BlackBerry App World is the source for most of the apps that I download, finding myself scanning through looking for new applications that might prove useful.

There is a lot more trust in downloading from here, rather than browsing the internet and downloading from less trusted locations. It allows you to manage any of the paid for or free apps you have downloaded.

WordPress for BlackBerry allows me to quickly check the numerous blogs that I contribute to. It makes it easy to manage new comments or even start writing a new post (as I am doing this very minute by writing this).

This means I can manage most aspects of my blog whilst on the move and still have available a lot of the functionality of the browser based version.

The Internet Browser is something I often use to browse twitter more than anything. I still haven’t managed to find a client that functions well like they do on the iPhone.

Depending on the context of what I’m looking for I sometimes switch to using Opera Mini instead due to it’s improved rendering of graphical web pages with full CSS support and ability to view video content.

BlackBerry Messenger is a more recent addition to my collection, with the majority of my friends and contacts opting for the iPhone over the BlackBerry I’ve only recently started communicating through it.

It allows me to send and even broadcast free messages to the people on my contacts list. It’s a bit more subtle than MSN messenger as it can quite happily sit running in the background.

Google Mail reinforces the fact that I can’t get away from what I do in life, allowing me to be contacted via email, even when I’m not sat in front of my laptop.

It provides all the basic functionality of your standard web client and the browser based control panel. As far as I’m aware, this application, along with all the others from Google are only available directly from Google.

Google Maps id the last on my list and although isn’t used as frequently as the others is just as useful, especially if you’re in a situation where don’t have satellite navigation.

It makes available most of the features found on the web based version, including driving directions and geolocation. The introduction of Google Latitude also allows me to browse my list of friends and see where they are in the world – creepy!

So there you have it, my list of frequently used applications. If you would like to recommend any similar ones or use any of the above I’d be interested to hear what you have to say .

Although it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, read more links can be enabled by over-riding the global $more variable and setting it to false, before looping through the result set, for example:

global $more; $more = FALSE;
query_posts('post_type=page');
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
	the_content('Read More...');
endwhile; endif;

I couldn’t actually discover why this is not the default behaviour when querying pages. There may be a good reason behind it, but in my experience I found it mildly irritating.

Instead I decided to write a very simple function to add a class name to the first paragraph by filtering the content, then setting the styles accordingly in my theme CSS file.

function first_paragraph($content){
	return preg_replace('/<p([^>]+)?>/', '<p$1 class="first">', $content, 1);
}
add_filter('the_content', 'first_paragraph');

By default this will append class=”first” to the first p tag in your post.

If you want to use this function on your own blog, just add it to your (or create a)  functions.php file within your themes folder.

Aside from what has been described as a “very important security fix” there were over 70 additional bug fixes, most of which I hadn’t come across myself although had heard of some troubles encountered by others.

Unlike my previous upgrade this time I just switched the subversion repository and ran the web based update script, shaving off an additional few minutes and therefore upgrading my install in under two minutes from start to finish!

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/

Luckily everything seems to be working fine and I have faith in the WordPress releases, but if you want to be more cautious you should probably backup your database first.

As Paul’s response to my previous upgrade post mentions, any web scripts can be rolled back using svn.

It is highly recommended that you carry out the upgrade as it is said that the vulnerability to 2.5 will be made public shortly.

There is also to introduction of additional security in the form of secret keys, introducing randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies.

Simply obtain a secret key and paste the code into your wp-config.php file along with the other defined variables.

Paul went through the upgrade steps on his blog, but thought I would go through them here as I went along.

Unfortunately when I initially installed WordPress I committed it directly to the root directory unlike the more popular location of the subdirectory /blog, but not to worry.

Here are the steps I followed to complete the update:

# Backup the current directory...
cp -Rp http httpBACKUP
# Create a new location for the update...
mkdir httpNEW
# Checkout the latest release from the repository...
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ httpNEW/
# Copy across any custom changes/themes and config file...
cp -Rp http/wp-con* httpNEW/
# Copy over the .htaccess file..
cp -Rp http/.htaccess httpNEW/
# Delete the old directory...
rm -rf http
# Rename/move the update to the original location...
mv httpNEW/ http
# Switch the SubVersion Repository...
svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
# Finally, run the browser based update script...

http://yourdomain/wp-admin/upgrade.php

And that’s all there is to it really, now every time I need to update WordPress I can simply copy and paste the above commands.