That last few weeks, when I have had the time and the motivation I have been toying around with additional and possibly replacement share buttons for my blogs. Two primary reasons is that while I love the sharing option I have currently for Facebook, it would be nice to also offer a like button and I currently do not have that option. Beyond that, I have yet to see much offered in regards to Google+ (more about Google+ tomorrow) and I think getting on that is going to important moving into the future. So now I am at some crucial choices and curious as to what other folks think.
Yesterday morning I had pretty much nothing but glowing things to say about the new version of WordPress (3.2) that was released on the fourth of July. I am still very happy the upgrade and expect to be very pleased with it as I upgrade the rest of my blogs over the next few weeks and hopefully get a chance to play with the 2011 theme. However, I do have a few things that I would really like to see addressed with some near release coming out from WordPress. I am not sure I really expect to see any of them in a future release, but I think I will see if I can submit these ideas to the WordPress folks for the future. Give me your thoughts on them as well, so I can get a feeling if I am on the right track or not with these ideas.
It is just before 3:00am in the morning as I begin composing this post but I am actually inspired and feel very compelled to write. Just a bit ago I finished up some work stuff and noticed a page load to my blogs had hung way back when on this machine. I set them to reload and noticed an update available on one the dashboards after logging into it. I was excited and checked, and sure enough yesterday (the 4th) WordPress 3.2, the latest major release, is now available. As I had done some testing with the release candidates I felt pretty comfortable with installing the update and have not been disappointed so far.
I have had in the back of mind for some time about using Picasa as the back end for my photos that were included on my blog. It only makes good sense as I noted just a few days ago, given that I already work up and store all my photos as a backup archive using Picasa. While the NextGen Gallery tool I have been using is great, it has typically meant an extra set of work ups for any photos I had an intention to put to the web. After a few days looking, quite by accident from another blog I have found Shashin (Japanese for photograph) that does all I am looking for with my Picasa pictures. A short list of what features I required that Shashin supports follows:
