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- Pop the champagne! Ping-o-Matic has broken a million pings in the two weeks or so that we’ve been counting. Keep the pings coming. :) (1)
- Harris County District Clerk Jury Services Page (2)
- If these new display rumors pan out they look mighty tasty. (2)
- This looks very promising. (0)
- Because of the size of the photolog, I had to break it up and move everything over by hand. However now it is badly out of order. The thought of manually reordering 282 albums is terrifying. I need a way out. I’m watching this thread closely. (1)
- Rannie is in the middle of his Blogger Week pictures and today I make an appearance. Thanks Rannie. :) (1)
- Well hello there. Welcome to the new server. (7)
- Staticize Plugin for Wordpress. Drop in your plugins directory, create a directory for it to put stuff, and activate. Instant on-demand caching. I’m going to try this out here as soon as I finish the server move. (The photolog may be broken for a few hours.) (3)
- I just finished reading Budget Design: Increase Profit by Improving Process by Dan Rubin and Dider Hilhorst. It’s free for a week ($9 later) so now’s a good time to grab it. It was enjoyable and well-executed with lots of valuable insight. Highly recommended. (2)
- Microsoft Expression, a free vector image tool for Macs and PCs. Hat tip: Cheryl Wise. (1)
- It seems for blogs.sun.com WordPress was considered at one point, but they decided to go with the Java product Roller instead. Too bad, because their feeds seem strange, they have terrible URIs, and I have no idea what’s the permalink for a page. Anyway. (1)
- Brian Alvey on periodic table usage. His problems sound like nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a little
overflowand some non-float layout tricks. The WIN sites really need a makeover, or a markover, because it looks like tag soup to me. “My readers are more important than the year I’ll spend in purgatory for using a single table in an otherwise modern layout.” Say three Our Zeldmans and you should be alright. (Another note: WIN sites don’t support pingback or trackback yet?) (0)
It’s Over »
An address that has never been on the web in text or javascript form has begun receiving large amounts of spam, starting a few days ago. This is not a dictionary attack, it is specifically targetted toward this single address. The address is not guessable or a dictionary word. Luckily the address is disposable.
The only form this address has ever been online is in a PNG screenshot I posted about a year ago.
- Using public keys for SSH authentication. Do it. (2)
- Chris Davis has put together an alternate admin UI for WordPress. He modifies a few of the files though, which could make upgrading a real pain. (0)
- Noel goes to Japan (and blogs it with WordPress). Unicode support should come in handy. (0)
- I really, really like Nutella. (7)
- Gmail invites. The only thing I get on my Gmail account (mmmmmm@gmail.com) are people begging for invites, which has gotten very old very fast. It’s almost as bad as the people who stumble across my old Orkut entry and feel it’s my duty to invite them. I’ve given out one account so far, and it was to Simon. (6)
- Question for MT to WP converts: “To those of you who have converted, or who are thinking of converting - what plugin/hack/thing-a-ma-jig did you used to have for MT that you wish you could have now. I think there is very little (if anything at all?!) that I did in MT that couldn’t be done as easily (if not EASIER!!) in WordPress. So, while I can’t say I’ll promise to get to everything right away, I’d like to re-create as many tutorials as possible for WordPress.” (0)
- Scoble visits an amazingly high tech church. (3)
- I’m moving Leonard off my updated list because he seems to be pinging constantly, even when there are no updates or changes. With my old-school aggregator style it makes it very annoying to visit his site. Moral of the story: don’t cry wolf with your pings. (0)
- Brad Choate’s Key Values Plugin for MT. I’ll have to look at how this compares to WordPress’ built-in custom fields functionality. (0)
