Jetpack your WordPress

Jetpack is a new plugin for your WordPress (either .com or self hosted installations) from Automattic, that provides a cool set of features: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons and even LaTex.

More features will be available in the future.

You’ll need a WordPress.com account to have it working on your self hosted WordPress blog, but it’s free and you don’t even need to create a new blog.

Although most of these features are available as separate plugins from other developers, Jetpack consolidates all in one, consuming less memory (at least for me) and storing some of the data on the cloud.

Jetpack is available for free and can be downloaded here.

WordPress 2.7 FTW

Yeah, just updated to WP 2.7 and everything went smoothly 🙂 The new Dashboard is bliss and K2 works just as it did with 2.6.

WordPress is definitely the best blogging platform around!

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Why So Silent?

Those who know me and follow me on the web might have noticed my “silence” in the last weeks. It all started in Codebits, I attended the first day and got a very ugly flu. I still managed to check some presentations and hang arround with the Prt.Sc crew, but I left around 19:30 or something with a heavy fever.

It took me a week to kill the flu and return to a decent state, lowering the fever from almost 40º to a regular body temperature. Excused to say that I didn’t follow Codebits the remaning days, nor did my usual blogging / twittering / feed reading. I barely had any interaction with the web (actually even with my computer) and this made me slow down and reduce the amount of time I dedicated to the social web.

I noticed that Twitter was consuming most of my online time, diverting my attention from other information that actually mattered, so I decided to make a “Twitter diet”. I first began to use Twitter to get updates on people and topics I was interested, but Twitter mutated drastically into IRC 2.0, not only you feed it a lot of info that is unnecessary, you also get back the same amount crap or more. I noticed that if some info worth of notice hit Twitter, it was also mentioned on blogs a few minutes later. The only difference was getting the info now or later.

All this allied to my heavy work load made me change the way I get info from the web.

Sure I miss Twittering with the usual crowed, getting the “gossip” and always being on top of the action, but it’s too much time and resource consuming… that really had to change. I’m now getting lighter on my work load and having more time to dedicate to my blogs. This “time off” was also useful to plot some plans to make 8-Bit Revolution evolve, you’ll have more info in a few weeks. Right now, I have to check WordPress 2.7 and see if upgrading is going to be bliss or hell 🙂

Godzilla is in da house…

I meant to update my blog’s template for a while and today I had the time and the mood to do it. Inspiration kicked in, 2 templates came out. One I’ll keep for another time, right now I’ll use this one. I call it Godzilla for the obvious reasons 🙂