WordPress kicked out the latest upgrade to its popular blogging platform software this week and I upgraded GravitationalPull.net yesterday. So far the improvements are subtle and useful. Almost as important, nothing appears broken, particularly among the dozen or so plug-ins I have installed. WordPress posted a complete list of all the new features and tweaks here.
One of the biggest new features is the addition of two blog post formats called aside and gallery. Aside seems to be tailor made for copying the link post popularized by John Gruber on his DaringFireball blog.
Those are posts that are mainly intended to send readers to an interesting link with just a little bit of commentary added. They’re not quite full-blown blog posts. Gruber’s link posts (which are not done with WordPress) allow you to click the headline of the post to be taken off his site directly to the link, instead of the standard blog headline which keeps you on the same site when clicked and functions as a permalink to the post. Here’s a typical link post example on his site.
With the new aside post format, there is no regular headline or title to your post. Instead, the post just starts with whatever you are writing. And that start can be a link off site.
The gallery format, which I have not yet fooled around with much, lets you embed a bunch of photo thumbnails into a post all at once. Readers can click on any thumbnail to see the full photo. Saves some time if that’s a common activity in your posts.
Linking within your blog is a lot easier in WordPress 3.1, also. Now when you highlight some text and call up the linking dialogue box, you see extra options:
The section called “link to existing content” at first presents a list of all your previous blog posts in chronological order for easy link insertion. But you can use the search box to narrow the list to only posts including the search terms (the search appears to cover all of the text, not just post headlines).
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