For some reason , all of a sudden Wordpress installations start displaying a weird exception in options general

(when you click Settings):

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'DateTimeZone::__construct() [datetimezone.--construct]: Unknown or bad timezone (Europe/Paris)' in [path/options.general]

If you are not that worried about time zones and just want to be able to post articles while this bug is driving you crazy, open wp-admin/options-general.php and change line 171 from:

if (function_exists('timezone_transitions_get')) {

into

if (false/*ignorant fix*/&& function_exists('timezone_transitions_get')) {

This works in Wordpress 2.9 – the fix for 2.8 is analogous but I’m afraid not exactly the same.

If someone has more time to investigate this issue, let’s discuss this in the comments.

Of course there is more to a podcast than just words turned into audio (as you can clearly discover by listening to these fine examples) -

but Odiogo does a very good job of creating MP3 versions of your blog posts and posting them for your readers to play – either on the website itself or as a podcast on their iPods (or similar devices).

I waste far less time going through my podcasts while jogging or driving than reading through the rest of the RSS feeds I subscribe to, therefore I’d love to see this feature on other blogs as well.

If you click on listen now on top of this post, you’ll hear what it sounds like.

The text-to-speech conversion is quite good (with very few blunders) with a relatively natural flow and a pleasant voice you (hopefully) won’t get tired of very quickly.

However, as I often post videos of interesting lectures or presentations here, I’d also love it if Odiogo could insert the audio from these videos into the podcast (and not skip them over like any other graphic element).

I accept that this is not a trivial job (and it would definitely require a lot more CPU power and temporary storage), but it would still make life significantly easier .

I’ve just added the Disqus Wordpress plugin to this blog.

Disqus is an interesting application that lets visitors track replies to comments via RSS and even take the conversations across multiple blogs, following trackbacks to your posts and their respective commenters.

Here is my discussion page.

I love the idea as a lot of popular blogs suffer from communication blockage – e.g., if you write a great post that’s linked by a renowned site, chances are that the bulk of the conversation will be taken out at the other site and your commenters will have no chance of joining in.

With Disqus, we are getting a new level of abstraction (similar to what FriendFeed is doing with Twitter & co.) to everyone’s advantage.

The only drawback some might notice is that the comments are hosted at disqus.com – I don’t care, but I can imagine some people could …

I hope this service takes off as it should – being backed by prominent VC’s will surely help .