- Doug has redone Stopdesign, and I must say it’s pretty spiffy. But who am I to say anything bad about fixed width designs and subtle lines in the background? His use of large normal weight Georgia is attractive, which is something I tried to use on the WordPress site when it was redesigned a few months ago. I’m a sucker for Georgia though. (Though you can’t tell from this site.) Thoughts: Everything is very clean, but the URIs are still crufty. The different colors on the different sections are great. There is a lot of really interesting attention to detail. It will take some getting used to though, it feels more “bloggy.” (0)
- 10 Reasons Why English is so Difficult to Translate (0)
- Nikolai recommends ABC, or Yet Another Bittorrent Client. (0)
- Sony’s HiMD player stores 45 hours of music per disc, and allows uploading. The lack of digital uploading was the biggest gripe I had about my (now stolen) MD player/recorder. Lack of recording is the number one reason I’m probably not going to get an iPod. (5)
- Adam does CDF for WordPress. Is there anything we don’t support? (2)
- 93,548 pings yesterday… so close! I know you guys can do better than that. The assignment for the day is to tell at least two people on your blogroll about Pingomatic. (1)
- Spent some time with Kathy and Sarah tonight, what pleasant people. Any night with BBQ is a good night, but with company like that it’s even better. (3)
- Azureus is a really excellent cross-platform bittorrent client. The best I’ve used so far. This is an arena really waiting for its killer app. (4)
- Picked up a fresh box of reeds today. In about two weeks I’ll be in the recording studio with the Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra. Looking forward to it. :) (1)
- Why the FCC should die. Declan in rare form. (3)
- I just got Apache 2 configured locally to serve all the different web apps I run locally (phpWiki, Tasks, WordPress, phpCoder, and some propietary stuff) as different virtual hosts with unique fake hostnames. I don’t know why this is a big deal to me, but it’s much cleaner. My local wiki has grown quite a bit, with hundreds of pages in it now. I’m not sure how I functioned before (4)
- Born to Plog. Classic. (0)
- Cory on Life Hacks 2. (0)
- I seem to be in between Wonkette and Belle de Jour, whatever that means. (2)
- For those that missed it, ScriptyGoddess is running on WordPress now. (0)
- Ryan Boren on cruft-free URLs in WordPress: “With the next release, every link generated by WordPress should be cruft-free.” He should know, he’s been writing everything useful in the cruft-free URL space since my initial implementation. (1)
WordPress Meetup »
Wow, this is very exciting—a WordPress meetup! I was just browsing around came across this post on Blogging Pro saying that there is now a WordPress meetup on the fourth saturday of every month. The very first one is coming up on June 26th. Funnily enough though I don’t travel very often it looks like I’m going to be out of town that week. (Any San Francisco WordPress users up for a meetup?) You can bet that I’m going to try and make as many of these as possible. I know at least a few very active WordPress users are in Texas, with developer Ryan Boren in Dallas and a few people in Austin. It would be very neat to …
- Enterprising girl in Singapore is offering WordPress installations for $5, and pledges to donate half. (0)
- Scot Hacker on WordPress: “Not prepared for something this polished and smooth.” (0)
Linux for the Masses »
It’s not there yet. I’m being totally unfair, because comparing Windows or OS X to the Linux distribution I’m using (Gentoo) is like apples and oranges. Gentoo is meant for people who are comfortable with the command-line and want to experiment. (It’d be fairer to compare Windows to Suse.) But I just want to bridge a connection between an ethernet card and a wireless USB device. Is that too much to ask? When I did this in Windows I just highlighted the two connections, right-clicked, and chose “Bridge Connections.” It spun for a little bit and then it was done. End of story.
