Musings
My musings of geniosity…
Opera Mobile 9.5 is SLICK!
I’ve been playing with the new Beta version of Opera Mobile 9.5 for a few days now, and I must say, it is just plain COOL!
For all you iPhone geeks out there, this one’s not for you, thank goodness. At least us Windows Mobile (and other mobile OS owners other than the iPhone) have something you don’t. 
So, what do I like about the new version of Opera Mobile?
Cool Opera Mobile 9.5 features
- It’s REALLY quick and extremely responsive
- It looks good. Remember, “pretty” is a feature for me
- It’s REALLY easy to use and move around in
- It seems to render web pages as well as a desktop browser in most instances. (The Google AdSense site is a problem that only Opera Mini seems capable of overcoming and logging into)
- Can use AJAX in most cases
- Browser URL auto complete
- The uploading and downloading of files works extremely well.
Here’s a video I created so that you get a (VERY rough) idea of what Opera Mobile 9.5 looks like.
Please excuse the quality. The video capture software I used for my HTC TYTN II (MyMobile) seems to speed things up quite drastically. And Windows Movie Maker widened the video, so it’s not in the correct proportions.
Anyway, enough excuses, watch this and let me know what you think
Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta Video
What don’t I like about Opera Mobile 9.5
The main thing I don’t like about how this new version of Opera Mobile works is the scrolling of pages. I think it’s something that Opera Mobile has always done, and something that Internet Explorer Mobile finally changed in WM 6.1.
When you scroll down a page, it only scrolls down half a page. This REALLY bugs me, especially when reading a page with a lot of text, because after scrolling down half a page, my eyes have to hunt for the line where I left off before scrolling down.
I’m not sure if it’s a “feature” I’m supposed to get used, but proper scrolling was one of the best (and for me, most noticeable) features in Opera Mini.
Final Thoughts about this browser
Overall though, I REALLY like this browser, and recommend it to everybody. I can’t wait for the final version as I’m sure it will be even better than the beta.
Read MoreWordPress 2.6 is out and it’s Turbo Charged
It’s finally here. And a month ahead of schedule.
Why am I so excited for a new release of WordPress?
If you read my “Google Gears and WordPress” post, you’ll see. Working from a South African internet connection (the miserable iBurst to be exact), I REALLY appreciate the fact that it is now MUCH quicker to do things like place images and links inside my posts.
What else is new in this version of WordPress?
Here’s a video to highlight the major changes:
- Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
- Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
- Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
- Word count!
- Image captions
- Bulk management of plugins
- Full SSL support
For descriptions of these, visit the WordPress Development blog.
Read MoreHotlink 2 Link WordPress Plugin
Here’s a new plugin I’ve written for WordPress users who want to benefit from everybody who hotlinks to their images.
A little background on HotLinking
If you write an article and place an image in your post, that image most likely sits on your web server. Every time somebody views your post, that person’s browser will download the image.
If somebody else likes this image, they can put it in their own article in 2 ways:
Read MoreVernon Koekemoer having his 15MB of Fame
The saying used to be “15 minutes of fame”. Now, thanks to the online world, it’s 15MB of fame. Well, maybe even 15GB of fame thanks to broadband connections.
Everybody knows Chuck Norris, but if you’re South African and you’ve been online recently (or you’ve seen the latest Vodacom ad), then you might have heard of Vernon Koekemoer!
Who is Vernon Koekemoer?
His real name is Cassie Booyse, but that’s obviously not how South Africa knows him.
To rest of us, he’s Rambo Guy from H2O!
Why is he famous!
Good question.
Here are a few examples of his online fame:
- He has his own Facebook profile
- He’s been interviewed on locally produced Kwela (anybody care to translate it?)
- He’s appearing on a lot of billboards as part of adverts (which you’ll see if you watch the above interview).
How did Vernon Koekemoer start?
All of this started thanks to a great photo apparently taken at the H2O rave.
Personally, I thought the photo was a fake.
But if you want to SEE fake photos of Vernon, go visit RamboGuy.co.za! He seriously is our own “little” Chuck Norris
Speaking of which, have you seen the latest Nandos ads with Vernon? There’s even one where he greets Chuck!!! 
I really hope Vernon is getting something out of this. He seems like a nice enough guy. 
WordPress 2.6 and Google Gears
ANOTHER UPDATE: WordPress 2.6 is out. When you’ve finished reading the article below (which I recommend 
), come watch the video about it’s new features in my post “WordPress 2.6 is out and it’s Turbo Charged“
So, there I was, having just upgraded my local Windows installation of WordPress so that I could update one of my plugins when I noticed a new piece of text on the top right hand side of my screen:
“Speed Up!”
Little update: It would appear that this has now been renamed to “Turbo”
Who is WordPress to tell ME, the king of speed on a PC, to SPEED UP!?!?!
