After a long period of waiting, WordPress 2.7 is here, and I couldn’t be more happy. After just 10 minutes, I’ve fallen back in love with WordPress, it’s completely rejuvinated the entire system. Anyway, lets take a look at some of the awesome features and changes which have arrived for us:

The Dashboard

The new dashboard is like a work of art. The “Right Now” section is perfect, highlighting all the info which was previously slapped in a single line of letters, words and other mumble jumble. The Quickpress feature I have yet to use, but I can see it being immensely useful in the future, especially for our individual resources. The rest of the content is pretty standard fare, but it’s all organized well and you can drag bits around.

The Write Page/Edit Template Page

It’s wider! Finally, a large area to edit content, content is, once again, king. It generally makes writing easier, and the right sidebar has all the info you really need to create a post. Below the writing area is the less-used stuff, custom fields, custom excerpt, trackbacks and so on.

(more…)

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Resource Pile version 2.0. Upon first inspection you’ll notice just the new design, we went for very minimalist, content focussed design this time. But why? Basically, the previous design didn’t work. While the idea behind it was a nice idea, to have multiple ‘content streams’, each separated into their own sections, it never worked in practice. The site became too fragmented, as did the wide array of feed options. Not only this, but the manual feed customization tool didn’t always work, and had issues, although I’m still planning on making a WP plugin out of this, but a lot more advanced.

We used to have: features, resources, inspiration & asides. Now we have basically one section, which is split into a group of categories which you can see at the top of each page. Generally this can be cosidered features and resources. Why no inspiration or asides? Well, inspiration isn’t needed really, because there are plenty of CSS galleries out there. And asides were just a waste of time, because all the great content can easily be found via sites built for finding new content, aka Digg & Design Float.

You will notice we still have an inspiration category, we will be running much deeper inspiration posts via this.

So, what’s actually new?

Apart from the design, our focus at Resource Pile is changing. We want to bring you more features, more content you care about, but less often. We’ll still have resources, because that’s essentially the point of Resource Pile, but we’ll be having more and more collections of icons, brushes and websites. More posts on inspiration from both digital and traditional art forms and more articles, including a marketing series.

We now have a Twitter account, so if you don’t like RSS subscription, but still want notifications, go follow Resource Pile on Twitter.

We also have only one feed now, which is our resources and features together. No small asides or inspiration however, only good content you actually care about. As well as this there is now an email subscription link, something we neglected until now.

Lastly, we have a more meaningful footer, specifically in two ways. One thing is that you can now contribute to Resource Pile, send in a resource, write a post, anything. If you’re launching a new site, tell us, and we’ll link you if it’s good. The other thing is a nice space for ‘friends’, non sponsored ‘ads’ for other blogs we like and might exchange links with. If you’re interested in adding your blog, contact us about it.

So there it is…

That’s Resource Pile version 2.0, currently all you’ve seen is the design change, feed change, twitter account and other little bits. New and improved content is coming soon. I hope with our revamped Resource Pile we can expand further than we have so far. Oh, there’s going to be more freebies too :)

It’s amazing, simply amazing. It took me about two minutes to get downloaded and installed (most likely due to my slow internet), and then I was up and running! Web pages load extremely fast, it’s pretty insane honestly. Anyway, let’s run through some cool features:

Interface. The Chrome interface is amazing, extremely minimalist, very tab focussed, with some neat little animations, but they’re not too overdone. It’s both beautiful and usable, it just works! Another thing I noticed was the address bar, check it out, highlights the url you’re on, with the actual sub-directory greyed slightly, genius, so simple, so good. Also, I immediately noticed a lack of a status bar, but soon realized it does exist, but it only exists when needed (nicely fades in, and out).

Speed. This browser is simply amazing, webpages are basically instant to load and be displayed, and when you’re using Tiscali internet, that’s a pretty amazing achievement. Not only this, but Chrome is using just 44mb of ram! Compared to FireFox (also running) which is taking a whopping 197mb. Now that’s amazing.

Features. Chrome boasts an “incognito” mode which basically records nothing, so yeah, that’s got a pretty obvious use, but I currently can’t see many other uses than that really, unless you’re buying gifts perhaps? The homepage is also different, showing your most commonly visited sites, but I simply set it to reload my tabs from last time.

The problems. It may be in beta, but it’s pretty good. I did notice a few things though, which are particularly annoying:

1. Checkboxes don’t seem to appear anywhere? (extremely annoying)
2. It doesn’t always offer to save password (didn’t on digg anyway)
3. No good bookmarking method, only a simple toolbar.
4. No mousewheel click scrolling, something I really, really need.
5. Update, found another error: Chrome doesn’t seem to support overflow: auto; in CSS OK, looks like this is now working, but not always for me. I’ll have to take a deeper look into this. My test file which is working is here.
6. No design on direct feeds. Also, the FeedBurner xml link doesn’t appear in Chrome (perhaps Google want to hide the fact it won’t display properly?). Direct viewing redirects to the original FeedBurner page.
7. Update 2: another, submit <inputs> backgrounds style don’t always work properly like they do in FF and  IE.

However, from what I’ve seen, it’s fast, it’s simple, it’s beautiful. I can’t wait for it to come out of beta, I can assure you, the final product will be amazing.

On a final note, this might be bad news for FireFox however, even if they can survive without Google’s funding, such an amazing browser like this might win-over many, many FireFox users (especially when we consider that a lot of FireFox users are more… tech savvy).

Update: one more annoying thing (not Google’s fault) is the lack of StumbleUpon for a while!