Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It’s therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and its very needed to strike a delicate balance between utilizing just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to ensure it loads in the least time feasible. What I actually mean is to employ image editing software to empty unnecessary info on your images, and thereby effectively shrinking the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it’ll be evident to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you pick the “quality” of the JPEG image — usually a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it’ll preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you don’t have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you may download and employ to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other hand, you may opt to save your images in PNG format to get the optimal quality at the least file size. You can similarly save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not employd in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size feasible. All the same, saving in GIF format will oftentimes compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

The new Wordpress v2.2.3 released on 8th September.

2.2.3 is a security and bug-fix release for the 2.2 series. Since this is a security release, we suggest you upgrade immediately. Two of the fixes are high priority.
On our Trac you can see the bugs closed and the files changed for 2.2.3.
To get 2.2.3, please see our download page.
As always, upgrade instructions including an extended upgrade guide are available.

My recommendation:

Get Instant Upgrade Plugin to upgrade your Wordpress to the latest verison hassle free.

This plugin will automatically your Wordpress with one button. I have upgraded my previous version many times.

Wordpress 2.3 beta 1 just released in less than 24 hours. Some of the new features include in this version are:

• plugin and core update notification,
• built-in tags support,
• faster javascript and
• SEO-friendly ULR redirection

Below are the press release about the up and coming version of Wordpress:

The development team has been working The past 3 months we’ve been working feverishly on the next version of WordPress, 2.3. Today we’re releasing the first beta of 2.3 and we’re hoping the more adventurous and savvy among you will help us test it.

This release is main target to beta tester who are willing to take up the the challenge to test and test the new version. You are recommend NOT to try on this version, IF you don’t know what you are doing. Do let’s other people who are good at it to test run.

However all of the new functionality is still very rough, so only test the beta if you are comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously. If you’re interested you can join the wp-testers mailing list and download the beta here.