Divine is a clever little tool that allows you to make WordPress pages using your pre-made Photoshop works, allowing you unlimited customization right down to the smallest details. All this can be done with minimal knowledge of site creation assuming you know how to use Photoshop but that’s a separate issue.
Yes, you are only as good as your Photoshop template. You see, the idea behind this is to design the perfect visual template within Photoshop then to upload it to Divine, adding all the interchangeable information within Divine. It works surprisingly well and at the moment it is absolutely free however because of this they have limited the number of functions.
It’s clear that a lot of effort has been put into the project and the example that have been put up look great. Ease of use is the key term here, the website not only offers a simple tutorial to Divines use but it has a guide to installing wordpress.
I’m impressed, with features including Built-in FTP-client, Supports for all Photoshop filters and Encoding support the internet could be well on its way to being neater and more stylish, well in terms of WordPress websites anyway and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.
If you work as a webmaster and maintain several blogs, or if you just maintain your own hosted somewhere, you would know that it has some extra management costs. WordPress represents the most used platform around the web, which means that vulnerabilities will appear constantly. And the last one it’s making a big impact around the blogger platform.
This vulnerability that appeared recently attacked thousands of WordPress self-hosted blogs (WordPress.com blogs are excluded), and it’s giving a lot of users a big headache. But the good news is for those that upgrade their platform regularly and have already the latest WordPress 2.8.4 are also immune.
Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) wrote a few days ago about this incident and extremely recommending an upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4. This is of course what we would recommend to you to apply as soon as possible.
How do I update my WordPress platform?
You didn’t have the chance to do it already? Here’s a short video (1min 20seconds) about the entire process:
How Can I be certain that my Blog will always be safe?
Simple: You can’t. You can never tell when these vulnerabilities will appear. We can recommend to you this:
Keep your platform updated. Don’t wait until attacks are being public and in massive proportions, use always the last WordPress build.
Keep a daily backup. On a previous post, we mentioned about Blog Backupr, a great and free tool that automates all your backups. Give it a try.
There are dozens and dozens of these applications, scripts and widgets available, but one of my favorites it is definitely is Ptwix. Simple script that you can use it on your website or blog, that shows your Twitter timeline with a very cool design.
The installation process it’s quite simple, just uploaded to your current server and modify the configuration files with your Twitter account. Since the code is based in PHP and AJAX you will be able to use it in almost any platform, including WordPress of course.
The configuration file is named PtwiX_reader.php and you’ll only need to edit these lines:
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
As we announced earlier, WordPress released their new version: 2.8, that has big performance improvements. Even though this feature isn’t brand new, it is a nice option that you can give it a try: WordPress Antivirus Plug-In.
The plug-in has a new version, 0.4, that appeared a few days back and it already includes compatibility with the latest WordPress version.
So what exactly a blog antivirus can do? You may ask. Well, this plug-in can help you out on monitoring possible platform vulnerabilities, virus injections, malicious links inserted, etc. Includes also features like email notifications and whitelisting.
The installation process it’s the same as every WordPress plug-in:
1.Download AntiVirus plugin
2.Unzip the archive
3.Upload the folder antivirus into ./wp-content/plugins/
4.Go to tab Plugins
5.Activate AntiVirus
6.Edit settings
7.Ready
WordPress users and webmasters always find the need to keep a good eye on the deployed platform in case any vulnerability appears and, if that happens, just pray for a quick hotfix. It’s nice to have a quick option that can help you be more proactive about the health of your deployments.
Grooveshark is an application that was reviewed here on Crenk sometime ago. At the time, I didn’t see the relevance of
Grooveshark awarded CNET's Top 100 Webware Award
the application, though it had some good aspects, I just did not feel comfortable with the entire package. It was not long after that post that officials from Grooveshark contacted me for a dialogue encouraging me to take a look at the offerings again, highlighting features I had not really seen the first time around. In the year that I’ve had with Grooveshark, I’m impressed with the continued efforts it’s making to establish itself as a viable music service for users.
CNET was obviously impressed enough to award it the 2009 Webware Winner for Audio and Music. Grooveshark has indeed come a long way and its user base has grown significantly. With this announcement comes features that again make Grooveshark heads above the rest. For starters their partnership with Ping.fm to build Tinysong API, which allows users to take the code and develop webapps that provide access to Groovesharks extensive library of music. It will be interesting to see what developers come up with as we’ve seen with various other online applications, the opening of the API makes it easy for supplementary apps to proliferate the net.
The second feature that was announced deals specifically with the blogging community. Grooveshark has announced that is now has a WordPress plugin that allows integration into blog posts for users to set up their favorite songs for specific posts. You can set up just one song, or a playlist of songs for your readers on your site. An interesting option, at the very least you could create a small station of songs on your, possibly with a widget.
Grooveshark is definitely expanding its platform and appeal, and it should be interesting to see how much further they go in 2009!
Wakoopa is a social network that helps people discover the best software, games and web apps on the market. Developed by a team in Holland, Wakoopa could just be the next best tool you play with.
Do you want to know what apps you use on and off the web, and just how much you use them? Do you want to find new stuff that is useful for the tasks you undertake everyday? Do you want to be introduced to people into the same tools and products as you? Wakoopa can do all of this.
First, all you need to do is sign up and download their tracker program. Now usually I’d run a mile at this, but I couldn’t resist after having had a look at the tools on offer.
Like any data collation software, it takes a few days to get the best results, so it’s worth leaving the program running for a few days and then revisiting your profile and start looking at the graphs…
On your dashboard, you find out the top ten tools you use, how much you use them and what you use them for.
What’s really interesting though, is the ‘recommended’ section, which suggests other tools or services to try based on your overall usage. I was recommended to try Evernote, a service I’ve heard of but not investigated – this is something that appeals to me as it “is a software application that allows users to capture information of various types, including text notes, mobile phone snapshots, printed and handwritten text”. I’ll have to give it a go.
I like the interface, it’s intuitive and not too busy. Each piece of information available is put into a particular type of category and this helps to keep data overload to a minimum. There are also several widgets available, and they even work with the basic WordPress.com blogs, as you’ll see to the side.
This is a great service and something that I would definitely recommend to try if you are fanatical about trying and finding out about new software on the web. You can follow the latest Wakoopa developments on their blog.
Personal blogs are more than a bunch of words put together. A good personal blog reflects your identity, your personality and individualism and a factor of great importace here is the design. It is the first thing that the viewer notices, before making any presumptions about you or your personality. So a good design is necessary to leave a good and long lasting impression on the visitor.
To help you out with the design, we at Crenk have put together 17 new wordpress themes that we believe, will rock your personal blog. Read on.
So that ends the list. I hope you liked it, if that’s so, show me some love and Digg it
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
I adore WordPress, so much so that I use it to design websites that don’t even require a blog, just solely based on the CMS, ease of installation and abundant supply of options and plugins available for it. With all that being said, now and again I run into an issue with some stupid coding somewhere along the lines that won’t let me do exactly what I want. Today I ran into a problem implementing a plugin that would allow me to place a Google Maps map onto a client’s website. Google is nice enough to give the code out to hard code their maps into any site, but it requires the iframe tag which does not play nicely in WordPress.
After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag. This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin. According to their site, EmbedIt is a,
simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.
embed Youtube videos into wordpress
embed ustream into wordpress
embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
embed whatever html code into wordpress
embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article
The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme. EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.
My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on. I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it. I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.
There are dozens and dozens of these applications, scripts and widgets available, but one of my favorites it is definitely is 
BlogBackupr
As we’ve announced earlier 
