Great coverage of whether "passion" for the subject is important in blogging. My take - yes of course it is. [link]

Gavin Wray designed this elegant website for management consultancy Ladder Consulting, which I then turned into a Wordpress theme. The site contains a blog, as well as a number of hierarchical pages which are all controlled by Wordpress’ easy-to use CMS.

The site looks great in all browsers and is very accessible to all.

Ex collegue of mine Matt Cashmore is about to blog motorbiking to Russia for charity, some of which he'll be doing as audio by phone - here's his handy guide to doing just that (the phone thing, not the motorbiking): "Sound simple doesn’t it. Just find a way of leaving a message on something like skype, then get it to encode your audio, upload it to the server and generate the XML." [link]

Tired of newspapers doing intros to blogging: “it’s sort of like an online diary…”?

Here’s a nice turnaround - Meet the newspaperers -

For those of you who don’t already know, newspapers make up a significant portion of topical written content in the UK and are fast becoming a vital part of the newsgathering process.

A few facts about newspapers
1. Newspapers are actually made from trees.

…
4. Newspapers are run like big companies and can employ hundreds of people.

via

I’ve just spent an hour or two (Saturday morning would be the quietest time for traffic to my blogs) updating this blog, BiNS and The Kitten Channel to the new Wordpress release 2.3. No major problems, but it is still squeaky bum time.

The Google sitemap generator plugin requires an upgrade to verion 3.0, and and plugins or themes that use the old catergories database tables directly (and not the recommended API) will fail. Unfortunately that, at least for the moment, includes the map function of the GeoMashup plugin I’ve been using on BiNS. I think I could fix it, but as it is well supported by the author I’ll wait for the official fix.

Haven’t noticed anything else wrong tho’, and the plugin update checker in the new version will be great.