The changes are really simple. Here are the diffs:

--- wordpress/wp-admin/wp-admin.css 2008-03-29 08:21:12.000000000 +0100
+++ ../amazing-development.com/wp-admin/wp-admin.css        2008-03-30 16:47:22.000000000 +0200
@@ -573,8 +573,8 @@

 #wphead #viewsite {
        position: absolute;
-   margin-top: 12px;
-   margin-left: 10px;
+       margin-top: 3px;
+       margin-left: 3px;
 }
 #wphead #viewsite a {
        font: 12px "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;
@@ -590,8 +590,8 @@
 }

 #wphead h1 {
-   font: normal 36px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
-   padding: 11px 170px 16px 12px;
+       font: normal 18px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
+       padding: 11px 170px 20px 13px;
        margin: 0;
        margin-right: 15%;
 }
@@ -635,9 +635,9 @@
 }

 #adminmenu a {
-   font-size: 16px;
+       font-size: 12px;
        padding: 5px 7px;
-   line-height: 30px;
+       line-height: 20px;
 }

 #adminmenu a.current, #sidemenu a.current {
@@ -770,7 +770,7 @@
 }

 #submenu li {
-   font-size: 14px;
+       font-size: 10px;
 }

 #minisub { /* for empty submenus */
@@ -961,6 +961,14 @@
        text-decoration: underline;
 }

+#wpbody h2 {
+  font-size: 12pt;
+}
+
+#titlediv h3 {
+  display: none;
+}
+
 #poststuff h2 {
        margin-top: 20px;
        font-size: 1.5em;

It looks very similar to the old app with a lot of added AJAX. But they fixed at least one major annoyance: if you open a feed with a lot of unread messages only the ones you have actually seen are marked as read. Nice, very nice… And bonus points for calling it “βloglines”

Update 6.9.2007:
As far as I could tell βloglines has all the original features but one: the “keep new” checkbox. I use this very feature quite often to mark important posts and was thinking about switching back to the old version but my prayers were answered today:

What happened to “Keep As New”?
We have renamed “Keep As New” to “Pinned”. It can be toggled by clicking on the pin icon in the lower left of an article (or using the “n” hotkey). Your previous “Keep As New” articles should all be transparently available in the Beta as “Pinned” articles.

• Rails, ActiveRecord and Distributed Ruby (DRb) in a nutshell (added DRb over unix sockets)
• Rubybashing: Why use implicit return? (this reminds me, I wanted to write an article about what I had learned, something like “Why and when to use implicit return in Ruby?”)
• Using Google Talk with kopete

• Thou shall not post daily links – if I’m interested in your links, I will subscribe to your $socialbookmarkingtool feed
• Thou shall not post daily pics – BOCTAOE like [daily dose of imagery]
• Thou shall not write ‘sorry for the lack of posts’ posts – twice in a row is evil, thrice is a mortal sin
• Thou shall publish full feeds – I want to read my stuff from bloglines
• Thou shall finish at least one of your unfinished blog entries before starting a new one – right now I have 8 unfinished posts
• Thou shall add some new content to a quote – “The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. ~Somerset Maugham“
• Thou shall not join the chorus – I really like rails, but how many people posted this in the last 24h
• Thou shall link to this list and/or add comments with additional commandments – sorry, but I’m out of ideas

Since it’s now possible for newcomers to the blogging world to set up a Blogger or WordPress.com account in mere minutes without the slightest idea about what one is doing or why, it seems like 98% of the blogs on the Web boast but a half-dozen erratic posts before going dormant forever. Of those that are left, most offer only simple “my link for the day” posts, which of course are fine for friends or people of very similar interests, but not so much for the world at large.

I’m quite satisfied that I possess enough self-control not to add myself to that group of people/blogs. (Thanks to Frank for letting me share his blog )

Doug continues:

I conceive of a blog as a project, to be given due consideration, planning and effort. As such, I brainstorm, write notes, prepare a vision, gather resources, construct initial timelines, experiment with form, evaluate delivery options, and so on, before I even think of doing that magic little incantation which causes the blog to appear.

I think this is a very important thing to consider when publishing all kinds of stuff, and for that reason, we used to have the headline “Does it matter?” on the “write post” page of this blog. Unfortunately it seems to have disappeared with the latest update. So we failed…

all the preparatory time in the world won’t mean squat if you don’t have the discipline or wherewithal (or –*ahem*– ego) to keep it up.

