ManageWP is something I have needed for a long time.  It takes your site details for each WordPress powered website you manage, and lets you take care of simple tasks for multiple blogs in one location.  This saves you time as you no longer have to log into each blog.  You can take care of things all at one.

Getting set up is easy, all you need to do is sign up, download the ManageWP Worker plugin and then install the ManageWP worker on your blogs. Once set up you can:

• Manage posts and pages
• Install new plugins and themes
• Manage your categories and tags
• Manage your comments
• Do one-click updates to WordPress and plugins

The only thing that keeps me away from using ManageWP full time would be the fact that I feel a little nervous about handing my login details to a third party like this.  However, there should be a self-hosted version of ManageWP in the works soon – so once that is out there, this is going to be something I’ll use for sure.

You can go sign up and try the remote version of the service at ManageWP.com.

Over the past couple of years, I have created a lot of free custom video game inspired desktop icons for you all to download.  While keeping a running list of these on one page worked for a while, I figured it was about time I cleaned up and organized my free icon collections I have created for you to enjoy.

So with that said, I invite one and all to go check out the new Custom Icons page over at Mitchelaneous.com.  There you will see I have organized all the free icons I have created over the years into five smaller icon pages.

You can download free desktop icons about/on:

• Mega Man 9
• Mega Man 10
• Nintendo Icons
• More Nintendo Icons
• Misc Free Icons

This has been a highly suggested task from the many Mitchelaneous reader for some time now, so I am happy to finally getting around to getting this done for all of you.  As always, hope you enjoy them all – and thanks for bookmarking, visiting and subscribing to Mitchelaneous.com!

Thanks to the powers of the Wayback Machine, here is the earliest layout I can find for Mitchelaneous (then hosted as a part of the lockergnome.net blogs). Actually, you could probably say that Chris Pirillo (and the old Lockergnome team of writers) played a big part in this web site’s existence.

I like to say I was a part of the last great team of writers at Lockergnome.com, before they turned it into a big social network/everybody can sign up type of mess.  At the time, I was trying to build up my own resume, so writing more seemed to be a natural progression.  So I set up a blog, start to pontificate, and the rest is digital history.

So in closing, I just wanted to take a minute to thank each and every one of you for stopping in day to day, and making this little pet project of mine a fun one to be apart of.  I appreciate your support, no matter if you just came in once or you come in every single day.

Want to make sure you don’t miss a post in the next five years?  Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed, in your feed reader of choice.

• Bigger Interface – It was kind of a shock at first, but after using it more and more I really do like the enlarged interface.  Makes the screen much easier to read. 
• New Video Control – Being able to control of video playback (slow motion, fast forward and rewind) using the right stick is pretty neat. 

So what did I not enjoy from the PS3 3.0 firmware update?

• Glitter! – The new “dynamic” theme is stupid looking.  I don’t want “glitter” all over my screen, even if it is “interactive”.  Thankfully you can change the theme back to “classic” to remove it.
• Ugly Background/Border for Friends List – I don’t use the friends list much (I have no friends!) but I can still say I don’t like the interface change from having a sleek background with no visual interruptions to having little grey boxes behind everybody on my friend list.  It is just a little annoying.  Seems like it was thrown in there as a, “Oh crap, we forgot to do that!” feature. 

So there you have it, not going to rant too much positively or negatively about it, seems to still get the job done, so I am happy about that. 

As somebody who constantly tries new things, earning a spot in my day to day application use is a special thing.  It used to be honored by parades of midgets gleefully dancing down the street, however since the lawsuit I had to resort to praising them in a blog post instead.

I would give my left leg before I’d stop using Ping.fm.

This web site is my social buddy.  It helps me pimp promote my posts and thoughts across many a social network, in one simple, yet easy to manage location.  From Ping.fm you can instantly update your delicious favorites, facebook, myspace and dozens of other social sites.

Between Google Analytics, and my hair – I’d pick Google Analytics.

I love check out web site statistics, so that is why I have Google Analytics plugged into nearly every web site I manage or post at.  I have even picked using Google Analytics over most stats programs that come with your everyday hosting package.  It is that good.  The exact number might not always be correct, however I have found that it does give you a good general idea of where your web site popularity goes up and down.

Instapaper would be the pick if somebody made me choose between it and my toes.

I do not always have the time to read every article or post I run across, and due to that lack of time, I need a way to save things for later.  Instapaper is my quick and easy, “eh… I’ll look at that again later” bookmarker.  Once you sign up and start using it, you can consider it your temporary bookmarks list.

Is there any web site out there that you can not live without?  Let me know what sites you are dependant on, and if nothing else, we can start an addiction group based around the ones with have in common. 

How do you like that new logo, by the way? It was designed my my good friend and graphic design specialist, Sean Barton.  I’m personally pretty proud of it – as it is pretty much the logo I always wanted for the show, but never had the time or the skill to put together.  Want to learn more about the web hosting industry?  The web hosting show is both a podcast and web site dedicated to helping anybody from novices to experts learn more about how to make the web hosting world work for them. If you haven’t before – be sure to bookmark WebHostingShow.com, subscribe to the e-mail updates, and add the RSS feed to your favorite news reader. 

I have done a number of custom icons in the past few weeks and months, so I figured – why not dump them all into a category so you can pick them up one by one?  Hence, the reason for the brand new (and reeking of awesomeness) custom icon category:

http://www.mitchelaneous.com/category/desktop/free-icons/

Browse through all the past icons, and if you have any requests – be sure to let me know!  More will be coming soon too, so look forward to seeing some updates there.

Once you do so, you will be given a grade – based on how much “power” you have.  I was pretty happy with my grade of 81 out of 100.  The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score. A grade of 81 means that the user scores higher than 81 percent of the other user profiles that have been graded.

Here are the main factors that they say go into play when deciding the score:

• The number of followers you have
• The power of this network of followers
• The pace of your updates
• The completeness of your profile

Go get yourself graded at http://twitter.grader.com/.  Then feel free to add me on Twitter to help both our scores. (insert evil laugh here)

You can set the monitoring tools to check the web site in question you wish to monitor in intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes or above.

If the worst might happen, and you need to be told, here are the various ways they can alert you to trouble:

• E-mail
• RSS
• SMS Messages

For those of you just wanting to beta test the service; when you first sign up, you are given a fully functional, 15-day trial account. At the end of 15 days, your account will be downgraded to free unless you upgrade to either Standard or Premium account.

Check out the screenshots, then give them a shot at Site24x7.com.

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Also here are some of the improvements, updates and upgrades:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

You can read more (and watch a video tour) from WordPress.org about it here:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

You can download WordPress 2.6 here:
http://wordpress.org/download/

Also looks like somebody has already found the easter egg in it too.

For those of you using cPanel/Fantastico to manage your install and upgrades, the upgrade for you might not come for a couple of more weeks.  Are you excited about WordPress 2.6 yet?