As you probably know by now if you’re a WordPress user, WordPress 2.5 came out today.  Along with that, WordPress.org received a redesign.  I won’t say much about the new version, as it seems to be the same, except an ugly admin redesign.  I will however point out that I have a new theme up here.  It probably won’t stay up too long, but I figured it’s a great theme for the season.  Cardinals opening day is Monday and the baseball season will be underway.  Just wanted to throw up a theme that celebrated the season a bit and this theme I thought was very elegant looking.  Anyway, let the baseball commence!

These past few days I’ve had a huge influx of traffic. The reason behind it is someone stumbled upon an article I posted back in 2005 and liked it and thus it was shared with thousands upon thousands of people around the internet. On Tuesday I had about 900 visits, Wednesday went up to 7,110, and today so far I’m at 2,243 and it’s not even 9 am. WordPress is known for not handling large traffic spikes, especially on shared hosting (which is what I’m on). Luckily, after Tuesday’s small influx to 900 visits I decided to download and enable WP Super Cache. It has worked quite well and my site has been loading fast and the server seems to be handling all the traffic quite well. So, we shall see how long this traffic spike will last and how the shared hosting of HostGator handles it.

I’m testing a new design here. Things can (and probably will) break off and on today. I really like this design and hope I can get it to do everything I want it to do.

Well, let me rephrase. Tagging in WP 2.3 is a joke. Tagging was pulled out of 2.2 because it wasn’t ready for prime time. Well, after using 2.3 release candidate, it still is far from prime time. In fact, it belongs in daytime soap opera land. Cheap, cheesy, and incomplete. There is no way to manage tags. Once you create a tag, it’s there forever, unless you go back to the post you created it in and delete it. Also, if you have been blogging for a while, do not use the convert categories to tags function. When it says convert, it does just that, but it doesn’t leave your categories behind. It deletes them. So then you will have 404s for all those category pages. For someone like me, who’s been using WordPress for a long time, I’d want my categories to be categories and tags and then continue to add tags to the new posts. They say the left tags with a lot of holes because they want to let plugins fill in the gaps. That sounds lazy to me and will cause a lot of confusion. “Hey guys, we released a new version of WP. The new version contains tagging ability. Oh, but you won’t be able to manage them or anything out of the box because we’re lazy and didn’t want to write that ability. Instead, use these third-party plugins that aren’t supported or updated by us. Kthxbai.” WP is really dropping the ball with development.

Also, my If you liked that (multi-category) plugin will not work with 2.3 due to changes in database structure. I hope to have an updated version out soon for anyone who wants to use with with 2.3.

In short, guy has wp.com account, new employee joins with the same name and wants that account name. Automattic takes it (supposedly without notifying current account holder). Guy gets mad and shouts at Automattic. Automattic points to their FAQ’s which they changed overnight to show what they were doing was ok. There’s probably more to the story. I could care less. I just find the whole thing funny. Another example of questionable practices on behalf of Automattic and WordPress leader, Matt.

Read Wank’s take on it and the original thread where the complaint arose.

Even if the whole thing isn’t true (which it seems to be true), their handling of it was a complete joke.