That said, there’s a fresh version of the Admin Links plugin available and this one is compatible with WP 3.0.

In case you’re not familiar with the plugin, it provides access to common admin features from the public side of the site. Visible to logged-in admins, and completely invisible to the great unwashed masses of the interwebs.

Download it directly from WordPress.org.

I’ve been hard on the poor WordPress guys in the past, so I feel a special obligation to acknowledge the improvement. The search now does a great job of indexing titles, descriptions and keywords to help plugins show up quickly and easily.

Best of all for me, a search for “random image” puts the Random Image selector plugin at the top of the list (at the time of this writing at least).

Thanks WordPress guys!!

That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net.  The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.

The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.

The solution?  Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter).  The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries.  This is a very elegant solution to the problem.  Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.

Technically the plugin works very well.  I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds.  Works like a charm.

• Matt’s official post on the WordPress development blog
• WordPress weekly Podcast which will spend some time talking about the release on Friday (5pm PT, 8pm ET (noon in Sydney))
• Lorelle on WordPress with some additional release info

If you’ve not tried 2.7 yet, read over the new info then give it a shot.  The super-new-and-improved admin interface is well worth the upgrade!

January 24th and 25th in Whistler a meeting of WordPress minds will meet up in Whistler, BC. The keynote speaker for the event will be Blogging Evangelist Lorelle VanFossen.

If you’re in the Vancouver-Whistler area, or can plan to be here the $35 entry fee is a great price for such a high-quality event. If you’re already registered, grab a badge and pimp the event on your site, your twitter or anywhere else!

Random Image Selector - Downloads Per Day

I’m glad that it’s proven useful for people and there will be a major update coming out over the Christmas break to coincide with the WordPress 2.7 release.  This update will include a few bug fixes, a couple of minor feature changes and one significant addition.

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the plugin, and to those who have left feedback on the blog!

I’ve just run the 2.7 update myself tonight (I swore I’d wait until the full release before putting it on the main blog… but I couldn’t wait anymore) and I’m really liking the changes so far. The fact that I can quickly look at the dashboard and see comment stats, recent everything and pen a draft all at the same time is great.

So far everything looks good, though I did have to deactivate a couple of plugins to make things work as expected.  TinyMCE Advanced was causing some CSS issues (I could fix it I’m sure but… meh).  In addition I had a plugin to replace the category box in the sidebar when posting which isn’t required anymore with 2.7.

Stay tuned here for more of the pros, cons and otherwise of the newest member of the WordPress family.

For those of you who’ve been following the development of the next iteration of WordPress you already know that 2.7 Beta 1 was released last Friday night.

WP 2.7 features some really great refinements to the admin panel which not only make it more useful, they also serve as the building blocks for the next few generations of WordPress.

I’ve been messing around with 2.7 for the last month or so on my WP sandbox and it’s been very interesting to watch the evolution of the menuing system.

I’ll be drawing up a full review for the AGP blog which I’ll post once the full release happens.

Jane is one of the minds behind some of the dramatic new changes to the admin interface for WordPress 2.7.  Recently Jane also posted a poll and a survey to garner some feedback on the new WordPress Beta that was released on Halowe’en night.

Give this week’s show a listen and check out some of the great answers to the questions that we came up with.

The long awaited seventh installment of the Aussie Geek Podcast is released.  This should be the last time I edit and post-produce a show for a while.  I have enjoyed it, and learned a whole lot about podcast post-production, and even about this show that I’ve been a part of for the last 18 months.

This week on the show we covered some economics including Yahoo! layoffs, iPhone sales and the effects of the tech slowdown on startups in Europe.

We also touched on an app to moderate WordPress comments from your desktop and a graphics package to create stunning high dynamic range (HDR) images which works on all platforms.

At the end of the show we’ve got the first in a series of musical appearances by the Lizards from Afar, and the show closes out with a blooper segment that’s sure to make Dave retalliate in episode 8.

Go have a listen to the Aussie Geek Podcast #007 :: Armchair Economists.  Better yet subscribe to the show in iTunes or directly via the show feed.

It’s a pretty simple proposition really, I’ll put together what I know about SEO with regular posts to the site.  Hopefully between now and next Friday night I’ll be able to get the site on Google‘s radar.

What are my chances?  No idea, but you can check out the post explaining the Google – WordPress experiment on the new site at kickjoey.com.

I’m relaunching with a bit of a project in mind: get this site from a PageRank 0 to a PageRank 1 in 7 days.  Impossible? Probably, but I’ll try it anyway.

Why PageRank? Because I’d like to start doing reviews here that I can collect on. Yes, paid blogging. I didn’t really want to to advertorial posts on kdmurray.net, but it’s something I’ve wanted to try out.

What next? Well, time to find some content to do reviews on over the next 7 days, and try to get some links pointed here from some other websites.

Let’s see if we can get this site on Google’s radar in only 7 days.