For a more comprehensive look at everything that has improved in 3.0 check out 3.0′s Codex page or the long list of issues in Trac. (We’re trying to keep these announcement posts shorter.) Whew! That’s a lot packed into one release. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the 3.X cycle we’ll be in for the next two and a half years.

The Future

Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress. The growth of the community has been breathtaking, including over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, but so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless. The goal of the teams isn’t going to be to make things perfect all at once, just better than they are today. We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.

It Takes a Village

I’m proud to acknowledge the contributions of the following 218 people to the 3.0 release cycle. These are the folks that make WordPress what it is, whose collaboration and hard work enable us to build something greater than the sum of our parts. In alphabetical order, of course.

Download WordPress 3.0 RC3

Gmail 502 Server Error

Today when I try to check my gmail from FireFox, I encounter 502 Server Error. But when I try different browser like Internet Explorer 8, I was able to check it smoothly. So, there is problem in Firefox and gmail.

Further after that I realized that if you clear your Firefox browser cache and cookies than you will be able to check your email even from FF.

In Odesk, I especially work as an WordPress Expert. I have developed and customized WordPress Themes and Plugins. I have even worked in HTML/CSS, SEO and Web Security.

I would like to thank Odesk, My Clients, Associates, Family and Friends for supporting me to achieve this success.

Sakin Shrestha - oDesk Profile

Lots and lot of love,
Sakin Shrestha
Kathmandu, Nepal

New Year 2067 B.S Kathmandu, Nepal

@The Kathmandu Post:
Here comes the spring. Rainfall on Monday evening coupled with hailstones sounded the bell bidding gloomy winter adieu and welcoming the sunny side of weather.

Weathermen say, the rainfall and hail on Monday in the Capital and thunderstorms in some central parts of the country heralded the pre-monsoon season.

“Heat in the last few days had created vapour in the atmosphere and the condensation resulted in thunderstorm, rainfall and hailstones,” says Mani Ratna Shakya, Division Chief at the Meteorological Forecasting Division.

The westerly disturbance from the Bay of Bengal has also resulted in thunderstorms in neighboring countries.

During the day, which was cloudy since Sunday afternoon, the temperature hovered around 26 degrees Celsius. Due to cloud formation on Sunday afternoon, the minimum temperature of the Capital on Monday morning went up by 2 degrees.

However, a wave of cool breeze followed by rainfall on Monday evening turned the weather pleasant bringing the temperature down. The rainfall and hailstones on Monday are expected to bring the mercury down by a few notches and turn the weather pleasant.

For those staying at home, the cool weather brought cheers, but for pedestrians and commuters, hailstones from the blue slightly played foul.

Traffic in several parts of the city, including in Chandol, Lainachuar and north of the Narayanhiti Museum was disrupted after trees fell due to the sudden thunderstorm, according to the Metropolitan Traffic Police Division.

A motorcycle in Lainchaur, two in Kapurdhara and a car in Jaya Bageshwori were damaged. However, no serious injuries were reported.

“Rain at this time of year is not unusual,” says Shakya. “And rainfall is expected to continue for a few more days, signifying the end of winter and onset of summer as well.”

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iPad

Today January 27, the first month of the year 2010 been a big day for Apple Companies. They are one of the most innovative IT company which has been revealing great products in the past such as iPod, iTouch, iPhone and so on. Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed another great produced names iPad Tablet which will cost from $499 to $829. Apple.com reported that it is their most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at unbelievable price.

Steve Jobs Reveals iPad

Features:
The device has a 9.7 inch LED-backlit display, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is half-an-inch thick.
Powered by new chip made by Apple itself, a 1 GHz A4 and will come with 16Gb to 64 GB of storage.
It supports WiFi, has an accelerometer, compass, and built-in speaker and microphone, just like the iPhone.
The screen is a full capacitive multi-touch screen.
Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours.
In addition to WiFi, it will have a 3G option from AT&T.
It supports the new iPhone SDK so you can use the iPhone apps in iPad too.
iPad lacking an SD card slot and USB port for which you have to buy extra adapter.

