The founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, who is visiting India for the first time to attend Wordcamp India got his own taste of India as is evident in this post full of colorful pictures.

(Picture Courtesy: Matt Mullenweg)

While you may want to install and test that plugin list in the directory on your blog and find out how it materializes on your blog, I suggest to choose your plugins wisely. Many of you might already have felt this: Too many plugins tend to make your WordPress installation slow.

Yes, it is true. I have checked it out myself. I installed a lot of plugins and the result is a slow responding blog.

Some tips to keep your blog in tip-top shape:

• Remember to choose your plugins wisely.
• Install and activate only those plugins that you require.
• Do not test new plugins on your actual production blog. Either create a test blog with your host or create a testing environment on your home PC or laptop.
• Do not keep plugins that you don’t use installed on your blog.
• Finally, many of the features which were previously available via plugins are now integrated into the latest release from WordPress. So, to lessen the load, keep your blog updated.

There. I hope these tips will be useful for you. Got comments? Drop them here.

WordPress 2.7.1, A maintenance pack addressing many issues to the initial release of Wordpress 2.7 is now available from WordPress.

Upgrading is a cinch! It’s pretty easy now, with the new automatic upgrade feature. It took me less than a minute to complete my upgrade. So all you bloggies (like me) who like love to make excuses, better be ready to upgrade to the latest version. Besides it adds to the security of your blog.

The Wordpress team has made available beta 3 of the upcoming version 2.7 of one of the fastest growing blogging software around.

It has a lot of bug fixes and has been released only for further testing by enthusiasts. I hope you are not crazy enough to install it on your live blog! Please be careful. I advise you to either setup a testing environment at home or if you got a domain or two to spare, why not setup a live test blog on your own web server? That way, you can test the latest version without disturbing your production blog.

Beta is really hot but equally volatile, I must say. It should be carefully handled. And, beta here is not the same as beta as in “Gmail Beta” or shall I say, beta as (re)defined by Google.

WordPress 2.7 is going to feature a brand new look for the Dashboard. Looks great from what has been posted over at the Wordpress DevBlog.

I can’t believe that they have overhauled the whole design. This has in fact made many options better accessible. It sure is a departure from the arrangement of the navigation which has traditionally been on the top. Now it is on the left. Of course the design is a lot less cluttered now and looks cool. Can’t wait to get my hands on a beta of 2.7 to check it out before a final release comes out!

I have recently updated my photos blog, TrendySnaps (After quite sometime) with some new pics and hope to keep doing it more regularly.

I have also associated the blog, which is hosted on Blogger, with a sub-domain on fiqbal.com.

It can now be accessed on TrendySnaps.fiqbal.com.

I will keep uploading new pics there by email, which I think is a marvelous way to post to your blog. I wonder if WordPress has this feature or not? Does anybody know anything about this? If you do, please feel free to drop a few lines which shed as to how I can apply the same with my blog!

Ryan has posted a list of confirmed features for the upcoming WordPress 2.7 :

* New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
* New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
* Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
* Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
* Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
* Reply to comments from the admin
* Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
* Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
* Sticky Posts
* Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
* Automatic upgrade of WordPress
* HTTPOnly auth cookies
* New HTTP request API
* A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

After watching what 2.7 has to offer, I think I had a lot of those features on my mind (that needed to be added to Wordpress). So, this is something good. The WordPress development team is in touch with users. What the user needs, is what the team provides. So what, even if it’s a little late?

One of the most needed and important update included in 2.7 is the WordPress Auto upgrade feature. This would ensure that we don’t have to shut the blog, upload new update and upgrade database and bring the blog back up and so on…

So, let’s just wait and see what exactly more pops up in the first Beta of WordPress 2.7.

A great plugin called Sabre is a great option to let users who want to register on your blog to verify themselves as being real humans. What is Sabre you say? I let the author tell you that:

SABRE is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine.

Whether you all know or not, I am still gonna give you an intro to Bad Behavior. BB is an excellent plugin (perhaps that’s not a proper way to address a solution that’s much more than that) for WordPress. It protects your WordPress powered blog (which of course which you are self-hosting) against a range of bots, spammers, harvesters and so on.

Bad Behavior v2.0.22 lets you integrate the resources of Project Honey Pot (PHP) in the fight against the bad guys. It all sounds very good, doesn’t it? It should so too. But when I actually registered on PHP and entered my key on BB, Little was I to realize that I was putting myself into deeper mess.

WordPress 2.6.1 is now available for use. It must be noted, however, that this release is an optional upgrade and is recommended only for self-hosted users who have their blogs on Windows Hosting ( with IIS ). So, if you are one of them, then you must consider upgrading. This is what the WordPress team says about this release fixing a lot of issues for IIS:

For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

It also has some fixes for international users, especially right-to-left languages improvements:

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed.