RSS of Cyberborean Chronicles now is http://blog.cyberborean.org/feed.

Changes

Main taxonomy of the content (tags) is preserved, but the structure of categories is completely redesigned. In 1.0 version, categories were used to identify topics and thus duplicated the tags in many cases. In fact, there were two independent systems of topics classification.

In new version, topics are identified only by tags (java, linux, coding etc) while “categories” are used to classify  posts by their type, format or purpose (Announcements, Essays, Howtos etc). Thus, there are two  clearly distincted taxonomies: topics and types.

Reading a post, you may notice “See also” menu in the sidebar. It contains the posts similar to the current one – those you might want to read if you are interested in that topic. This magic is a courtesy of Similar Posts WordPress plugin.

Photos

I also launched a standalone photo gallery and moved all pics from my Flickr account to there. Now the gallery is another part of Cyberborean Chronicles: http://photos.cyberborean.org. The pics are organized with their own system of tags.

I’m not going to post gallery updates in the blog (former Photos category) anymore, except for the shots I have to tell something special about. You can see gallery updates (the latest pics) at the widget on the right sidebar. You also can subscribe to the updates feed: http://photos.cyberborean.org/main.php?g2_view=rss.SimpleRender.

Gears

WordPress just rocks as usual and gears everything on this site with a help of the following plugins (alphabetically):

• ActiveLink lets quickly insert links to Wikipedia definitions.
• Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button: you can see this button on every post page to add the post to your favorite bookmarking services.
• Akismet keeps spammers away from my blog.
• Contact Form 7 powers the form to contact me on the Feedback page.
• Similar Posts does all magic to generate “See also” menus.
• Simple Tags helps me to tag the content and generates the tag cloud (see on the left)
• SyntaxHighlighter Plus converts code snippets into eye candies.
• WPG2 integrates the photogallery with the blog

The photogallery is powered by Gallery2 software. To photos from Flickr are imported with Gallery2Flickr plugin (hacked to fix the dates of the imported pics).

Please note that everything is still a beta, so any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

[sourcecode language='java']
/**
* HelloWorld
*/
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello world!”);
}
}
[/sourcecode]

See also this and this examples of Java code, this example of Python and this XML. Actually 12 programming/markup languages are supported by the syntax highlighter.

What’s good

• It’s an eye-candy
• Language-dependent syntax highlighting, of course
• Horizontal scrolling of the code block, if it’s needed. Now I don’t have to bother how the lines are long
• You can copy my code into your clipboard by a single click

What’s bad

There was a bug when HTML-reserved characters (“<“, “>“, “&“) were displayed as HTML entities (“<” etc). It has been fixed just today. I also noticed that the single backslash chars (“\”) are not displayed and must be escaped with another backslash (“\\”) – hi, PHP geeks!

[upd] The problem with backslash has also been fixed. Thanks to Joseph Scott from WordPress for fast responding and fixing it![/upd]

Sadly enough, code posting is incompatible with WYSIWYG, if you bother about indentation of your code. TinyMCE visual editor will eat all your leading spaces and tabs.