photo credit: Hamed Saber

In the last few days, I've heard from a few people who've upgraded to WordPress 2.8 that they're missing some or all of the visual editor from the Add New Post page: even if the "Visual" tab is selected (not the "HTML" one), buttons are missing. People have also reported the dashboard page not loading properly.

The issues seem to be reported more widely in Firefox than any other browser, but that may be because the WP community uses FF more frequently than any other browser, rather than because it's a Firefox issue. But if you have Chrome handy, it might be worth trying that. Otherwise, this routine seems to fix things at least some of the time:

• in WP Admin, go to Tools, Upgrade, Reinstall automatically and reinstall it,
• then clear your browser cache,
• then refresh the dashboard.

Other people have suggested that switching off Google Gears and/or any caching plugins you have installed may help.

If that doesn't work, then using a plugin like Dean's FCKEditor will give you more visual editing functionality than the normal WP editor (including a "justify" button which I think may have disappeared from the WP interface).

Testing, testing...

Alternatively, you could upgrade to WP 2.8.1 beta, which should have resolved both of the above issues - though equally there are other, unfixed bugs, so you should only be using the beta if you really know what you're doing. But if you do want to be a WordPress tester, the lovely Westi has just released a rather neat plugin to allow easy installation of nightly builds for testing. Fun

Amazon have now made their Kindle platform available to all bloggers. Publishing via the portable book reader was previously open only to big blogs, but a new self-publishing tool means that just about every blogger can have their blog available through the Kindle store.

Sign up for an account at Kindle Publishing. All you'll need to add are details of your feed, a screenshot and logo, and info on your blog's content, and it'll be on sale in store in just a few minutes.

Yes, readers have to pay to get your blog on their Kindle. Most blogs seem to be priced at $1.99 per month, of which blog owners see 30%. I'm not convinced many of us are going to get massively rich 60c at a time, but if you have a blog that particularly appeals to Kindle readers, you might do alright here. Let's not all rush to start Kindle-related blogs tonight.

Whose blog is it anyway?

When you add a new blog to Kindle, you have to click a box to say you have the right to make the blog available. There's no further verification of ownership at the time of publishing, which apparently leaves things open for anyone to claim any blog they feel like claiming. In fact, this has already happened to TechCrunch, who were notified by another blogger that he'd claimed their feed as his own to see if he could, and was "flabbergasted" when Amazon let him.

Right now, there doesn't even seem to be any check to stop even the most basic abuse, like duplicate feed submission. I've managed to add this blog's feed twice without query from Amazon on the same seller account, so I'm not sure what's to stop me submitting something that might be more lucrative and claiming it as my own.

Amazon have removed the unauthorised TechCrunch blogs from the Kindle store, but it's probably only a matter of time before some enterprising scammer writes a program to automatically add unclaimed blogs to their own account. I'd expect Amazon to start tightening this up pretty quickly: we can probably expect to have to add meta tags or verification files (similar to how Google Webmaster Tools do it) as proof of ownership. Even so, it's worth claiming your own blog sooner rather than having to claim it back later.

The figures come from ShareThis, who make the ubiquitous green widget for sharing online (you can see it at the end of this post). More than half of all their shares are sent by email.

Facebook's 21.2% portion of the market is really the only social media site worth writing home about: next most popular is MySpace, which ironically is often written off as "over" by the cool kids. Twitter, darling of the - ah - Twitterati, is barely visible on the chart, with a miserable 0.5% share of the shares.

I know from my own sites that people are certainly using share-by-email links; it's easy to discount or forget about them in favour of trendier sites, but for now at least, they're still the most important way to share that you can offer your readers.

I'm almost certain I'll be there: Cardiff's a bit of a trek from here but I'm trying to tempt myself with added bonuses like Neanderthals and Dr Who.