The work started yesterday, when I figured out that the reason nothing would emerge is that there were …
- Quick and easy emerge guide. (1)
- TV hath charms to soothe the savage breast. (0)
- Shelley’s Parable of the Languages, a re-run, but one of those re-runs that makes you feel nice and fuzzy. (0)
- 66,639 pings on Ping-O-Matic yesterday, let’s see if we can beat that today. :) I rewrote the pinger deamon in Python, because the old PHP one was crashing the system on a regular basis. The new one is amazingly light, and was ridiculously easy to write. So now Ping-O-Matic is powered by PHP, Python, Perl, and caffeine. Right tool for the right job. (1)
- I’m not sure why they’re still working on a WordPress Blacklist when that functionality is built in to 1.2 in a very robust fashion. At this point patches to improve the included blacklist/moderation would be more useful to the average user, I think. (1)
- Work-safe art, John Ashcroft would approve. (1)
- RSS 2.0 specification clarifications. This looks simple and effective, two things I like. If this goes through I’ll update WordPress’ RSS import to follow these guidelines. (0)
- Harry Potter 3 was fun. I could see it again. (3)
- WordPress subscribe to comments plugin from Jennifer. Upload two files, add one line to your template, and activate the plugin on your admin page. Beautiful. (2)
- Fellow WP developer Alex has released his cursor-aware quicktag code under the LGPL. This is one of my very favorite features of WordPress, and its ease of use is one of the main reasons I haven’t adapted a meta-language like Markdown personally. (1)
- Tanya — Raving Lunatic: “At one point he said “they can have my organs after I’m dead. Not before,” and I found myself thinking, “well that’s perfectly sensible. I can get behind that."” (0)
- I could enjoy these more if I cared for the design of the site itself. Sequels always have trouble. (11)
- Meet The New Blog—Same As The Old Blog. “In other words, dear comment spammers and trolls, you are both now officially extinct. The asteroid has hit, and you are a herd of triceratops. Time to die.” Aaron doesn’t dig the template structure. (2)
- Derek Featherstone: One Word: ImPressive. “OK, I admit it. I’m on the WordPress bandwagon.” When did we become a bandwagon? Derek outlines several reasons why he chose WordPress, including its syntax, templates, and learnability. He has a nice clean design over there as well. Congrats and welcome to the family. :) (2)
- PearPC, a PowerPC Architecture Emulator. My fake OS X Sony laptop can finally be complete. At the very least it’d be useful for debugging Safari and Mac IE problems. I’ll try to install it next week. (0)
- Ping-o-Matic did over 60,000 pings yesterday. I just finished rewriting the pinging engine to make it even faster. Are you pinging it yet? (5)
- Jeffrey on the new Glassdog and the web. Happy ninth birthday. HTML wasn’t easy enough, and it isn’t getting any easier. Blogs aren’t anything special, they’re just a function of software that makes it easy to maintain content. Compare the usability of the top 3 blog packages with the top 3 “content management systems.” Blogging software is the simplest mechanism for “In-depth explorations of every imaginable topic.” That’s the revolution. (2)
- “Odd what you find when you decide to just follow comment link after comment link - why do some people seem to think that to use WordPress you must know PHP ?” (4)
- Jill/txt is having some problems switching to WordPress, maybe we can help? Two documentation pages that come to mind are styling lists and The Loop. (0)
- A few useful Windows keyboard shortcuts. I remember seeing a very comprehensive list somewhere, but I can’t find it right now. (3)
- WP contributor Podz: “The RSS feeds from here have been stopped.” My thoughts? That ship has sailed. Despite what I’ve said in the past, to many bandwidth still matters. (2)
- Harry Fuecks on WordPress. I have learned so much from Harry over the years, quite an inspiration. Hat tip: Thomas Maas. (0)
- “I really wonder how does Matt ever go thru all the articles that he links.” Also thoughts on activating and deactivating plugins. Hat tip: Alex. (3)
- How to set up your own private CVS repository, this is almost exactly what I would have written if I had the time. Excellent walkthrough. If you’re not using version control yet, why? (2)
- Jay Allen, From Troll to Doppelganger. For what it’s worth, I ran the IP on the forums and no posts have been made to the WP support forums from that IP. (8)
- Kitten’s Captchas for the blind? May be more accessible, but just as annoying. I wonder what Joe will think of this. (1)
- Keith on Web Standards ROI. Show me the money! (0)
- Periodic Table of Perl 6 Operators. I’ve got a big Perl project coming up, I need to start drinking the kool-aid. (Or something.) Hat tip: Jonas. (0)
