It is here, my friends, at long last.

One of the things that always bugged me at WordPress was how cluttered it was. It was difficult to navigate, and just looked all sorts of messy.

The developers at WordPress have switched things up with 2.5. Gone is the day of a messy admin layout, and come is the day of the clean layout.

Thus far, I’m impressed. I feel things are laid out in a more common sense fashion than previous versions. The more common elements are enlarged and placed on the left side. The least common elements of the admin panel are made smaller and aligned right.

I also like the new dashboard. I didn’t have much beef with the old version, but the layout in 2.5 is very nice.

Finally, there are some new features to the write/edit screens that I like. WordPress has finally added the ability to embed videos. Previously, you had to use a plug-in, which kind of sucked, given the flexible nature of today’s blog. I think if anything, that’s where WordPress was lagging behind. They have also made it easier to add photos and other media. Good for them.

I’m not an incredibly big fan of the new placement of the category selection. If they’re trying to promote tags over categories, it shows, as the tag form comes before the categories. They used to be at the right of the textbox, and I can’t speak for others, but I preferred them there.

A Change

As I’ve spoken about before, I’ll be bringing my laptop with me to Las Vegas, so that I might try and live blog the NAB/BEA conferences. Thus circumstances require some changes. My hotel has free wireless, and I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to get to wi-fi hotspots easily enough on the floor of the convention. Now, assuming this, it’ll be easy enough to get to the blog. But, I’ll be looking around all day. I don’t want to constantly have to go over to the WP admin panel.

Therefore, I’ve downloaded Windows Live Writer. It’s Microsoft’s answer to all the other desktop clients out there, and the official client of their Spaces service. I figure that it’ll be a lot more convenient. I just open that up, write what I want, add any pictures, and publish. A lot easier than even the new-fangled photo and video adding features of WP can give me, I think.

Next week will give me a chance to really try the program out. If I like it, it’ll became a permanent fixture in my blogging. We shall see.

Now off to bed…