After manually upgrading the NPT blog to WordPress 2.7, I was feeling pretty proud of myself… and relieved. Because the blog was installed manually, I do manual upgrades and hold my breath in suspense each and every time until the very end of the process when the software tells me that the upgrade was performed ‘successfully’.

Around the same time I sent out a newsletter alerting folks to the latest blog post about PPC (link below).

Strangely, the post received a pingback, but not one single, solitary comment in 24 hours. Very strange in fact, considering comments usually start coming in within minutes of posting.

I felt a little dejected and conjured up excuses like “everyone’s too busy watching Anderson’s interview with Barack to reply”. Weak, I know — especially considering I didn’t put one and one together to think that the lack of commentary had anything to do with the upgrade.

Thankfully, Gill Clark sent a message through our Support Desk to let us know that there was a problem with the reCAPTCHA code and an error that read “This reCAPTCHA key isn’t authorized for the given domain”.

AH-HAAAAA.

Weird, considering I entered the exact same key that I’d used before when I re-activated the reCAPTCHA plugin after the upgrade.

Anyway, the reCAPTCHA has been temporarily removed. Now make my day — I’d love to hear your comments about the “Losing Money on Your PPC Campaigns?” article as well as any thoughts on the reCAPTCHA issue.

Over the holidays, I decided to do a total overhaul on my 101Date.com site which involved converting all my static HTML pages to WordPress posts and pages.

Because it was a new blog installation, I ended up working with the new WordPress 2.7.

At first, I was slightly turned off by the new dulled-down appearance of the Dashboard.

I mean, it just isn’t as colorful or easy to read as the 2.6.3 Dashboard.

However, once I started getting used to the layout and working with all the nifty new features, I REALLY started to appreciate the latest version and the look didn’t matter anymore. (A ‘stick-to-it’ attitude that I could have / should have adopted much earlier in life – apologies to a few suitors from years gone by. )

The most noteable changes are with the navigation, which has been changed from a horizontal top bar to a vertical left-hand sidebar. And unlike the separation that occured between Writing, Reading, Discussion functions and the Settings, Plugins components in versions 2.5 onwards, all the functions are now available together on the left-side.

Particularly handy is the new “Quick Edit” feature as shown in the next screen capture.

This feature allows you to change any of the following items without having to open the post in full.

• Title
• Slug
• Category
• Tags
• Date
• Password
• Privacy
• Allow Comments
• Allow Pings
• Make Sticky
• Publish Status

By making the items available in a compact area, you’ll save a little time with each post you edit in that you don’t have open a page, wait for it to load or mouse from one corner of the page to the other selecting various items that you want to change.

Although that might seem like a very small matter, all those small amounts of time add up to a BIG chunk of time over the course of a year.