- Stephane Le Solliec’s weblog » WordPress powered blog up and running “I’ve worked enough with computers to know that nothing ever work on the first try, … is that WordPress thing defying Murphy’s law?” Hat tip: Ozh, who also writes in thta Stephane created Geoping and U-Blog. (0)
- What I got out of this article is I really need to pick up a WRT54G. Hat tip: Mark Pilgrim via Slashdot. (1)
- New WordPress Blog. “Having never used an out-of-the-box CMS before, I have been more than pleasantly surprised by the ease with which I have got a version of WP up and running. It really is a 5 minute install, and the code it produces slips into my CSS like a wide-boy into a Volkswagon Golf.” (1)
- Robert: ” Oh, and everytime I meet an IE team member in the halls (which is quite often) I grab them by the shirt, give them a nugie, and ask them when they are gonna support standards.” It’s good to know the best and brightest are on the task. The IE Mac team did a wonderful job of supporting standards, why can’t the IE windows team keep up? (3)
- “Sony has yet to find the magic song on Brion’s latest production, [Fiona] Apple’s new record. The album has been finished for months but sits on the shelves at the label as, Brion says, execs search for a single.” It’s no secret I’m a huge Fiona Apple fan, and a Jon Brion fan as well. His work with Brad Mehldau (Largo) was excellent. I really can’t wait for this album to come out. Hat tip: Michael. (0)
- WordPress on the Wikipedia, I wonder who’s going around adding all this blogging stuff to the wikipedia? The site is looking excellent, not sure when they adopted that new style. Looks like a good CSS implementation, which makes perfect sense for an encyclopedia. (Not counting the weird page-within-a-page embedding thing which I suspect is an application error.) (2)
- Lars Holst, Designing With Jazz Standards. I’ve always been inspired by Blue Note record covers and the design of Reid Miles. In fact Sarah got me a book that is nothing but Blue Note covers and I love it. (5)
- Anne van Kesteren: Unicode support in WordPress — “As you can see in my previous post WordPress handles all kind or characters flawlessly.” (0)
- You would expect much more from otherwise intelligent and rational people. I agree with Nick, “I’m not sure what the point of all of this is.” I’m glad none of the people actually writing software get caught up in this because then they wouldn’t have any time to do anything useful. (1)
- Sony’s new Powerbook killer. I wish they would give a more meaningful refresh of the Z1 line, which I use. Aside aside: do they have the worst URIs and store or what? Also see their upcoming 1.7 pound notebook that looks gorgeous. (1)
- Om Malik, noted tech writer, has made the switch to WordPress. “Word Press is very fast, nimble and is light weight. I see the bandwidth consumption is down, and so are the MySQL resources.” The path he took. (0)
- WordPress now has 4623 inbound sources and 10232 inbound links, which according to my watchlist page ranks it at #7 in the technoratisphere. This site is #129. WP isn’t on the Technorati 100 because they filter out weblogging tools and other non-blog sites. (6)
- The guy who made that giant chart everyone has seen ended up choosing WordPress for his own use. A very interesting read because he obviously is very familar with dozens of systems and goes into detail on why he made the choice he did. (0)
- Victor Lombardi now uses WordPress. Look at how the information architects go crazy with sub-categories. I love it! (3)
- WordPress: The Road Ahead. (1)
- Moose courtship, why not? (2)
- Jason Santa Maria sheares his design methodology. I think these types of posts are fascinating. Whenever I get a chance to talk to a designer I really admire this is one thing I always ask, as Jeffrey and Doug will attest from SxSW 2003. (0)
- Yale Web Style Guide (0)
- Ethan redesigns and discovers the good Word. (0)
- Six Apart announces more changes to Movable Type license. That sounds like a good model for WordPress. (7)
- Princeton professor and noted expert on Chinese economics left two drive-by comments on my blog the other day. I’m guessing he was searching for his name on Google and came across the entry. In any case, I’m flattered. If anyone needs a blog it’s that guy. (1)
- Freshly stolen CSS? Is the Creative Commons enforcable? (4)
- I was thinking about redesigning, but now it’s trendy. Love the new logo. I also love live redesigns, it really gives you a peek into the designers mind. I learned so much by watching Zeldman iterate his design a year or so ago. When I redesigned photomatt.net it was a live redesign, and it was pretty ugly at some points but I’m happy with how it turned out. Yellow is the new black. (4)
