The crux with the Like

As a matter of fact, there are a lot of privacy concerns with the viral Like and Tweet buttons that appear almost everywhere on the net. While the feature itself is nice and can certainly help to attract visitors and generate traffic, people often fail to see the risks. Do you really want allow Facebook to track ALL your surfing activity, because that's exactly what they can do with these buttons?

When you are logged into your Fb account (and I think, most Facebook users are permanently logged in most of the time) AND have your browser configured in a way that makes it possible to use the Like buttons (it must, at least, grant read access to 3rd party cookies), every page you visit that embeds such a button could - at least in theory - be tracked by Facebook. In theory, they know what pages you visit and can connect your surfing behavior to your account profile. Whether they do this or not isn't really relevant. Maybe they only do it for certain pages, or don't do it at all. Maybe they'll do it in the future - nobody really knows. What matters is that these buttons build the technical foundation to track users.

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How do you deal with JavaScript?

A couple of days ago, I had one of these discussion with a good friend, who is - like myself - a typical "IT guy". Many of his opinions can be seen as fairly "old school", but he does have a lot of experience, particularly with network security and the evils of the Internet. I would say, he is a highly qualified expert in that area and he certainly knows his stuff.

While browsing my site, he noticed that it recently has become quite heavy on JavaScript with all the things I integrated, particularly the colorbox script, the syntax highlighter and some jQuery stuff. I know, he is not a fan of script heavy sites at all and he prefers to surf the net with JavaScript disabled by default.

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There are these days...

... where you sit down with a cup of fresh coffee in the morning, checking your mails, reading the news and suddenly - between all the ever repeating madness and daily routine - you find something that actually makes you think. It's like a punch in the face, telling you - hey, that guy does have a point, and a strong one.

Logging into my WordPress admin area, I found a post by Matt (WordPress) in my dashboard that awoke my interest. The title alone - I Don’t Care if You Read This Article - made me think twice. Really? Who should think this way and why?

Heading over to the original article (Matt's post was just a short excerpt), I found a fantastic read, an article so full of truth that you simply cannot ignore it, especially not if you find a part of your own past in that short essay.

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One step further

Blue admin theme

The beta phase for the next major WordPress upgrade continues with the second public beta version, released today.

Noteworthy changes in Beta 2

• The blue admin theme has been finished and provides the same, new and smoother look as the previously updated gray color theme.
• The bundled jQuery was updated to version 1.6.1. This should not cause any troubles, but if you absolutely need to use a different (=older) jQuery version than the bundled one - here is how you can use any version of jQuery in the frontend while keeping the bundled version for the admin backend.
• Support for Internet Explorer 7 was improved and the admin panel should look better in this old and outdated browser.

Release schedule announced

According to the developers, the final release of WordPress 3.2 should be out by the end of June 2011 and there will be at least one (possibly more) release candidates before.

At a first glance, I did not find any problems except for the issue with the disqus plugin, which can be fixed easily. As always, you should not use the beta version on a production site, unless you have taken steps allowing you to quickly revert to a backed up stable version.

Disqus plugin breaks admin area of WordPress 3.2 beta

After installing the disqus plugin in WordPress 3.2 beta1, I began to notice severe problems in the WordPress admin area. Basically, all JavaScript related things stopped working - the sliding menus on the left did no longer respond and many other things were broken as well.

Using Opera Dragonfly, I quickly found a JavaScript error:

Uncaught exception: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: [href=edit-comments.php?page=disqus]

This is caused by a change in jQuery which was upgraded to version 1.5.2 in WordPress  3.2. Unquoted selectors are no longer allowed in jQuery 1.5.2, so this is a fairly easy fix.

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One thing I didn't know a few years back when I installed WordPress as a newbie was a technical issue with custom permalink structures. I figured that %category%/%postname% looks nice and it also was recommended by many so called SEO experts, so that's what I had chosen.

Now, years later, I have often read that using a non-numeric first element for a custom permalink structure is a very bad idea and the general advice by WordPress experts is to not use %category%, %tag% or %author% but instead %year% or %post_id% .  Even the official codex page does not recommend it.

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to have at least two path segments in your post's permalink structure such as /%year%/%postname%/ or even /posts/%postname%/

Basically, they are all saying the same: If you have lots of pages, using one of the bad link structures can badly affect the performance.

So, I run some tests to figure out how bad the impact really is.  I wrote a perl script that created "fake content" for a WordPress 3.1 test installation. The script created about 2500 pages with random content, nested only 2 levels deep and another 500 blog articles in 10 categories. This isn't huge - just a blog with 500 posts and 2000 pages - I'm pretty sure there are much bigger sites out there.

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A good reason to watch your weight

Watch your weight

There are plenty of reasons why you should be careful about your weight, but this is one I have not yet seen being mentioned.

That summarizes the changes for the recently released first beta of the upcoming WordPress 3.2.

Visual changes 

The admin area got a visual overhaul, the first one in years. The screen shot shows how it looks with the gray admin theme. It is noteworthy that the blue theme has not yet been updated and looks a bit weird in beta 1. This is a known (and documented) issue. In my opinion, the new admin theme looks smoother and preserves some screen real estate due to a more compact header. The changes are visible but they don't hurt the user experience - it still looks and feels like WordPress.

Admin theme

Full Screen editor

Twenty Elven

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Quick writeup with some helpful hints for migrating a WordPress theme to HTML5.

HTML5 is the upcoming standard for web documents, that's already set in stone. While the standard has not yet been finalized, it already looks very solid and consistent. One should expect some changes in the future, but don't be afraid you'll have to rewrite your entire theme when you make it ready for HTML 5 now. It's already safe to use and when done right, there will be no disadvantages, even for visitors who are not using one of the latest generation browsers.

Advantages

Keeping up with current or even future web standards is basically a good thing. By doing so, you gain access to new technologies and methods to create better web sites. You also ensure your sites will display with the same level of quality on many modern browsers and other web-enabled devices, because most of them are already supporting the new standard. There is a good level of backward compatibility, so using HTML 5 will not break your pages for visitors using an older browser that does not support it.

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