacy, difficult to use, unreliable, not compatible with websites, and not easy to manage. In fact there are only three areas that the three browsers “tie” in: web standards, customizability, and performance. Although they just couldn’t pass up commenting about Firefox’s extensibility:

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.

Now I’m not trying to say that Internet Explorer 8 is an awful browser. In fact I use it several hours everyday at work because there are a lot of older internal sites I deal with that don’t play nice with other browsers. I just hate that they are trying to send a message like this. Take the “Security” section for example. This is their reasoning behind why Firefox and Chrome didn’t get a checkmark:

Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.

Huh, both Firefox and Chrome have phishing/malware protection in them. So they are going off the fact that theirs is “better?” Oh well. Hopefully their aren’t too many people that will see this chart.

Still want some more of this good stuff? Jump over to their “mythbusting” page.

Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” Page [via Google Blogoscoped]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Over the last few years, Encyclopaedia Britannica has had to sit and watch as more people turned to what was easily available and free, to look-up information on a certain topic or event instead of their physical encyclopedias.  The simple fact that the Internet, and particularly Wikipedia, is universally accessible to anybody with an Internet Connection and Britannica is not hasn’t been such a good thing for them. To help bring them up-to-date and up-to-speed with their competition, they’ve decided to go social which includes offering Encyclopaedia (yes, that’s how they spell it) Britannica to bloggers for no cost. The program is called WebShare.

Clearly they have to benefit somehow, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing this. So here’s how bloggers are going to help. Any blogger who has gained access to the new WebShare program (bloggers have to get approved first) will have access to over 56,000 articles online. Of course that isn’t even close to the number of articles Wikipedia offers, but theirs are all professionally written and edited (to most, this fact doesn’t really matter). If a blogger is researching a topic and comes across useful information on WebShare, they can link to it and readers will be able to go view the complete article on Britannica’s website. Readers won’t be able to view anything but the article that the blogger linked to, but it still gets them to the site. In the end, the benefit to Britannica is that they’ll have all kinds of links pointing to them which will certainly help their ranking on search engines and might get more people to their site.

We also mentioned that they are incorporating a social aspect to the site.  The social aspect is made up of widgets that can be posted on a blog or web site, a new blog, a Twitter Account that people can follow, and an RSS feed.

WebShare has unofficially launched, and the official launch with a Press Release will not happen for another week. Already bloggers are able to register for an account which can be done here. The only requirement for getting the same benefits as paying subscribers is that you need to be a “Web publisher- a blogger, webmaster, or writer.” With such broad terms, just about anybody will be able to at least attempt to register for an account, although that doesn’t mean you’ll get approved.

Thanks for the tip Omar!

Source: TechCrunch

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 18, 2006 by CyberNet.

Right now Digg.com is undergoing some maintenance (which says should last just minutes but has been a lot longer than that) and they will be rolling out the fresh new look that is pictured above. The biggest thing as far as the design goes is that the layout adjusts to the width of your browser (a.k.a. liquid design), instead of the static size that it once was. Also on the homepage you’ll notice the “Top 10″ stories located in the sidebar and the duration since the submission of each story is now in a bright red font.

Beyond just the eye candy there are also several new features that you can watch in the official video that Digg put together:

• Interface Design, Digg Goes Widescreen
  We’ve gone from a fixed width layout to a flexible one allowing you to make use of your screen real-estate on larger monitors. Navigation has also been moved to the top allowing you to quickly switch between sections.
• Top 10 Stories/Videos
  Digg stories move fast, so we’ve created a quick view of the top 10 hottest on Digg, updated in real time. This list changes as other stories accelerate in Diggs – so make sure to check it often. Think of this as your quick pulse of what’s hot in any given section.
• Videos Enhancements
  Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.
• Podcasting
  Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don’t forget – every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.
• Profile Enhancements
  Now quickly jump between your Dugg News, Videos, or Podcasts. With three separate sections we make it easy to sort through your own Diggs or the Diggs from your friends using the friends tab.

Definitely my favorite feature is that the videos play right there in Digg rather than taking you to YouTube’s video page, for example. That will save people a lot of time from having to traverse to an external site but that is going to make things worse for people who submit videos that are embedded in blogs, because now they will really be labeled as “blog spam.”

Overall the features are very nice and I want to congratulate Digg on the new design…now I just wish that they would figure out a way to prevent the Digg community from unnecessarily burying articles which is what got our site banned.

News Source: Webware

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a free application called Liquid Resize that implemented the much acclaimed seam carving (also known as content aware image resizing). It is pumped with features, and it has already had a couple of more updates from time I wrote the article.

However, there is a new seam carving app in town, and I have a feeling that it will conquer all the others. Give a warm welcome for Rsizr, which a free and completely web-based solution to seam carving. To get started all you have to do is select an image from your computer, and then drag the two sliders over a bit to start the processing (I outlined them in the screenshot above). Then the necessary “handles” will get placed on the corners of the photo for resizing it.

Here’s why I think Rsizr is so great:

• The image processing is done prior to scaling the image (by using the sliders). This is especially useful when working with large images where the processing can take a long time. With this you can just drag both the horizontal and vertical sliders all the way over, and then walk away until it’s done. When you come back the image will be ready for its instantaneous resizing!
• You can scale the image without using seam carving, revert back to the original, or crop it in a few clicks.
• There are tools available to mark areas on the photo which you want to preserve or remove first. A good demonstration of how that would be useful is when trying to remove someone from a photo:
   

I suggest that you check Rsizr out and see how well it performs for you! If you decide to upload your results to a photo sharing site make sure you drop a link in the comments so that we can see, too.

Rsizr Image Scaling (works with JPG, PNG, and GIF images)
Sources: Go2Web2 & Download Squad

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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