- If I ever highlight comments the colors would differentiate just me and everyone else, because that’s the only hierarchy on this site. I’m no longer being auto-highlighted over at Dave’s, which is too bad because I thought my mezzoyellow.com joke was funny, but I don’t think manual highlighting is going to scale. Basing it on URI is dangerous at best, and the PHP code is… well I need to write more PHP articles for Digital Web. (4)
- Molly’s new books is out. Why no Amazon link? Here we go: Buy Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours. (I’ve always wondered, does anyone ever binge on those books and do everything in one day?) (1)
- Dave Shea redesigns, the new look is called “Proton.” (3)
- Dean offers hosting, and pledges 10% of the fee to anyone who uses WordPress on it. Available for a limited time only. Those specs sound killer. You can’t deny that man’s flair. (8)
- “Why are people moving to WordPress? I have absolutely no idea. I hate it.” Me too. (2)
- Nikolai Nolan has posted his pictures from SxSW 2004. What’s funny is I know it’s going to kill him that I’m linkblogging this. As usual it has a novel design and presentation. Nikolai is the most underappreciated CSS guru and designer on the web. (5)
- “It’s easier to upgrade from MT 2.6 to WordPress than it is from MT 2.6 to MT 3.0.” Usually I stay away from Slashdot comments, but these look pretty good. ;) (1)
- WordPress gets slashdotted again. We aren’t even mentioned directly in the article this time but the traffic rush is much more intense. Things were very slow for a few minutes. (1)
- Irony in your palm: WordPress PocketPC Theme. Anyone want to try this out and let me know how it looks? (1)
- “I’m proud to announce the new and improved, Word/Image Count Plug-In for Wordpress 1.2.” Four steps. (1)
- Rafe Colburn on Java and PHP. (0)
- My honest opinion: Scrivs, we get it, you’re controversial. It’s a good way to get links, but use it too often and you become the designer who cried wolf and people start to tune out. Critiques are good, but there’s a difference between ranting, constructive criticism, and stop energy. Criticism between friends is usually just that, between friends. It takes on a whole new dimension when it’s in the public eye. (3)
- Anne asks “May a webpage use H1 multiple times within the same page?” He helped me proof the new WordPress readme before the 1.2 release and mentioned this. (0)
- Adam updates Textile 2 for WordPress. Apparently the plugin we included with 1.2 doesn’t have all the features the perl version does. We’ll have to roll this in. (3)
- The pinging continues. If you haven’t set
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/to be your default ping in your blog software yet, why not? (1) - Nice Thunderbird theme called Charmel. Hat tip: Rick Yribe (3)
- Shelley says, “It’s odd, but when I first switched from Movable Type to Wordpress, I also thought the interface was ‘unpolished’.” This is a common first impression but an uncommon lasting impression. What could be done to make WordPress a little snazzier for first-time users without compromising the speed and elegance long-time users appreciate? (21)
- How to ping Ping-o-Matic in Movable Type. Nice looking blog too. (2)
- JournURL is auto-pinging the Ping-o-Matic RPC interface by default. Awesome, and should result in much faster service for JournURL users. (1)
- “ Even better the upgrade of the site to the new version is now complete. It took all of 30 seconds to do. Only well written software can make things that easy.” (0)
- Brad Froehle » Switch to WordPress “Let me tell you that right now it’s the slickest thing I’ve used.” (0)
- Zen, and the Art of Blogging » Upgraded to WordPress 1.2. “That’s right, they’re making it even easier for you to switch from your old blog software to WordPress.” (0)
- This review could be in a good magazine it’s so thorough and surprisingly insightful for someone who has only been using WordPress for a bit. Not distributing language files was actually on purpose. Once more translatations are published and checked we’ll include a few of the most popular with the distribution and make the rest available for download. I’m always annoyed when I download a package where the language files are bigger than hte app itself, and I’m going to use one. (0)
- Favorite PHP Editor, I realized again today that I have Dreamweaver open more than Thunderbird. It works, but it often feels clunky or like I’m fighting the program. I’m going to check out a few of the options from this thread. (4)
- Tim Bray on Vonage. I’ve been happy with my Vonage phone, which I’ve had since around December. The only problem is it seems to have to go in front of my router, and the double NAT makes a lot of things tricky. Also my box is really tiny, not sure why he says they have to get smaller. (0)
