We use WordPress on almost all of our company blogs.  Along with those, we setup and customize WordPress blogs for many of our clients.  Over the years WordPress has done a good job creating a quality blogging/content management system.  Yesterday version 2.8 was released which improves upon 2.7.  This morning I was able to successfully upgrade our blogs without a hitch.

New features include easier searching and installation of themes.  It also gives a better user interface for organizing widgets all within a single screen.  WordPress also claims the platform is faster and fixes over 790 bugs.  Also new to 2.8 is the ability to customize the UI which builds upon the changes in version 2.7.  View the video below to review some of the new features in the updated system.

What are you doing?  This is the question Twitter is trying to answer.  I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about Twitter.  I’ve integrated Twitter with the API on this site as well as installing plug-ins for things like Facebook.  For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a social networking site which is primarily based on status messages.  It’s what I like to call “mini-blogging” because it’s short quick posts.  Twitter also makes it relatively easy to update.  You can IM, text message, use the web, or use applications that use the Twitter API to post to your profile.  This is nice because there are times when I don’t blog because it takes time and sometimes I’m just too busy.  With Twitter it takes no time to update.

I used to use Pownce, but I think Twitter is better integrated at this point.  I think both services have their plus and minuses.  I also think both can co-exist together.  Twitter is much more simple since it only has the one task it tries to accomplish.

Twitter is also integrated into our WordPress blog.  Whenever we create a post for the blog, it automatically updates our Twitter account.  This is nice for businesses since other Twitter users can follow the company and always get updates from the company.  Feel free to follow the Twitter profile for Brandon Quintana Consulting.

It’s a fun and pretty addictive service.  It’s easy to use which I think is the most important part.  It might just be a fad for me, but I’m not sure.  Recently I’ve read Twitter was transitioning away from Ruby on Rails due to some scalability issues.  If they can overcome these issues, I’m sure the service will be around for a long time.  If you have any Twitter advice, let us know.

If you have ever been interested about the inner workings of JavaScript and haven’t already, you should take a look at several video lectures by Douglas Crockford. Douglas Crockford is a Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! and has authored an O’Reilly Book: “JavaScript: The Good Parts“. The two I’d recommend starting off with are “The JavaScript Programming Language” that provides fundamental yet thorough information into the JS language such as objects and functions. Even if you have been using JS for an extended period of time, I’d recommend browsing through the lecture. The second video lecture is basically a continuation from the first, “Advanced JavaScript“.

These lectures do not delve into any of the current JS Libraries like YUI, mootools, or prototoype, but the lectures will help you extend those libraries as needed by project demands. The general Yahoo! UI (YUI) Library Theater page has many other video lectures available that get into utilizing the YUI JS library.

I decided to use WordPress for the Brandon Quintana Consulting blog.  I had skinned quite a few for clients over the years and the old WordPress software just didn’t have all the features I wanted in a blog.  In fact back when I started blogging no one really had all the features I wanted.  Blogging was relatively new and everyone was still trying to see what worked and what didn’t.  This left me to create my own blogging software platform which I’ve used on many sites for a number of years now.

Well as time went on and the company got larger and larger, blogging was evolving and I had a hard time keeping up with it.  With all the client work load, I had little time to update the software with new features or fix any of the bugs that I had come across.

I looked to using WordPress about a year ago.  I wanted to switch everything over and use a piece of open source software that a group was actively maintaining.  I tried to make the switch, but just couldn’t do it.  It still didn’t have enough features and I didn’t have the time to write the plug-ins I needed.  Sure others were writing plug-ins, but a lot of them just weren’t ready for prime time.  I let the issue rest and kept using my old platform.

I recently was asked by a client to skin a Blogger blog for his business.  I figured we’d have much more flexibility hosting a WordPress installation.  I’ve always liked WordPress for clients because the user interface has always been pretty easy to use and hosting it yourself you have access to all the code.  While it might not have had enough features for me, for most of my clients it was more than enough.  I recommended WordPress to the client.  He agreed and WordPress was configured and starting to be skinned to match the look and feel of the new website.

In the latest installation, a lot had changed since I first looked at it about a year ago.  A lot of the features that were missing previously had been developed.  I thought maybe this time I can give it another shot and see how it goes.  Well I’m now writing this post in the WordPress admin.  I’ve completed a theme for the new Brandon Quintana Consulting site and for the most part I’m pretty happy.  It’s easy to use, easy to skin, and hopefully it can deter a lot of the spam issues I’ve had in the past with my own home brew.

If you have any suggestions for this blog or have another blog platform you think we should check out, let us know.  We’re always interested in new technologies and how we can use it here at the company for us as well as our clients.  This is the first blog post for the new site and we’ll hopefully have many more as the site progresses.