PayPal Money Market rates are getting so low, that pretty soon, you will have to pay eBay (paypal’s parent) just to keep money in their accounts.

Right now the rates are   0.12% that’s 12/100ths of a single percent.  Factor in inflation and that is less than 0 already.  You better not leave any significant amount of funs in PayPal, because that just sucks!

Hell, its even a percentage point less than other money market funds and 1/6th as much as interest bearing checking accounts.

Since November of 2008, PC User’s have benefited from the WordPress Theme Generator called Artisteer and now that WordPress Generator desktop application is available for Apple / Mac users.  The initial Mac beta was just released and people that purchase/have purchased a PC license will also have the ability to use the license on a Mac or vice versa on a PC.

I have been giving demonstrations of WordPress as a Content Management System for several months which includes a demo of Artisteer and the first question that is always asked is, “Does Artisteer work on a Mac?”

Now the answer is YES!  Artisteer does work on Macs.

Better yet, existing Artisteer users already know that when you purchase a license, that license will receive free upgrades for a year.  I have personally created almost 100 WordPress themes since purchasing Artisteer last fall, and I have significantly benefited from many many upgrades to the software.  This latest upgrade ads more Avatar support for WordPress, ads support for Dot Net Nuke and past upgrades provided support for Joomla & Drupal templates and much much more.

here’s the latest news release from Artisteer about the Mex Mac Capability

Artisteer for Mac (Beta) has arrived!
Artisteer 2.2 for Mac (Beta) is now available by clicking here. Couple interesting facts:

• Artisteer for Mac joins the family of products based on cross-platform .NET framework known as Mono.
• Artisteer might be the first product for Mac OS utilizing the ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows.

Technical notes and known issues for beta testers:

• Artisteer for Mac runs on Intel based hardware with OS X version 10.5 (Leopard).
• Artisteer for Mac requires X11 which is usually installed by default on OS X 10.5.
• Artisteer may require approx 1 minute to start the first time after installation.
• The "Open" and "Save" dialogs display Windows style folder structure and may require additional navigation to desired Mac folders.
• The top Mac menu bar does not offer an option to quit Artisteer. Use the Artisteer menu, keyboard shortcut ‘Command’+'Q’, or the red window close button to quit.
• Keyboard shortcuts stop working after clicking anywhere within the web design preview area.
• Certain amount of instability and limitations (as above) are expected due to limitations of the current Mono framework 2.4.
• There is a slight chance that your Mac computer may freeze when using Artisteer (this happened once in our tests). Please save all your work often in case you need to reboot your computer.

Customers who purchased an Artisteer license can use it on both PC and Mac computers (one each) during the beta period. An official release date of the Mac version will be planned after receiving detailed  issue reports from our beta testers and determining how much work is needed to resolve those issues.
Please send feedback and report reproducible issues to our support via the Contact Us page.

Artisteer version 2.2 update
We are releasing a new update to Artisteer 2.2 to resolve a few recent issues reported in the previous version 2.2 Beta.

• Artisteer: Added "Options" button in the export dialog.
• Artisteer: Added DotNetNuke Skin export announced below.
• Artisteer: Fixed a bug with the font size being altered by changing Articles -> Line Height.
• WordPress: Improved compatibility with Avatar List plugin.
• Joomla: Resolved custom footer not showing up.
• Joomla: Resolved centered menus not shown correctly.
• Joomla: Resolved a problem with the text "’30′, ‘height’ => ‘30′ near h2" showing on some pages.
• Joomla: Fixed incorrect path to spacer.gif in script.js file in Joomla templates.
• Drupal: Fixed an issue with broken image appearing instead of a logo uploaded in Drupal.

The new version 2.2.0.17297 can be obtained by clicking here and may become the officially released version 2.2 after additional testing.

Note: Cross posted from The LiveWriterz.

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This weekend I had to do an ugly install of the GooseGrade plugin.  The service was very impressive at Blogworld last year, and I think it had a lot of promise.  Unfortunately, it seems to have faltered somewhere, the web management tools were difficult to manage accounts, even though the WP plugin seemed much tighter.