- “In a relatively short space of time, WordPress has evolved into the perfect blogging tool for the experienced web user, and even for the web novice.” (1)
- My experiences writing Joel on Software, a post from 2000 when Joel was using Manilla to run his weblog. Replies from Brent Simmons, Wesley Felter, and Dave Winer. (0)
- Matthew Thomas » Interface design in Wordpress 1.2. If you think the new options are nice, wait to you see some of the other stuff mpt is bugging me to do. :) We’re very lucky to have this guy around. Don’t believe anyone who tells you UI is easy. Matthew spent a lot of time designing everything and it took me an order of magnitude longer than I expected to implement most of it. (The last 10% will take even longer.) (0)
- intraordinary » yes, it’s about time. “We’ve added so much stuff, it’s almost like a 2.0 version, except that your 1.0 templates should still work.” (0)
- Wow, Photo Matt and WordPress are in the PubSub 100. How they work. (0)
- Good Blimey! Wordpress 1.2 Final Released. “I’ve just now updated Good Blimey to the final version, and it was easy and quick. The past few days I’ve been messing around in Wordpress has left me nothing but impressed and sad that I didn’t install it earlier.” (0)
- I almost forgot that Neowin uses WordPress for its events blog too. I count 36 authors on that blog, which fits perfectly in our licensing scheme. Hat tip: Sushubh. (2)
- Neowin.net -> Comparative: WordPress versus Movable Type. Fair and balanced, and it made the front page of Neowin. (0)
- “I just upgraded this site and it took me about 2 minutes!” (0)
- WordPress Template Tags, just a taste of some of the new documentation. Kudos to Anne van Kesteren for his hard work on this one. (4)
Sing It From the Rafters »
WordPress 1.2 is available. I’m at a loss for words at the moment, so I’ll just quote the features list…
- Hixie’s Natural Log: Web Applications and Compound Documents, IMHO. Like Hixie ever has a humble opinion. ;) (0)
- Former Colgate-Palmolive Consumer Affairs expert analyzes MT trackback feedback. Good read. I’m going to try to start classifying WordPress feedback. (0)
- I’ve got your switching right here. I swear it’s for localization. (0)
- Why I shouldn’t go to NY. Hat tip: the lovely Julie. (1)
- URI, URL, and URN explained. Clearest thing I’ve read on the matter yet. (0)
- “I’ve just upgraded my install of WP to the final release candidate of version 1.2.” (1)
- Ping-o-Matic RPC pinging now available. Lose all that other stuff and put this in your blog tool now. More on this after the WordPress launch. (2)
- Spider Bites. I got bitten by a spider but I’m not sure what kind. Luckily not one of the ones described on thta page. (0)
- The Scripty Goddess has her first plugin up. With a simple tweak she could shave a step. I’m really digging the new WordPress plugin system. First of many to come from her? Bing! (1)
- Phil checks out MT license. Aren’t most software licenses similarly gross and nasty? I suspect most of this was from a template of some sort. I read a Microsoft EULA once and had nightmares for weeks. The GPL isn’t bad. (3)
- Anil on Movable Type pricing and Six Apart. It’s refreshing and touching to see such honest, heart-felt communication. (0)
- Dinah discovers our secret plan for world domination. She must be taken care of now. We can’t let this get around. (0)
- Joel on Software - Fire And Motion. While I was reading this I was interrupted 7 times. Wasn’t this in Office Space first? “In a week, I’d say I do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.” Any tips for making those minutes come more frequently? Hat tip: I can’t remember. (0)
- Easy News Topics - RSS 2.0 Module aka RSS ENT. (0)
- magistyk weblog » The Best Choice - Wordpress. “Only good things can come from these people.” (2)
- Blogging For Fun & Profit. The HTML version could be a lot better. Is blogging for profit still blogging? (2)
- Beyond The Template Engine. Any sufficently advanced templating engine approaches PHP in syntax and capabilities. Most are more trouble than they’re worth. (Disclaimer: I chose Smarty for a fairly large client project.) (3)
- Good comparison of different PHP blogging tools. I don’t really consider Drupal a blogging tool though, and efforts to make it one have all seemed a little strained to me. Use the right tool for the job. See also: Incomplete WP feature list and what’s new in 1.2. (1)
- The Move to Wordpress, and a sharp design too. “No re-building, no muss and no fuss.” One of my favorite things about linking to all these WP sites is the beautiful permalinks they use, which used to be the realm of just the blogging elite and heavy tweakers. (2)
