But the developers seem to be going for “more is more” in recent times, features wise, and against their original philosophy of “less is more,” which won them fans to begin with.

I wish I didn’t have to add define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false); to my config file. But what the hell, it’s a tiny annoyance for using an otherwise state of the art blogging engine.

I am not a pro-blogger, or even a wannabe, but if you’re new to the business of blogging, and you’re in it for the money, then you’re in luck. For Google Trends is a jackpot map. Let me explain.

Let’s say you are a newbie, and you’re looking to write about topics that are currently sought after on popular, and high earning sites. You may not have access to their stats, but Google Trends will give you some insights on what’s being sought on those sites (see “Also searched for” list at the bottom right corner for topics).

Now all you need to do is get the top 100 sites, sift through their popular searches using Google Trends—say in pairs, or as you see fit—and voila, you have tons of topics to write about. Of course, this only gives you an opportunity. In the end the stuff you write will be judged solely on its merit.

So go on then, make some money by writing about the good, useful stuff.

Golden ratio perfectionists be pleased, and it’s been available for a while now: The “Edit Photo” in Flickr allows you to crop images to an aesthetically pleasing Golden ratio: 1.618.¹

1. I wrote about the need to have something like this as a Flickr feature some time ago. It is gratifying to learn that Flickr now supports it.

• WordPress has the ability to natively correct most of these—so that you don’t have to.
• WordPress will not add a <br /> tag soup to your content—unlike Blogger or other software/service. It maintains well formed paragraphs and lists, tables or whatever describes the content in its correct context—just as the writer intended.
• Also, be sure to look-up Typographical niceties and Intelligent text formatting on the features page.

In short, WordPress is a writer’s dream for writing well formed content—without the extra effort. This alone won my vote back in 2004 when I switched to WordPress.

You can spit that gum now.

Now I have a local web server running on my Ubuntu powered desktop—complete with a local version of my site, and proudly powered by WordPress.

Update: You’ll need to set /var/www folder writable by server: sudo chmod -R 755 www.

Credits: Much of the LAMP installation part was referred from this simple and excellent Howto Forge article. I’ve skipped tasks that are now automated; and added those that weren’t covered in the referred article.

1. Here, username is your login name on the computer; typically username@computer that you see when you open a Terminal window.