But then It started slowing down my site, crashing my other plugin functionality and giving me nasty errors when I tried to deactivate it like

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to www.goosegrade.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home/somethin/public_html/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1142

So I had to go into ftp and delete the plugin files from the server.  That’s an ugly way to kill a plugin, but I couldn’t have it crashing my site.

I just wanted to share a very quick tip, this quick article helped me figure out quickly how to send a mass email (actually only about 50 people) using Thunderbird. 

http://www.tech-evangelist.com/2007/05/11/mozilla-thunderbird-mailing-lists/

I rarely send out emails to more than one or two people but occasionally need to hit a group or list and this fit the bill tonight in a pinch, something I probably would have used Outlook / Word Merge Mail in the past, but in this case didn’t need to personalize the message body of the email much.

If you know of a way to do merge mail with Thunderbird, drop me a comment or a link to an article and I’ll add it to this post.

I just installed the 2.2.0.17208 Standard Edition of Artisteer, and Artisteer will be available for Mac Users very soon. . . .

Here are some of the improvements added to Beta 2.2 coming from 2.1

The following is the summary of new changes and improvements:
Web Design Features

• CSS structure changes by adding "art-" prefix to style classes to prevent conflicts with other CSS styles.
• Simplified syntax for styling buttons and links: <input style="art-button">, <a style="art-button">

WordPress

• Resolved an issue with footer editing when the PHP option magic_quotes_gpc is turned on.

Joomla

• Added support for module class suffixes

Drupal

• Resolved issues with the Menu not working properly in some cases
• Resolved an issue with missing upload button
• Resolved an issue with uploaded logos not appearing

If DotNetNuke doesn’t get you to interested in Artisteer, or if the ability to create WordPress themes and Drupal or Joomla templates isn’t cool enough because you are on a Mac, guess what?

Artisteer just finalized the Mac version of the program which will hopefully be available for download/trial/purchase very soon!  I know many many Mac users and designers out there that have been waiting for this and it is almost ready!

When the automatic (push button) upgrade of plugins within WordPress first became available, it was the best thing since sliced bread or maybe even WordPress itself.

But over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that first one then several, then almost all of my plugin upgrade attempts were failing.  It started with the xml sitemap generator plugin.  For some reason, it just couldn’t update itself anymore, when I clicked on the option to update it from within WordPress.

Soon after that, several other plugins on several different servers on several different WP installs started having some difficulties updating too.  Now, I’m just about at the point where every single plugin on every single WordPress install doesn’t seem to work.

I get a failure that looks something like this:

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/ plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip

Unpacking the update

Could not copy file: /home/Yoursite/public_html/wp- content/upgrade/all_in_one_seo_pack/all-in-one-seo-pack/all_in_one_seo_pack-pt_BR.mo

Installation Failed

After doing a little research, I came across a few people struggling with similar, if not the same problems.  After catching up on the threads and the support tickets, there appears to be 3 different solutions, which I’ll list in reverse order of how they are presented (thus saving you some time).

1. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 as this is a bug cemented in my 2.7.1
1. But EVEN THIS won’t work for everyone
2. If it doesn’t work for you, then you will need to download this replacement file for http.php which resides in your wp_includes folder of WP
3. UPDATE – This step did work for me!
2. add "72.233.56.139 downloads.wordpress.org" to the "/etc/hosts" file. 
   1. I have no idea what that means
3. Disable cURL using the "Core Control" plugin ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/ ) after activating the "HTTP Access Module 0.6" within Core Control.
   1. Note this plugin probably should not be used by people not terribly experienced at programming in a WP environment (not talking html, I mean real programming)

So that all points to step number 1 for your average user.  This may be the MAIN reason to go upgrade to WordPress 2.8 if you are the type that typically sits on the fence for 3-4 weeks (like I usually do). 

Resources

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9998

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/231500