- Move away from MovableType? Jon Hicks, a designer I respect a great deal, contemplates WordPress. (2)
- Super Scripty Goddesses choose WordPress. Can’t wait to see the cool stuff Jennifer comes up with. (0)
- Think Tank Claims Torvalds Didn’t Write Linux, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. (2)
- Getting drafts right, because it’s the little things. (1)
- Prom pictures that you were all asking for. Dig the outfits. (3)
- Jeremy Shields on why he uses WordPress. “I really feel that WordPress has redefined the way a Weblog CMS should be” (1)
- I wish I understood everything Marc writes because then I’d be a millionaire. But please, someone get that man a
<blockquote>! (1) - Phil proves hyphens are cooler. This is—of course— how we do it in WP. I promise I’ll stop talking about WordPress in every post at some point. (4)
- WordPress in Hindi. It’s the first full localization I’ve seen and it gives me chills. Congrats to Pankaj. (1)
- LibraryPlanet.com » MT Keywords to WP Slugs. Something is funky with the CSS on this site, slows my browser to a crawl. (3)
On Asides »
As you may have noticed on this page or in your aggregator my normal entries are now interspersed with smaller link and commentary entries represented in an unordered list. These fall in chronological order with my other entries and are real posts with permalinks, comments, categories, trackbacks, and pingbacks. I have been wanting to do this for a long time and there was a flood of entries when I first got this working. I fully expect to post in this category with a much higher frequency than my normal posts. I come across things all the time that I want to link so badly but I just don’t have the time to write an entry about. Now every interesting tidbit …
- “If smart, informed people are using
bori, it’s because they have made smart, informed decisions to do so.” (1) - DomainKeys could change email and the markup and CSS on that page is pretty decent. Hat tip: Jeremy Zawodny. (2)
- Shelley on encoded PHP in EE and a cat in peril. (2)
- Out Of The Rut, Into The Groove from Virulent Meme. “Uh-oh, Advocacy!” (1)
- Ferrari digital camera in a gorgeous red. Hat tip: Nick Finck. (0)
- Moving from Movable Type to WordPress by Carthik Sharma. (0)
- Audioblog.com supports WordPress now. MetaWeblog API is nifty. Wasn’t there a free service that also did this? (4)
- Pink is the new pink. I hadn’t done a design from scratch in a while. Hack-free CSS, two images. (2)
- Mark switched, puts his money where his mouth is, and understands freedom. (1)
- “Though Matt of Photo Matt fame is the primary developer of this product, if for some reason he decides he would rather spend his time photographing naked people holding fruit, he can; the project might slow for a bit, it won’t stop.” From Shelley. The whole article is worth a read. (2)
- Simple backup tutorial using Perl on Windows or *nix. Hat tip: Forever Geek. (0)
- Adam switches to WordPress. I promise this had nothing to do with my hosting him. (Though when he was beta testing MT3 I did notice some strange CPU spikes.) (0)
- Eric talks about why he moved to WordPress. RSS import was a killer feature for him. (2)
- Lauren Woods — What WordPress Does Right (7)
The Google Blog »
As nearly everyone in the world has noticed, Google has a blog now. It’s too bad they didn’t go with the /blog/ URI because this one has extra redundant redundancy, and that doesn’t seem very Google-like. The new blog is very generic, it barely seems like a Blogger blog. On the same day Blogger releases gorgeous XHTML+CSS tempates from Doug and the crew, Google releases its blog with a table-based layout and funky HTML 4 (with no doctype). Also, Blogger uses utf-8 encoding by default now (like WordPress) and Google’s blog uses iso-8859-1.
So there isn’t a lot of information on their blog yet. The first post was signed by Ev, but after that it’s been non-entities writing (and modifying) the …
Plugins From CSS Guru »
The infamous Eric Meyer, as you may know, powers his blog with WordPress. In the course of customizing WordPress to meet his needs we chatted quite a bit and he extended the functions he needed to extend using the 1.2 plugin format, and he is now sharing his work with the community. See his Meyerweb WordPress tools and hacks page.
Update: Whoops! I thought I was writing on the WordPress development blog. I’ll leave it here since I already pinged everyone and your aggregators have probably already grabbed it, but if you want to link please link to the entry on wordpress.org. That’s what I get for multitasking while writing a post.
Sting »
On web standards, celebrities with one- and two-word names, WordPress, IRC, and the meaning of life.
Original Zen »
Before Jon Hicks, before Dan Cederholm, before Doug Bowman, before Dave Shea, there was the original CSS garden.
