Remembering might work for a few ideas or someone with a photographic memory but most bloggers need to write down their ideas and findings somehow. Some simply bookmark the pages but that leaves the ideas behind because they obviously cannot be bookmarked.

Others use a text editor to post the ideas and websites. That’s an option but not a very sophisticated one. Last but not least there are note taking applications online and for the computer desktop.

BlogIdeas probably falls into the latter category although it has been designed to provide bloggers with a blogging software to store their blogging ideas.

The multi-lingual program (German and English) stores ideas that are added by the user. Each idea consists of a category, title, sources and text. They are added to the main interface after creation from where they can be accessed individually.

There is also a random button that supposedly picks one of the ideas randomly so that the blogger does not have to select one.

Ideas that are listed in the main interface can be edited directly in there which is great for adding new content or revising old.

BlogIdeas is an interesting blogging tool. It could use some further development so that for instance additional elements like photos or videos can be added to the ideas. And integration with popular blogging software scripts would also be very nice to directly move the idea and information to the content there. But that’s also possible manually right now by simply copying and pasting the contents.

BlogIdeas can be downloaded from the developer’s website over at Stevie’s Website. The program displays a language selection screen on first startup. It should run on most Windows operating systems providing that the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 is installed.

The development focus was usability as WordPress 2.7 brings in a few exciting new features to the table. The long awaited option to moderate comments from the admin interface, mass editing of posts or automatic upgrades of plugins and the blog software itself are just a few of the new features.

Another new and exciting option is the ability to remove and position elements on the screen. This streamlines the WordPress admin interface quite a bit by bringing the needed elements closer together while removing everything that is not needed. Well, almost everything. Some elements cannot be removed obviously like the post form.

It will take some time getting used to the new WordPress admin interface as it moves the menu entries from the header to the left menu.

The update should not pose to many difficulties. The only problem that you can encounter are plugin incompatibilities. The Simple Tags plugin was one out of a dozen plugins that was not working with WordPress and you might have noticed display problems here at Ghacks earlier thanks to that. There is however an easy temporary fix for that to make the plugin compatible.

All that needs to be done is to edit the simple-tags.php file. Look for the line

if (version_compare($wp_version, '2.5', '>='))

and replace it with the following

if ( strpos($wp_version, '2.5') !== false || strpos($wp_version, '2.6') !== false )

This should ensure compatibility.

Besides that i really like the following three new features which should make live a little bit easier:

• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page.