The world has just lost a genius. He will be remembered by us all. He is Steve Jobs.

Here we would like to share 15 things you didn’t know about Steve Jobs, from onlineschool.org.

WordPress 3.2 is on its way soon. This version is scheduled to be the first WordPress release that drops PHP 4 support. The planned minimum supported version for the WordPress 3.2 release is PHP 5.2.

This means that your server must be running at least version 5.2 of PHP in order to install or upgrade to WordPress 3.2 and all the new features and fixes it will have.

How can you find out if your server supports PHP5.2? There are two ways:

1. Find a free tool developed by WP community to check the server
2. Contact your hosting company and ask them if their server is PHP5 ready.

Good news! Exploring Blogosphoere is WordPress 3.2 ready.

Before you find out the answer, do not upgrade your blog to WordPress 3.2.

Good luck blogging. 🙂

The breaking news this weekend was Microsoft’s official withdrawal of their Yahoo bid. The whole internet world is talking about the reason why Micorsoft walked away and guessing what will happen to Yahoo! ‘s stock price on Monday, as well as who might become the next potential buyer of Yahoo! It’s pretty interesting watching this kind of game between internet giants. Some predicted that Google might come into this show. Who know? By watching, we might be able to learn something valuable 🙂

We all know that WordPress blogs can future-dated its posts. However, for a long time, Google Blogger couldn’t do it. Whenever you edit the publish date, it will be published right away. In some case it might be an advantage – when you want to put a post on top of other posts, you just need to future-dated the post and it will stay there till the time expires. According to Blogger official blog, started from May 1 2008, Blogger blogs can schedule future-dated posts. I found out this new feature today when I failed to publish a future-dated post – I got a message saying that “This post will be published as scheduled”, which it is not good for me, since I don’t want to edit the date of this specific post that I planed to put it on the top whenever I have a new post. 🙁 Anyway, it is good for people who would like to better manage their posting frequency - You can write ten posts a day when you have more blogging ideas but publish it through out the next week as scheduled.

Update:
I just found that actually I still can give a post a date in the future but have it appear on my blog now. There is one extra step to realize this – First, publish the post with the current date and time. This will make it appear on the blog. Then, edit the post to change the date into the future and publish it again. – That’s even better than WordPress 🙂 As far as I know, WordPress doesn’t have this option yet.

Explorer noticed that some websites or blogs’ Google PageRank has been changing up and down today. It seems like Google is doing its first update this year. Exploring Blogospher is still 2 so far. Hopefully it will for the better 🙂 How about you? Did your blog’s ranking changed?

Today when I logined, there is a notice on the dashboard reminding me to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1. I did the upgrade right away since my host company has one-click installation which allows me to do upgrade easily. The upgrade was smooth and fast. After that I started to wrote this post and I didn’t notice any difference.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some annoying bugs and improved performance. Here are some highlights from WordPress official site:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Regardless, it’s always good to upgrade to the newest version. Try Wordress 2.5.1 out and tell your readers if there are any new bugs.

I’ve seen many discussions about Semantic Web on the blogosphere this year and didn’t really understand what is Semantic Web. As usually, I did a Google search and the first link showed up was from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

” The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.”

On the left is a logo owned by W3C for Semantic Web. ” The three sides of the cube dig at the triplet in RDF. The peeled lid is meant to invite people to open their data to the Semantic Web.”

How wonderful it is to be able to witness the rapid development of the Internet technologies?

Reading blogs is part of my daily routine. I’ve stumbled upon many nice blogs with plenty of helpful information. I discussed blog reader-friendliness in my Sunflower blog last year. Here I would like to share my points with you again.

Template
It’s the first impression for the visitors; therefore, it is critical to have a nice & simple template which matches the theme of your blog. The main colors should be selected very carefully as well.
Word Verification
Not many people like this because it wastes the readers’ time, although it can be used to avoid annoying comments spams and it is a personal preference.
Sidebar
A well-organized sidebar will definitely attract readers’ attention.
Interactivity
The Auto-linky and Chat-box are good examples to entertain and interact with the readers. Since not so many bloggers have these two features, make sure your commenting interface is easy to find and quick to load.
Post
Ideal posts are are not too long and don’t have distracting spelling or grammar errors (I especially need to improve my grammar). In addition, don’t display more than ten posts on your homepage because the readers have to spend more time loading your blog.
Content is King
Without interesting content, it is hard to maintain regular readership. The question is how to make your posts interesting enough to attract your readers. I always find I am lack of inspiration 🙁

In summary, your blog is just like any other service or product in the market place. If you want to promote you blog and establish reader-loyalty, you have to please your readers (your customers) by making their reading easier, saving their time and providing more value-added information.

BTW, I don’t mean that my Exploring Blogosphere is reader-friendly enough. I am still learning and experimenting……

What are your criteria for a reader-friendly blog?

Some fellow blogger friends asked me why I like blogging. I wrote a similar post in my Blogger blog a while back. I won’t mind repeating it here since Exploring Bloggosphere has different readers. Here goes the reasons why I liking blogging:

• Blogging is a new experience which can bring me more
• Blogging is free thanks to many Internet talents
• Blogging is creative: internet is all about ideas and innovation
• Blogging is a lot of fun & laugh
• Blogging helps me make wonderful blogging friends and reach large audiences
• Blogging helps me learn how to write better
• Blogging provides me chance to experiment and promote my own ideas
• Blogging can be an outlet when needed
• Blogging practises my skills in difference ways
• Blogging is freedom, just like my own backyard
• Blogging has great potential
• Blogging feedbacks and comments make me happy and healthy
• Exploring Blogosphere is a great place to share thoughts, experience & fun 🙂

Now it’s your turn – why do you like blogging?

Today I checked my pending comments – 4689 spams waiting for me to delete! Wordpress only allow me to delete 25 spams/time. Let’s say 10seconds/25 spam, I have to spend 32 minutes (4689/20*10 = 32) to delete all these spams!! What a pain!!

Here is what I did to deal with commenting spams:
1. Turned off some popular post commenting function
2. Created a Comment Blacklist including those popular key words in spams
3. Created a Comment Blacklist including those IP of current spams

There are some drawbacks of the comment blacklist since readers might use same key words as those on the list. In that case, their comments will be marked as spam 🙁

Anyone knows any idea to deal with spam? Thanks!