The AWSOM News Announcement plugin has been updated to version 1.2.4. This is a non-critical bug fix release to correct a typo that adds an incorrect element (a “}” symbol) into the header of the index page. You can get the new version of the plugin from the News Announcement product page.

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No plugin, no matter how well coded, can satisfy everyone. Since this site is dedicated to more than just highlighting my own plugins, I like to point out some alternate image gallery possibilities other than my own Pixgallery plugin. The one I want to point people to today is Nextgen. It appears that the developer of this image gallery, much like me, has decided to work from the ground up and create a Wordpress native plugin that’s flexible but user friendly.

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Here’s another web based tool that might give you some interesting information about your website. Websiteoptimization.com hosts a tool (the Web Page Analyzer) that will tell you a great deal about how your website loads in terms of how fast and how many page elements are being loaded. It’s always good to know how other people will experience your site performance.

I would caution not to get too wrapped up in some of their suggestions though, with the conversion of a large percentage of the world to some form of broadband, not every little element of your page needs to be optimized for speed–but it’s still good to get an outside view of the situation, sometimes you may not realize how many things are really a part of your site.

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I can’t stress more strongly the need for testing of a new or updated website before it goes live. This is true with Wordpress or any other method of setting up a website. The problem I hear the most in regard to this though is most people don’t know how to set up a non-live (as in not visible on the internet and open to anyone going to it) version of their site to do the testing, usually on their own PC. Well, Mac users really have no excuse, since being based on Linux it has a web server built into the regular OS, all you need to do is go to your preferences area and enable it (I won’t bother explaining how to do this, there are millions of google sites that will do that for you).

For Windows users it has traditionally been a whole lot harder. Windows doesn’t really have any support for doing web server services built into it–and in most cases actively makes it hard to get this working. It’s also not really a great idea (in my opinion) to utilize the Windows server system of web services (known as IIS) even if you could since they are really not that great–and most of the world still uses Linux style web services (known as Apache).

So what are Windows users able to use? Luckily a group of people realized this lack and built their own pseudo-Linux style web services install for Windows called XAMPP. The group is called the Apache Friends and they actually have set ups for pretty much every platform also. On Windows the web server package is a simple .exe file that you download and install. At first it might seem a little daunting, but it’s really pretty easy once you get it installed. Instead of going to a “real” web page in your web browser, you instead go to “localhost”, with everything else a branch off of that (so it’s like localhost/mywebsite/). Read their setup instructions and you should be able to figure out where to put your wordpress files.

For the novice the best usage of this environment is to tweak your Wordpress themes or try out plugins. Once you finish with these files you can simply copy them to your live web server.

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It appears that some people are a bit confused about the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. Wordpress.org is the website that hosts the Wordpress CMS development files and is where you can download the Wordpress setup files to utilize the program on your own server. Wordpress.com is also part of the overall Wordpress organization, but is a place where you can sign up for a free account and use a copy of Wordpress that is hosted by them. It’s works sort of like Livejournal or MySpace, but utilizes the Wordpress engine. If you want to get a blog site up quickly and want to do a test of the Wordpress system without having to do much work, it might be a good idea to sign up for an account at Wordpress.com and try it out.

There are differences of course. You are much more limited when using a Wordpress.com account than if you set up the program on your own server. They have a limited selection of approved plugins and themes–though the benefit is they usually just work and don’t require much if any set up. Unfortunately my plugins are not a part of their service (yet!). Also, they pay for allowing you to use their service by selling ads on your account site–money which you don’t get– and you aren’t allowed to add your own ads. Ultimately if you plan on really making any money you’ll want to transition to your own server set up.

If you don’t have webspace purchased yet and are still in the decision making stage, go get an account, it can’t hurt. It’ll get you an understanding of the basic workflow of posting.

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