Main blog­ger­illa topic of the week: the new Word­Press aka 2.7. Matt and his team change a lot in the back­end — it’s like Obama said: “Change, we can do it!” What O did not men­tion though was the fact that change makes most folks rather uncom­fort­able. In that respect, it’s more like TLC sang-rapped: “Don’t go chasin’ water­falls / lis­ten to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.” In other words, I’ve heard a lot of user com­plain­ing about a so-called ugli­fi­ca­tion of the CMS. My five cents: so far I’ve only updated half of my blogs, and I really dig the new look and all the new features.

The new Word­Press 2.7

A lot of hard pro­gram­ming work has gone into this release: every backend-screen is cus­tomiz­able, so it should be eas­ier than ever to fit WP to your needs. Fur­ther­more, this updating-round is the last man­ual one: from 2.7 or “Coltrane”, WP updates do hap­pen on the fly with­out any ftp-uploads (just like the cur­rent plug-in update func­tion). This new release is so full of fea­tures that you might want to take a look at the offi­cial Word­Press Blog. This screen­cast sums up all the new blogging-goodness:

Jerry nails it again

I really dig this guy, not just because he’s funny and a good writer — I also learned a great deal from him. And I can only fully endorse this quote from an arti­cle about blog­ging and not sell­ing out:

Going local with your host

If you live in the US and you run an online busi­ness, you prob­a­bly didn’t choose a Euro­pean host­ing provider — why would you? US Hosts offer cheaper con­tracts, and they’re just as reli­able. And that’s the rea­son why many Euro­peans chose US hosters, but that might not be a good idea. NTT Europe just released a new study about the impor­tance of local host­ing. And the results are quite sur­pris­ing: if your server is hosted in another coun­try than the one you’re tar­get­ing with your busi­ness, you might lose up to 30% of poten­tial vis­i­tors! So whether you’re a global player or more of a niche-fiend: don’t for­get that your IP always tells Google where your server is located: pay­ing a cou­ple of bucks more might actu­ally pay off, and that goes for blog­gers, too.

Going dig­i­tal this X-Max

Geeks need to pay for Bytes, says Crunchgear — we all got too much brick-and-mortar crap already, and it’s about time to switch from energy-consuming, poison-producing hard­ware to dig­i­tal con­tent streams — I fully agree:

Video of the week

Ever felt like jump­ing from a really high cliff with­out a para­chute? Well, that’s what those guys do on a reg­u­lar basis. Yes, they do sur­vive their falls thanks to so-called wing­suits — and their adven­tures look a lot more spec­tac­u­lar than those of Superman:

That’s it for one of the last weeks of 2008 — I hope you have a great Sun­day! Thanks for stop­ping by, see you next week.

Got any news you’d like to read about in my weekly round-up of cur­rent blo­gos­phere events?

Don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me! Of course I’ll include a back­link to your orig­i­nal story.

So don’t hes­i­tate — just click here for the con­tact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.