WordPress 2.9 has several new image enhancements. One of the biggest features is some basic image editing functionality. Another one is that you can now specify different alt text from the “caption” field. The “caption” field places a caption under the image. The “alt” text is used to describe the picture to non-seeing users (including search engines). This is a nice addition. However, I usually like my caption, alt text, and title text to be all the same, and I […] (Read more)

The first question on reader’s mind must be — why use LaTeX to blog? Well, I have a pretty specific instance in mind, but I can imagine that others might be interested as well. This fall I am teaching a course on computational corpus linguistics at CU Boulder. I like to have some materials online for the students, such as the syllabus, course notes, etc. I thought about setting up a simple webpage, but then I decided instead to use […] (Read more)

Thanks to all the users who helped me test out the 1.3.testing version of postie, the wordpress plugin which allows you to post by e-mail. I now feel that it is stable enough to call it 1.3.alpha. There are probably still some bugs, but I think that the new features probably warrant giving it a try for most users. Here is a summary of the new features and fixes: Now using default wordpress image and upload handling, which means: No […] (Read more)

I am happy to announce the release of my fourth collapsing X plugin for WordPress. This one is Collapsing Links, which was requested by several users of my other plugins. With the development of this plugin, I finally added the ability to have multiple instances of the widget. This took some careful study of some of the default wordpress plugins, and forced me to completely re-design how the plugin options are handled. In addition to the ability to have multiple […] (Read more)

I am now trying out the scribefire Firefox extension for xml-rpc blogging, since I have discovered that QTM does not support image uploading, and it seems that scribefire does. It allows one to resize images, but it does not seem to create thumbnails. I will probably stick to posting the old-fashioned way, but it is nice to know that there are some other options.