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Well if you read this blog for any length of time, you probably recognize that I use Wordpress as the publishing platform. Wordpress is open source and very constantly developed and Matt, the guy that created and runs this platform is young enough not to be scared of big change.

Well today there is another big change with the change of Wordpress to version 2.5 from 2.3. Usually we do not look at a point change in software as much more than a minor feature release and bug patches but in this case there is a lot more.

The interface for Wordpress has been completely rewritten by some of the best minds in Web Interface design. The interface has completely changed and the ease of use has been simplified as well. There are new features like a picture gallery within posts and easier posting interface but the change is a bit daunting for a casual user.

I am not too sure about plugin support yet as I have not moved any of my major blogs to the new Wordpress 2.5 but I will be moving this blog over to Wordpress 2.5 this morning. Wish me luck.

What are your impressions of these big changes? Do you like it? Do you have problems? I am interested in seeing before I have broken plugins or any other downsides. As we as tech guys always know, it is usually better to wait a couple of days or week before implementing a major release of software instead of regressing back to an earlier version.

I ran into problems a few months back with some blogs that I had running Movable Type and never recovered, I moved to Wordpress instead.

pinging pinging everywhere. I have been having trouble pinging lately with pingomatic, it seems to be down. I sometimes use Pingoat but they are really bad for banning weblogs for no reason. I just found a new ping service called iPings and I used it just now and it seems to work great.

Pinging with either Movable Type or with Wordpress is pretty easy to do but the tough part is knowing where to ping. Here are the sites that I ping:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blo.gs
http://rpc.weblogs.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://(your weblog address)
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

For the most part these seem to work although I occasional get some errors back. Remember to register your weblog at http://my.yahoo.com before you put your address in there and while you are at it go and register at lots of weblog sites as well. Robin Good has created a great list of sites to register your blog with.