Highlighted Featured:
Apple highlighted the iPad’s use as a digital reader. The iPad comes with a new app called iBooks and an iBooks store. Apple partnered with five publishers to make books available for sale through the iBooks store. “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this technology,”says Jobs referring to the Kindle. “We’re gonna stand on their shoulders and go farther.” The iBooks support the ePub format, allows readers to flip through pages and supports pictures, video, and other graphics. The first book available will cost $14.99. It is also said to be next version of digital journalism.

Costs:
The Wifi-only version, with 16GB of memory, will cost $499.
A 32GB version will be $599, 64 GB will be $699
3G from AT&T it will cost $829 (for the 64GB version)
AT&T will offer two data plans: $14.99a month for 250 MB of data or $29.99 for unlimited. All the 3G iPads, however, will be unlocked, meaning they can be used on other carriers as well.

Video:

Photo Gallery:

[View with PicLens]

WordPress 2.9

After the security lot of security release in WordPress 2.8. Today (December 19, 2009) WordPress released it’s new and awaited WordPress version 2.9 “Carmen” named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae (whom we’ve added to our Last.fm WP release station). You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org.

Check out a short video summarizing some of the cool things about the new WordPress version 2.9

The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

2.9 provides the smoothest ride yet because of a number of improvements under the hood and more subtle improvements you’ll begin to appreciate once you’ve been around the block a few times. Here’s just a sampling:

• We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
• There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
• You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
• We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
• Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
• Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
• Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
• The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
• Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
• When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
• The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
• Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
• Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

oDesk Top Ranked Freelancers

Today I really feel happy and excited to share two achievement both as a team and as an individual.
We (Digital Max Solutions) as a team has been listed as the Top Ranked Companies in oDesk. At the same time, I have been listed as the Top Ranked Freelancers.

oDesk Top Ranked Companies

Beside this, last month in November, 2009: we (Digital Max Solutions) achieved our milestone  6000 hours of quality service provided through the robust marketplace called oDesk. With this we have developed a good brand image as the Quality oDesk provider.

Digital Max Solutions provides comprehensive customer oriented solutions in Information
Technology (IT) including Web, Multimedia and IT consultancy services, both offshore and onshore.
Read more about Digital Max Solutions

Read more about Digital Max Solutions profile in Odesk

Read more about Sakin Shrestha  profile in Odesk

oDesk is the marketplace for online workteams, with the best business model for both buyers and providers. Our unique approach guarantees to buyers that an hour billed is an hour worked, while guaranteeing to providers that an hour worked is an hour paid.
Read more about oDesk

Square Logo and iPhone Device working like Credit Card Machine

Jack Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter and is now its chairman, has unveiled Square, his new start-up. Tuesday (December 1, 2009 ) the company’s Web site went live. Square makes a small square device that plugs into any gadget with an audio input jack, including an iPhone or iPod Touch, and turns the device into a credit card machine.

The idea: anyone with a mobile phone can accept credit card payments.

Little background: In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as payment. Even though a majority of payments has moved to plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience. Square was born a few days later right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.

Useful For: Square could be useful for people who run small businesses, like food carts or booths at art festivals and farmers’ markets, who would not otherwise be able to accept credit cards. Theoretically, it could even be a way for individuals to pay one another without exchanging cash or checks.

Square Receipt

Availability: Square is starting with a limited roll-out and will be available to everyone next year. The company, which attracted a lot of interest from several venture capital firms, is backed by Khosla Ventures, which recently raised $1.1 billion to invest in start-ups.

Test User Cheri Mims is the owner of Lilybelle, a flower cart near Square’s office in downtown San Francisco. She, along with just a few other merchants, has been using Square for several months during a test period. Ms. Mims plugs the device into her iPod Touch and connects to the Internet using the Wi-Fi connection in the plaza where she operates her flower cart.

Cheri Mims share her experience and view about the Square. It makes it so much easier to sell your product. Customers don’t carry lots of checks or cash. The fact that you can go anywhere and run a business is amazing. It was surprised that customers were not nervous about swiping their credit cards using a device they had never seen. Fraud prevention will be a big challenge for Square. People who want to pay with Square can create accounts with photos so sellers can verify that the person using the credit card is its owner.

Alternative forms of payment are an exciting area for entrepreneurs and investors. Many companies, including eBay’s PayPal unit, are focusing on making it easier to pay for things online. Others, like Obopay, let people text message money to one another.

References:

• About Square
• CLAIRE CAIN MILLER