I decided to take the plunge and switch from WordPress 3.6.1 to the 3.7 beta 2 version. There’s a plugin that is supposed to make this easy – WordPress Beta Tester – but the current 0.97 version of this doesn’t seem to work.

Fortunately, I found a posting on the support forum that suggests that you can use the 0.96 version. It’s at: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/not-updating-from-361-to-37-41 I did these steps:

• Back up my database (I’ve been using the free UpdraftPlus)
• Download WordPress Beta Tester 0.96 to my computer
• Use the Plugins > Add new and find the link on that page to upload the file
• Activate the plugin
• WordPress immediately detects that a new version (the 3.7 beta) is available
• Let the installation proceed
• Presto! It’s working

The 3.7 beta’s are supposed to check daily for new versions. I now have WordPress 3.7-beta2-25801 – I’ll find out tomorrow if it worked…

I had some fun checking out the brand new Ghost blogging platform. Its claims to fame are:

• It’s a blogging platform that is easy to install and setup
• It can be customized to look the way you want
• It uses Markdown for text formatting, with a very sexy real-time Markdown->HTML converter built in. You type Markdown text in the left pane, and the right pane shows a live preview of the posting.
• It’s free/open source, so you can try it too.

Installation was pretty straightforward. Two comments:

1. I was confused when I made my first post: after finish entering the text, there’s a “Save Draft” button that has a popup menu that allows you to “Publish Now”. Cool! But it doesn’t actually publish until you click the button a second time.
2. I also had a problem with running it on my test server. It has dramatically limited RAM (128 MBytes) and it’s also running WordPress, Apache, and a bunch of other stuff. Ghost gave an “weird error 137” message in the console, but I’m fairly convinced that’s just because it’s running out of memory. I wrote it up in  the ghost forums so others can learn from my research. (https://en.ghost.org/forum/installation/1129-npm-err-weird-error-137)

Ghost seems to be a solid initial release, with a dedicated team that’ll drive it forward.

I’ve been playing with the Fargo blogging software from Dave Winer at Scripting.com It puts your blog info into an S3 bucket, then has links to WordPress, so that you can use Fargo’s outliner to edit your post, then publish it directly to WordPress.

I just found something else that’s really cool. I moved my “Posts” page to a sub-page (after creating a static home page on my WordPress blog) and the postings automatically followed my “Posts” page. Nice job, Dave!