Sunday Chatter – 2/24

Preview of WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 will be out soon, but is still in beta as of right now. Many users may want to try it out first before upgrading later down the road. Chris Johnson has put together a great demo site which allows you to login and play around in the WordPress admin panel using 2.5. The first big thing you’ll notice is the colour change from blue to orange and the menus are located in different places from where you’ll find them now. After about 5 minutes of touring 2.5, I was pretty comfortable with it. Don’t install the beta version of 2.5 yet, it’s not completely safe and may contain exploits. Wait for the official release to be debuted in March.

10 Google Search Tricks

There are still many things we don’t know about the mysterious Big G, so it’s always fun to find out new tricks you can use.

1. How to search different file formats (keyword filetype:doc)
2. How to search educational resources (keyword site:.edu)
3. Finding the meaning of words and abbreviations (define:keyword)
4. Finding the time of any location (time new york)
5. Finding the weather of any location (california weather)
6. Tracking commentary of live events (cricket)
7. Using Google as a calculator (9 * 10)
8. Converting currencies (1 USD in EUR)
9. Tracking stocks (stocks:MSFT)
10. Finding faces (add imgtype=face to the URL)

Don’t Forget About Yahoo!

While many worry about optimizing their sites for Google, Yahoo! is just as important in generating inbound links and search related traffic. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great way to add and customize your site’s URL in Yahoo!’s index, as well as add a sitemap. It’s similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools, in which the site owner has to verify their ownership for each site they add. If you run a blog, you can use a plugin called XML Sitemap, which although is catered for Google, also has options for pinging Yahoo!, Ask and MSN among others.

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