Wordpress 2.5 Released

WordPress 2.5 has been released and includes a huge number of changes over the WordPress 2.3 series. Rather than list the changes in detail which would probably take me some days to write out I offer the following statistics and information about the WordPress 2.5 release:

• In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).


• Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.


• Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.


• Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

As usual you can download wordpress at their site, http://wordpress.org/download/. Btw, check out their new interface. They also changed how the wordpress.org site works.

Youtube Unblocked in China

After a week hiatus, Youtube, a Google-owned video sharing network, is back online.

It seems that tonight(Mar 22) Chinese users could visit YouTube again since it was blocked on Mar 15. I can confirm China Telecom can access it. It was really terrible when YouTube was blocked a week ago. There is no official answer as to why Youtube was blocked for a week period by the Chinese internet regulators. Quite a lot of people considered that it was for the tibet riot on Mar 14.

It may be that Chinese authorities has brought the situation under control,  and Kuo Min Tang win the Taiwan Election too, so they unblocked youtube, but some of the special video in Youtube still can not access. The Chinese authorities constantly prevents access to sites that it finds content or ideas offensive. Chinese users should enjoy Youtube while it's available because we may never know when it will disappear.

YouTube Blocked in China Again

Internet users in China were blocked from seeing YouTube.com on Mar 15 after dozens of videos about protests in Tibet appeared on the popular online video Web site.

This is not the first time that Chinese authorities blocks YouTube. In October 18, 2007, YouTube is also blocked temporarily, two week later YouTub became available again in China, but now YouTube blocked again.

The current block is actually a bit more restrictive than the other block, since any mention of the string "www.youtube.com" in any URL seems to be blocked.For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=www.youtube.com (if you are out of China, you should use http://www.google.cn/search?q=www.youtube.com) will not go through, and will get you a "Connection reset" error.

China has blocked access to YouTube in an apparent attempt to stop the spread of video footage related the rioting going on in several cities in Tibet. There were no protest scenes posted on China-based video Web sites such as 56.com, youku.com and tudou.com. The only protest scenes video is on CCTV's website. Chinese media and international media have shown footage of buildings burning and crowds damaging store-fronts.

China has at least 210 million Internet users, according to the government, and is expected to overtake the United States soon to have the biggest population of Web surfers.

WordPress Excerpt Seo Tips

Wordpress blogs have duplicate content issues, and one of them is allowing reading the same content on both the posts, index page, archives and categories pages. To avoid search engine penalty it is important to optimize your Wordpress using Wordpress excerpt so that duplication will be avoided.

Instead of duplicating the whole content, you may use just an excerpt in the index, archives and categories pages. The WordPress displays the excerpt of the current post with [...] at the end, which is not a "read more" link. If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor's optional excerpt field), the first 55 words of the post's content are used.

To use Wordpress excerpt function, you may replace the_content() tag with the_excerpt() when on archive (tested by is_archive()) and category (is_category()) pages and index (is_home()) page in WordPress themes.

Now that you are in the correct section, locate the following piece of code:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
</div>

You are going to replace that entire piece of code with the following:

<div class="entry">
 <?php if(is_category() || is_archive() || is_home() ) {
  the_excerpt();
 } else {
  the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;');
 } ?>
</div>

Of course, this example uses the WordPress default template, but the same code can be used on most any template if you find the index.php or main index page and the spot where <?php the_content(); ?> is in the code.