iLEMONed

Attentions have been drew since yesterday by the return of wordpress.com.cn. I also wrote about the issue at my Chinese blog. But friends from all over the world may not have an idea about what is going on. So here's the story:

WordPress.com.cn came out in late 2005 as a FAKE official Chinese version of wordpress.com. The domain was registered in China by a Chinese and its server was located in Beijing. A couple weeks after they opened registration to the public, they deleted many user accounts without notices, which led to a large number of users criticising not only wordpress.com.cn but also wordpress.com. Matt then quickly responded that wordpress.com.cn was an imitation in no way associated with wordpress.com. The site then faded away silently.

Yesterday I received a spam e-mail sent from wordpress.com.cn, in the mail I was told that testers were wanted. I then followed the link and registered an account. No sooner had I logged into the admin center than I noticed that they had removed every backlink to the official WordPress sites there! Even worse, in all of their 330 available templates including some very famous ones, I could not spot a single credit link back to the theme authors!

Wicked and self-deceiving enough, huh? I don't want to believe that all these evil behavior, this fraud, was from a Chinese, my compatriot. WHAT A SHAME.

At last let's see some timestream of this FAKE SITE:

• 2005-12-07: Fake site launched, and was rapidly spread out.
• 2005-12-08: Fake site opened user registration.
• 2005-12-22: Fake site deleted many user accounts without notices.
• 2005-12-23: Matt debunked the fake site.
• 2005-12-27: Users discovered that DoNews might be the guys behind the fake site.
• 2006-01-19: DoNews started providing WordPress-based blog service which was apparently done by the same guy from the fake site.
• 2007-10-23: Fake site spammed a ton of maiboxes and returned.

This time the good news comes from Ultimate Tag Warrior, another (used-to-be?) must-have plugin.

First, a bugfix version of UTW Final for the current WordPress has been released. Second, a beta version for WordPress 2.3 is out. And of course, the latter one is what I care about.

So far, three "sub-plugins (things)" has been unveiled to beta testers:

"Tag Suggest Thing", which benefited from the Yahoo! term extraction API, and dopes out keywords basing on the post content.

"Embedded Tag Thing", which allows you to include tags as hyper links in the post content.

Update:
"Tag Managing Thing" is out! I've been waiting for it! With this lovely thing you can rename tags / slugs, delete tags, and even split tags!

WordPress 2.3 will be coming with native tagging support, probably next week. What UTW can do from now on, is to have some additional functions for us. To be frank, I was not much interested in these two "things". The expected "tag cloud" has been integrated into the latest WordPress svn but is poorly customizable, Christine should spend some time on it. Another thing that has been worrying me is the "Add tags as meta keywords" function, I'm not sure if it's still necessary since we already have rel="tag". Am I misunderstanding something?

Oh I almost forgot about the "Related Posts" function. Those who are at the same time using UTW and other related-posts plugins, do you know UTW itself can do this like a charm? Just read the readme files inside UTW package carefully. By the way, a guy from China has worked out something already.

At last, if you also want to be one of the beta testers, send request to this e-mail.

Extended Live Archives is still one of the most outstanding archives plugin today, though it is losing popularity within WordPress blogsphere. WordPress 2.3 will come with native support for tagging, the upgrade of database structure has resulted in incompatibilities for the current version of ELA and a number of other plugins. A Hongkong blogger Tinyau, has recently modified ELA to accommodate the new database structure. An unofficial version of ELA that supports WordPress 2.3 alpha is now available.

For more information and the download link, read Tinyau's blog entry.