Robin Majumdar 2.0

Well, the latest Google Toolbar 5 beta release is still available only for Microsoft Internet Explorer. This is kind of surprising considering Google’s support of the Mozilla / Firefox project (see Google Pack, etc.) but granted, MSIE still has the lions share of the browser market - for now.

Interesting side note: after installing Google Toolbar 5 (beta) on Internet Explorer, there is a Sign-In button on the far right side of the toolbar which let’s you sign in to your Google account. Well, surprise, the sign-in page opens in a pop-up IE browser window with the login form and… when submitting, Google Toolbar blocks the toolbar.google.com for pop-ups. Heheh… small oversight, but considering that G Toolbar has been in beta for over 6 months now?

Brian Gardner today announced the long awaited release of the Revolution News 3.0 Theme for WordPress…

Revolution News is one of the most popular (and rightfully so) themes for WordPress sites - it’s not free, with the theme selling at $79.99 for a Revolution News single-use license - good for use on one domain or site.

They also have a “multiple use” license which allows you use Revolution News on multiple sites for $199.99 …

Brian suggests that sites wishing to go to the latest Revolution News 3.0 version do so from scratch as there are many code changes that would benefit from a so-called clean install.

A few of the new features include:

• All of the 3 sidebar zones now support widgets
• There is a theme options page within the WP admin page
• The comments section now supports Gravatars
• For those of you monetizing (or trying to monetize ) your blog with Google AdSense, Revolution News 3 now supports AdSense code integration between posts and comments
• There are distinct templates for the “archive” and “blog” page areas of your site

I will be most likely deploying (and customizing) Revolution News 3.0 here in the next few days.

See a live trial version of Revolution News 3.0 here.

This is breaking news so the theme should be available for download in the 24 hours or so.

PHPizabi, makers of one of the more feature-packed and popular social networking systems, announced earlier this afternoon a fix for a critical security flaw which could allow a malicious user to intercept the site owners MD5 password by exploiting a weakness in the usercomments.php script.

Although MD5 passwords are indeed encrypted, a commited cracker could decrypt the password using a powerful enough compute cluster and appropriate software.

I was just reading Matt over at WordPress.org and he shared a pretty valuable discount coupon code for anyone interested in participating in the An Event Apart Web Design and Development conference that is happening in New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago over the next few weeks.

I don’t think I’ll be attending myself, but if you are thing about it (it’s well worth the 2 day time and travel investment) then you can save $200 on the registration fee by entering the coupon code AEAWP during checkout.

Kudos to Matt for sharing that.

It’s rare that a story on CNN really grabs my attention, but it was on the front page and interestingly enough had a cool enough tech story… James Earl Buck was covering an anti-government protest in Egypt when he was arrested by the authorities… he sent a message on the Twitter network ; arrested.

His friends who followed his Twitter account saw that (first!) message from him and … the rest is history!