Philoking.com

I decided today to make a Vista theme for my blog. I started with a screen shot of Outlook, and opened it in Adobe Photoshop and started simplifying it. Once I had the basics of what I wanted, I had a single flat jpg that looked something like this…

I brought it into back into Photoshop and made a couple slices to create a top header, top fade, repeat fade and footer image, as well as a background fade, and I was able to get started with some html and css.

I laid out the elements and got it all working before I installed WordPress on my local wampserver and began integrating it into the “default” template.

I spent about an hour adding all of the formatting for the WordPress generated content to the css file I created when I sliced the image up, and within about 4 hours, give or take, I had it as you see now, well as long as now is June 13th. I am sure I will tweak it more tomorrow and throughout the weekend getting it just how I want.

But there you have it, a tribute to Vista as a WordPress theme. I want my blog to be a bit unique so I won’t release this out for everyone, although I may make a pink twist on it for Dawngrrl.com.

Hope you like it, and if you are a Mac or Linux fanboy, get over it…I work for Microsoft, remember?

I have been playing with this for quite a while now and nearly begging Joe Cheng and the Live Writer Team to let me blog about it.

I have raved about Windows Live Writer before but now you really have something special for your blog writing needs. Special enough that I even use it (via a virtual machine) on Mac because nothing for OS X comes close.

So what is new in this new version of Live Writer you ask? Well, let me show you…

Fun with Images

The most obvious change you will find on blog posts is the addition of new ways to view your images. The new image styles show reflections, pixel borders, rounded images and even allow you to tilt the image in question for dramatic effect…

In addition to these effects, you can also use the filter effects from before and even crop a photo from the original right in live writer!

In addition to these display features, you can also seamlessly integrate with your favorite modal popup type like Lightbox, Slimbox, etc. One other oft-requested feature is the ability to center images as well.

The beginnings of video integration are there as well with Soapbox support. Of course there are a myriad of plugins to work with your other favorite video sites.

Editing

One thing I am super excited about in this release is auto-linking. Not only can you create a database of words and phrases you use a lot and set them to link automatically, you can also do it as you create a link through the interface:

This is really useful to get your database going as you write instead of trying to think of things when you first set it up or forgetting to add them later when you think of them.

User Interface

Also big to those that really tweak their posts is the new tabbed interface for Edit, Preview and Source. Now you can quickly flip back and forth between these three modes with no effort.

The toolbar has been cleaned up a bit and for those of you like me with tons of categories, you can now search and filter for those quickly instead of browsing a monster list. This makes it really easy to get your posts in the right place.

SDK Updates

From what I understand this is where the real meat to this new version is. I don’t develop against it, so I can’t say for sure but for more details about the SDK, please see the blog post on Windows Live Dev.

Final Thoughts

Collectively these may not sound like a huge major release and I agree, if I was paying for it I would have to really need these features to pony up an upgrade, but this software is F R E E folks. It costs you nada, it’s not ad supported and has no nag ware. Windows Live Writer was already the best blogging software on the planet, and now it’s gotten even better. For those of you who are not already familiar with Live Writer as it stands now, I cannot recommend it enough.

The team that works on this product at Microsoft is passionate, brilliant and don’t ever stop thinking of cool things to make your blogging life easier. It would be interesting to try and take some sort of straw poll to see how many professional bloggers are already using this tool, there really is nothing like it.

So now you want it right? Get your butt over to the Live Writer Team blog and download it now.

Imagine being able to upload a photo to flickr at the same time you use it in your blog.

It uploads the thumb to WordPress and the actual photo to your flickr account….fancy…. leave a comment for details, it’ exists…

upgrading my site to WordPress 2.5, please be patient with the spartan appearance.

Update Update… MS won’t let me FTP from inside the network so I will be on this less than exciting template and plugin-less environment till I get home today.

It used to be that if you wanted to run WordPress, you wanted a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) Server. You could get it working on Internet Information Server but it wasn’t the best and there were definitely issues to be dealt with.

Trouble yourself no more! Zend Technologies, and the “Zend Platform” have taken the PHP core and added performance and stability. The Zend Core commercially supported flavor of PHP has now been certified to run on Windows Server 2008.

This should be of specific interest to many I have seen recently asking about running WordPress on Windows.

From itnews.com:

For example, Zend worked with Microsoft’s FastCGI component for its Web server, IIS, to make FastCGI set up and run PHP applications efficiently. The IIS Web server is now built into Windows 2008, and the two companies made certain the PHP interface to FastCGI worked smoothly, Gutmans said in an interview.
Zend’s PHP now supports CardSpace, Microsoft’s identity management system, so users of PHP applications may gain online services after being authenticated and awarded the proper privilege level. The Windows 2008 certification also means Windows as well as Linux servers can be expected to host such PHP applications as the Mambo Web site content management system or the WordPress blog publishing system, Gutmans said.
Previously, PHP “didn’t run as well as it should on Windows,” said Gutmans, despite the fact that 75% to 80% of PHP users were developing on Windows workstations. When they deployed their Windows-based applications to production, their performance was disappointing and they tended to develop on Windows and deploy under Unix or Linux. Now the three platforms should be available on a more equal footing, he said.
The two companies have started work on a SQL Server driver for Zend Core that will make interfacing PHP Web applications to SQL Server a more straightforward task, Gutmans said.