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Downloadsquad announced yesterday that WordPress 2.7 is due out this evening. Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform put out the first release candidate version of WordPress 2.7 just a few days ago, but a beta version has been available for the last few months.

WordPress 2.7 represents a huge shift away from earlier versions of WordPress – at least in the administration area. Most of the changes will be visible to bloggers, but not blog readers. But the changes in the admin area are huge. First, the navigation menus have all been moved to the left side of the screen, giving you more room at the top of the page. The submenus are all also collapsible, which allows you to navigate the administration interface without reloading the page as often.

You can also customize the admin area by dragging, dropping, adding, or deleting widgets like the Right Now screen which gives you an overview of your blog stats or the QuickPress widget which lets you create a post using a stripped down WYSIWYG editor right from the start page.

WordPress 2.7 also lets you search for and install plugins without leaving the admin area. And for the first time, an automatic upgrade tool is included in WordPress so you can upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 or 2.8 or whatever new versions are on the horizon without having to fire up an FTP client.

Google announced it will release a brand new open source web browser called Google Chrome. Yesterday a site went up, and has subsequently been taken down at http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en (as of this morning clicking this link take you back to regular old Google).

According to Crunchbase the features include:

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information

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Windows Vista includes a feature, “Receive Window Auto-Tuning,” that you’ve likely never seen mentioned on your desktop, but which can cause noticeable drag and even crashing when browsing certain web sites or using some routers or other network hardware. If you’re noticing browsing glitches that only occur in Vista, the Wise Bread blog has a tip, pulled from PC Magazine’s recent issue, that explains how to turn off auto-tuning and skip the spinning blue circle of death.

To determine you current settings launch a command prompt as an Administrator (type “cmd” into the Start box, right-click on Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator), then enter the following line:

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If that doesn’t help the simplest way to turn off auto-tuning is to enter the following line:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disable

That should do it, and turning it off won’t likely have any adverse consequences. You should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If you find otherwise, turn it back on with:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

So I installed the WP Super Cache plugin. Seemed simple enough, I’d been using WP-Cache for a long time and was pretty please with it. WP Super Cache is based on the excellent WP-Cache plugin and therefore brings all the benefits of that plugin to WordPress. On top of that it creates copies of every page that is accessed on a blog in a form that is quickly served by the web server. It’s almost as quick as if the you had saved a page in your browser and uploaded it to replace your homepage.

So that sounds good, except that I followed all the steps, let the plugin to it’s automagic stuff and then I got a 500 error when attempting to hit my site. OUCH! No good.

Turns out the issue was the way my .htaccess file was written (it did this automatically, no clue why it didn’t work out correctly. Anyway, what ended up in my htaccess was:

Options All -Indexes# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

What it SHOULD be is this:

Options All -Indexes
# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Make that simple update to the first line, ensuring that the #BEGIN WPSuperCache is on it’s own line and everything started working as expected.

The most excellent site GoogleSystem has a write up on how to enable you to chat with your site’s visitors using Google Talk.

Google Talk’s gadget was a nice addition, but you couldn’t use it to chat with unknown people or with the visitors of the site, like in Meebo Me. Now you can do that using the new chatback badges. You only need to add some code to your site and anyone could click on the generated badge to chat with you.

“A Google Talk chatback badge allows others to chat with you even if they haven’t signed up for Google Talk or a Google Account. You can put the badge in your blog or website, and people who visit those pages can chat with you. The badge will display your online status (whether you’re available to chat or not) and, optionally, your status message.”

If someone clicks on the badge, a special version of the Google Talk gadget will open and he will be able to chat with you.

The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won’t be able to read them. For some strange reason, they’re not even added in Gmail’s chat section. Unfortunately, being constantly interrupted by other people is not very pleasant, so you can disable the link from your badge by setting your status to “busy” or by signing out of Google Talk.

I’ve put this in place on my site to test it out. It was extremely simple to enable, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the About Me section and you’ll see my Google Talk badge!