skippy

What do you need your QuickTags to do? If you just want a button to insert, say, your name, the following example plugin should demonstrate how to do that with buttonsnap:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Button Example
Plugin URI: http://www.skippy.net/blog/
Description: Demonstrates how to use buttonsnap
Version: 1.0
Author: Scott Merrill
Author URI: http://www.skippy.net/
*/
// use Owen's excellent ButtonSnap library
include('buttonsnap.php');
/**
Register our button in the QuickTags bar
*/
function my_button_init() {
$url = get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-content/my_button.png';
buttonsnap_textbutton($url, 'ME', 'skippy');
}
add_action('init', 'my_button_init');
?>

Create the image “my_button.png”, and store it in your /wp-content/ directory. The $url is the path to your button image. So the call to buttonsnap_textbutton has these parameters:
* the path to the image to use for the visual editor
* the text for the button in editor (or the hovertext in the visual editor)
* the text to insert when the button is clicked

It should be trivial to extend that example to do all sorts of fun stuff.

Not all plugins are yet compatible with WordPress 2.0. See this page for an on-going effort to record which are and aren’t.

wpPHPmailer is a great plugin for handling SMTP.

The fact that your domain became active today has nothing to do with this.

What FTP program are you using? It might be worthwhile to try an alternate program. You are taking care to upload in ASCII mode, right?

You can use the RSS feed(s) from WordPress to drive an aggregator of some sort. Several solutions exist for this, though I’m not familiar with any of them.

The error you received:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected $ in /home/theart/public_html/blog/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 306
is a PHP parse error, which has nothing to do with the database. This is PHP saying “Hey, I found a dollar sign and I wasn’t expecting one”.

That usually means you need to re-upload the PHP files to your server, taking care to use ASCII mode for any FTP transfers.

ian2: I don’t know. I’ve not seen that error before. I was merely pointing out one way in which you can help yourself. If you do what you asked above, and it works, please let us know! If it doesn’t work, let us know that, too; and be sure to tell us what does fix the problem so that this thread can help others in the future.