There are a lot of good articles available about how to customize the layout of you blog but sometimes want to add some kind of outside information to your blog. For complex or large amounts of information, you should consider a database solution but in a lot of cases a simple file based solution works, too. This tutorial shows you how to add information from a file to your blog.

Recently I added a “Just read” block to my sidebar containing links and images to the books I have read and a rating. At first this was a static html block, just to see how it will look. Lazy as I am, I didn’t want to write html every time I finish a book. This is why I moved the information from the sidebar.php into a seperate file called books.txt in the main directory of my blog.

The file

The file contains 5 tab seperated columns for author, title, amazon url, amazon image url and url for the rating image. A sample line looks like this:

Dave Thomas<tab>Programming Ruby<tab>http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974514055/<tab>http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0974514055.03.MZZZZZZZ.jpg<tab>/pics/stars-2-5.gif

Reading and parsing the file is pretty easy in php (this is taken directly from the php manual):

$lines = file('books.txt');
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
  $parsed = explode("\t", rtrim($line));
  ...
}

As I wanted only the first 4 books to show, I added a check to echo only the lines with a line number less than 4. rtrim removes the whitespaces/newlines from the end of the line and explode splits the line at every tab. This leaves me with an array of 5 strings. The final step of assembling an entry for a book within a <td> is straightforward. After every 2 books a </tr><tr> is added to create a 2×2 block of books.

Here’s the whole block, as it is used in my sidebar, if you have any questions feel free to ask…

<li><h4>Just read</h4>
  <table>
    <tr>

<?php
$lines = file('books.txt');
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
  if ($line_num < 4) {
    $parsed = explode("\t", rtrim($line));

    $book_author = $parsed[0];
    $book_title = $parsed[1];
    $book_url = $parsed[2];
    $book_img = $parsed[3];
    $book_rate = $parsed[4];
    echo "<td><a title=\"$book_author - $book_title\" href=\"$book_url/frankspycha0b-21/\"><img src=\"$book_img\"/><br/><img src=\"$book_rate\"/></a></td>\n";
    if ($line_num % 2 == 1) {
      echo "</tr><tr>\n";
    }
  } else {
    break;
  }
}?>

    </tr>
  </table>
</li>

The theme does not include the ‘just read’ from the sidebar, but everything else is just like you see it here on my blog. You can download it as .zip or .tar.gz.

Update 10.2.2006:

• ‘Subscribe me’ in sidebar
• links to delicious, diggit and reddit on single article page

Update 11.2.2006:

• different background for odd/even comments
• nice numbering for comments, used the idea found here

This theme works with WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0!

sed -e 's/\&38;/\&38;38;/g; s/\\/\&38;#92;/g; s/>/\&38;gt;/g; s/</\&38;lt;/g; s/"/\&38;quot;/g; s/-/\&38;#45;/g' $1 | sed -e "s/'/\&38;apos;/g;"

…an important security issue was brought to our attention which required an update for our users. The problem is not yet public but you should update your blog as soon as possible to 1.5.1.3…

• unzip latest.zip
• move old directory
• copy old wp-config.php
• copy old theme
• copy old plugins
• copy old .htaccess

took 5 minutes et voila…

Tried to leave a comment in Sonic Chicken’s article, but comments are closed. That’s evil, use a spaminator or something similar…

    @wp_mail($admin_email, $subject, $notify_message, $message_headers);

to

    @wp_mail($user->user_email, $subject, $notify_message, $message_headers);

Notification mails for comments held for moderation are now sent to the post author instead of the admin.

This site now uses a new theme, you can find it here.

If you like my theme, just download psycho.tar.gz or psycho.zip, put it in the wp-content/theme/ directory, unpack it and activate it under “Presentation”…

enjoy and let me know if you like it…

Features:

• Recent Posts list in the sidebar, when not on the main page
• Recent Comments list in the sidebar
• author shown only for articles not written by the administrator
• little stats block in the sidebar

addendum 7.3.05
hey, 7 downloads in one day If you actually use this theme, let me know…

addendum 7.3.05 II

• moved ‘filed under’ to the top
• changed the ‘recent comments’ code, now comments which are not approved no longer appear in the list
• added the stats block

addendum 8.3.05

• fixed the link list

addendum 10.3.05

• added author count in status box

addendum 11.3.05

• changes at the comments box, could still use some improvement

addendum 18.3.05

• fixed the damn backslashes in front of quotes, but it’s just a workaround