upgrade to wp 2.0

All
activity on this site this week (apart from changing the theme) was done
behind the scenes. Finally, _neverendingbooks_ is upgraded to WordPress 2.0.
It is a straightforward well-explained procedure but somehow I decided
to try this out in between a WorkShop and a
Ph.D. defense. As a consequence I had to reclone twice…
Some of the Plugins‘ functionality
didn’t survive the upgrade. In particular, the anti-spam plugin BotCheck doesn’t work any longer (one could fill out any code and
still get a reply posted) as I found out sunday-morning when I was
greeted with about 20 spam-replies… Fortunately, WP 2.0 comes
bundled with its own anti-spam plugin Akismet but one needs a WordPress.com API key which
meens signing up to a WordPress-account (free). When Akismet is
activated, it really bans all spam (it even shows how many spam-messages
it found, 30 over two days…), the only problem being that it seems
to de-activate itself at random… The new theme is called Kiwi which is a lot more
compact than the default neverending(sic) page. But there is a (heavy
some will say) price to pay : only summaries of posts are on the
front-page and the font is (too some will say) small. Still, Kiwi has
some nice extra features : the Featured Post Plugin which
allows to re-cycle changing selected old posts to the right of the
banner. Another changing part is the _Elsewhere_ list (second row
to the right) where one can display any feed. At the moment (but I may
change this as the del.icio.us site
seems to be having some problems) all _del.icio.us_ links tagged
noncommutative are shown (if the site is up…). It
appears that apart from Graham
Leuschke nobody has a del.icio.us account or doesn’t use the
noncommutative tag. So, if you want to change this site a bit every day,
you know what to do. Speaking of tags, several new
_categories_ were created so that posts now get multiples tags,
describing better their (intended) content. Something I learned by
tagging papers at citeUlike. Btw.
you are still invited to join the
NoncommutativeGeometry Group over there… Clearly, re-tagging
every individual post was a painstaking experience. A WordPress 2.0
feature I like is the ability to write _pages_ (as opposed to
Posts) which are kept alive in the sidebar and therefore resemble
‘stickies’ (in WP parlace ‘they live outside of the usual
timeline’). At the moment there is just one test-page NAGworldMAP
on which you can see that geocoding was added to
this site via the Geo
Plugin (allowing to add geographic data to posts) and the instant google world map Plugin plotting these data on a Google Map. At the moment you can see
the distance I have to cycle to get to the university, but I have plans
to do something more substantial with this feature soon, so please
familiarize yourself with dragging and zooming the map (for US-citizens,
European countries often do not put geographic data in the public
domain, so there is a limit to the zoom-factor and I use the
‘satellite’-view rather than any of the other two).