But, always one to improve on a process, I clicked it, and this is what I saw:
What is Google Gears?
Google Gears is a browser add-on from Google that enables web applications such as Google Reader and Google Docs to feel more like an offline application like MS Word or Excel.
It does this by storing information on your machine allowing you to read, edit and update “data” from the internet without actually being connected. And then, the next time you connect to the internet it synchronises with the website, uploading any changes you’ve made, and downloading any changes/updates that have been made on the site.
At least, that’s the very basic explanation of it.
Google Gears and WordPress
So, how about an example, using your friendly neighbourhood blogging platform?
Having installed the Google Gears plugin for my browser, I clicked the “Enable Google Gears” button, and this is what I saw:
As you can see, my browser is downloading all the information it needs so that WordPress doesn’t need to connect to the internet for certain information.
What has WordPress made faster
As a side note and introduction to what has been sped up, here’s a little rant.
I personally LOVE the changes that were implemented with WordPress 2.5.
But, some of the new features (and features I’ve just started using now that I use the Visual Editor) just aren’t as cool thanks to the not-so-great internet speeds in South Africa.
For example, if you want to create a link. Every time you click the link icon in the editor’s toolbar, it has to download the same stuff over and over…
Well, it looks to me like the WordPress Google Gears implementation has solved that. The link and the “insert embedded media” popups are now instantaneous!
Thank you to whoever decided to do this.
It also seems that switching between each “pane” in the admin section is a LOT faster… Believe me, working on the South African tubes (via iBurst), this makes a HUGE difference!
Google will be PROUD!
All I can say is, this is going to give Google Gears the much needed attention that they’ve so far been lacking. Especially since out of all Google’s products, it’s only the Google Reader and Google Docs products that utilise Google Gears.
Read MoreWhat you can do with WordPress
In response to a few questions by Mary on my post about using WAMP to install WordPress on your Windows Machine, I’ve decided to write a post and see if I can help her (and anybody else who needs it).
First, an introduction.
Everybody should have a website
I FULLY believe that everybody should have a website. Even more so if you run a business.
In South Africa, if you’re technically inclined (or, can just follow a few simple instructions) you could have your own website up and running in about 4 hours for about R1000 a year.
If you’re not really a technical person and you’d need to hire somebody to help you, then it may cost anywhere from R3000 for setup, and R1000 a year after that. Of course, this depends on the complexity of your website and your requirements.
With it being so easy, you really have no excuse for not having a site.
Why you should use WordPress
WordPress, in my opinion, is the best software for running anything from very simple websites to sites of medium complexity.
You can use it if you only need a couple pages containing the following information:
- Home page
- About page, with info about you and your company
- Contact page – NEVER forget to have one of these
But, thanks to a whole lot of WordPress plugins (or just using some extra built-in functionality), you can use your WordPress installation to do the following:
- Have a built-in forum
- Create a mailing list to keep people up to date with your product listings, perhaps
- Have a website with more than one user contributing to it. For example: a news website
- Create a blog – you KNOW it’s all the craze now
What will my site look like?
OK, so Mary’s first question was: “I’m not sure if (and how) I can integrate my own design as I am not willing to use any ready-made templates”.
What ready-made templates is she talking about? Well, one of the benefits of using WordPress is that a LOT of people have created free templates that you can just upload to your installation to change the way your website looks.
As an example, just do a search in Google for free WordPress Templates or for free WordPress themes.
Of course, because they ARE available for free on the internet, you might not have a unique looking website.
To combat this, you could hire a WordPress template designer to design a custom look for your website, or, you could download one of the free templates and customise it to make it look unique.
Another option is to design your own theme however you normally do it, and then convert it for use with WordPress. This is obviously the route that I would recommend to Mary.
But, how do you do that? Well, if you’re OK with basic programming in PHP, you could take a look at the WordPress guide to coding WordPress themes and templates.
Or, you could hire somebody (like me ) to take your website layout and create a template that is compatible with WordPress.
How to publish your WordPress website
So, now that you’ve tested your WordPress website using the guide to install WordPress on your computer, and then you’ve gone through and created your own theme, you need to upload it for the world to see.
To do that, you need to do the following things:
- Get a web host – I recommend the on I use for my South African sites -> www.anno.co.za
- Ensure your web host allows MySQL databases and PHP websites
- Follow the instructions for Installing WordPress (it’s a little different to installing it on your computer)
- Change the settings of your site as appropriate
- Upload your WordPress theme and enable it
- Write all the pages you need!
It is that easy.
Of course, as I mentioned before, you could hire somebody to do all the technical stuff for you. Then you can rely on them to set up your site and lay it out correctly for optimal search engine crawling (which could help rank you website higher, helping you get more visitors).
So, Mary, hopefully you found this article interesting and helpful as a starting guide.
If anybody has any questions, post them in the comments section below, and I’ll see if I can answer them.
Read More
