Automattic, the team behind blogging platform WordPress have announced the release of version 2.8 of the platform. Code named “Baker”, in the tradition of the platform’s jazz inspired naming, the release focusses on making the blogging experience even simpler than before, whilst adding over 180 new features.

2.8 builds on the developments that lead to the plugin browser, to add a theme browser into the WordPress interface. It enables you to search the WordPress theme directory, without leaving your wordpress blog. Tick box selection narrows down the theme choices from the thousands of free themes available. I’m not yet clear on how this will work for commercially supported themes, important to businesses that are blogging. Most businesses have a custom developed theme, so this will most likely not be an issue.

The release also adds syntax highlihting into the theme editor, which makes it much easier to customise themes and will be a boon for developers. Widgets have been enhanced at multiple levels too, starting with the interface to them. There is a lot more control over how you can interact with them, together  with support for multiple instances of a single widget, and a drag and drop interface to allow you to move widgets from one column to another. Again, this makes site customisation much simpler, and will cut down on the amount of coding required. There is also an “inactive widgets” pen, to save customisations of widgets for later use. This is a big improvement over the old interface, which simply lost customisations.

A Widget API has been added to simplfiy the widget development process, which will hopefully enhance the number and quality of widgets available for the platform. The administration interface is generally easier to customise, for example enabling changes to the number of columns and items per page, and scaling the page with the browser window. These features build on the improvements delivered in 2.7. There are some speed optimizations too, to speed up the process of blogging.

All in all, another step forward for the usability and flexibility of the WordPress platform, which is growing from strength to strength, particularly as it starts to eat into the CMS application space.

Today Imagini launched the VisualDNA Shops Beta. Behavioural Targeting is an increasingly hot area. On-line advertising models have a direct lineage from the off-line print world. Although the broad range of digital media enables marketing to be more targeted, most advertising is still based on a broadcast style model – everyone gets the same advert.

What if a web site had enough information about a visitor that it could target ads towards a specific user? Arguably this is better for the user (less irrelevant adverts) and better for the advertiser (better yields from each ad). The sensitivity – and sometimes the controversy – is how that additional information is gathered.

VisualDNA takes a more visible (quite literally) approach to gathering data. Visitors chose from a selection of images. The result of their selections are saved as their ‘VisualDNA’. This is then used to provide more product recommendations from the VisualDNA store. The process is fast and just requires a few mouse clips. I’m trying it out in a couple of spots on some blogs and will track the results with interest. Having tried the camera shop, it figured me out as a Techno Pro pretty quickly. I have a few beta invites, so if you would like to try it out on a blog, go to http://shops.visualdna.com and click “Create a shop”. You will be prompted for an access code – enter benjaminellisvisualdnashop and you should be off.

The VisualDNA store so far include a camera shop, gadget shop,  mum and baby shop, phone shop, travel shop, computer shop, and entertainment shop. The shops exist as a widget that allows bloggers and web publishers to embed the function into existing sites, to provide personalised product recommendations. It also provides a new way to monetise traffic, with a percentage of every purchase made through the widget being paid back to the site or blog.

The shops are currently built upon Amazon.com. Imagini plans to also include products from sites such as eBay and Shopping.com in the coming weeks. The technology has a broad range of potential applications, but this first one should build the profile of VisualDNA in the Blogging community, which will be no bad thing for the company’s profile. There are product overviews on the VisualDNAshops site, voiced by none other than Stephen Fry.

This Tuesday’s TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event included a presentation by Joe Drumgoole, “get of of my cloud.” It probably steered between too technical for non-tech folks and not technical enough for the techies. Launching a start up on a cloud infrastructure makes good economic sense – it’s a success-based cost model. The same holds true for start up projects inside of larger businesses.

However, Joe advised some caution, per transaction costs can kill you (this is ironic given that the concept of “Free” – so popular with the Web 2.0 world – is based on infinitely low transaction costs). Remember, with cloud computing, you can’t touch the hardware or see it, so monitoring is more important, he mentioned Nagios and Monitis which are great packages for doing just that. [more...]

Today was CloudForce in London – SalesForce.com’s big event, which is touring the world, and touted as “your chance to get the insight you need to take advantage of cloud computing and salesforce.com applications in 2009.” And that’s probably where the problem starts. There wasn’t much cloud on show, at least not cloud computing as I understand it.

They had me in the palm of their hand. I was waiting to be wowed. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s highly energetic Chairman and CEO took to the stage and had at it like a fervent preacher, although one who’d slightly forgotten his gospel, having to glance down at his autocue as he stumbled over customer and competitor names, but that didn’t dim his obvious passion for what SaleForce.com had to offer. [more...]

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a London SharePoint user group meeting at Microsoft’s offices in Victoria London. Michael Noel of Convergent Computing gave an excellent overview of building the perfect SharePoint farm.

Michael is one of the authors of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, and well know for his SharePoint expertise. He did a walkthrough of build process, from best practices perspective, covering small deployments with all SharePoint roles and SQL server on the same server, though SharePoint roles on a a single box, with SQL server on separate box, to a fully redundant set up with multiple query servers and an index server. That set up requires 5 servers, and is the smallest redundant farm configuration. [more...]