Lockergnome Happy Ending »
Lockergnome has finally responded to the community and redesigned their site.
Mix CDs »
Mix CDs are so fun because they provide vignettes of someone else’s tastes, the best and most interesting. Mix CDs are like linklogs of music.
Lockergnome Critique »
Paul Scrivens has written one of his famous critiques of the Lockergnome redesign. He covers the redesign point by point with far more detail than I have, taking a multidisciplinary approach. He loses his cool at one point, but try to understand this is incredibly frustrating.
What’s strange is there hasn’t been a peep out of Lockergnome regarding any of this. Aren’t they plugged in to customer feedback?I think a simple statement or clarification would do a lot to clear things up. Though in the comments some people have used names of people at Lockergnome, it isn’t at all about that. This is simply a matter of supporting companies and organizations you can respect and routing around ones you can’t.
Standards Jokes »
You’ll either find this incredibly funny or find it incredible that anyone could find this funny.
Code is Food »
Good code is the essence of a healthy web, just like good food is essential to health.
It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine »
At first I was optimistic the LockerGnome redesign wouldn’t be that terrible…
New Gadget Weblog »
I always liked Gizmodo before, but I stopped visiting for ethical reasons. The currency of weblogging has always been the personal voice of the writer, not the weblog itself. I followed a link to Gizmodo the other day and it was nothing like I remembered, and I thought to myself “When did this jump the shark?”
Well apparently the soul of Gizmodo, Pete Rojas, is now blogging at a new gadget weblog, Engadget. It looks great so far and I’ve added it my daily visits. Weblogs Inc. looks interesting in general, and worth watching.
Jay-Z Construction Kit »
A toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album
Protect Your Wireless Traffic »
On my giant todo list for SxSW this year was double-checking that all communication I would be doing over the wireless network would be secured against possible sniffing. Most of my traffic isn’t a problem: I use SFTP with CuteFTP Pro and Dreamweaver MX 2004 to update sites, terminals are (of course) SSH, and all my incoming and outgoing email is over SSL. I’m worried about the errant website login, and maybe AIM. Better safe than sorry, right?
Well Mr. Haughey is going to be using VPN through an inexpensive third-party provider. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? I thought about setting one up on my server at home (or maybe the colo) but then I remembered that …
More on the Gnome Regression »
Another newsletter, another reason to worry. Here’s the quote:
We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on our cutting edge CSS layouts and, while they are definitely fancy-schmancy, they detract quite a bit from our core efforts which are great content and easy access to it. So, as Chris put it in yesterday’s Windows Fanatics, we’re taking a mulligan and calling a do over. Lockergnome is changing looks one more time and moving to a more traditional layout and coding structure. This, my friends, successfully filled the rest of the time between when we last graced your in-box and now. I’ve been locked in my office, nose to the grindstone, hacking out automated content updaters, link rotators, and convoluted include …
Clever Virus »
Just in case anyone has seen this one going around yet, it is the most clever and well-done spoof I’ve seen in a long time. I have been getting dozens of these and they are humorous because I run my own email systems, so the email just doesn’t make any sense.
More Google vs. Yahoo »
Just looking over a few stats for the month of Feburary, and this stood out:
Googlebot
7,025 sessions
Inktomi Search
28,769 sessions
Yowza.
Downhill Battle »
Downhill Battle is a great website with tons of interesting information, and they are also the people behind Grey Tuesday. I don’t agree with everything they’re saying, but it’s all educational. Did you know label and Apple take 89 cents of every song sold on iTunes? Oh, and shhhh.
Browsing »
Just a few links and excerpts I’ve come across lately.
Use absentee voting ballots so there will be a paper trail:
Michaan said, “I consider this to be the greatest threat to our democracy of anything we have ever faced in this country. There is so much possibility of fraud that there has to be a voting system that is verifiable with paper trails. Absent that we’re totally at the mercy of whoever controls this equipment.”
I have always thought it interesting that Diebold, known mostly for ATMs, has said that it would be too much trouble to have voting machines give voting receipts or some physical record of the vote when ATMs have no problem giving you a paper record of every …
Curious QRIO »
QRIO, our new robot overlords friends. Hat tip: Robert. Some videos in Windows Media format:
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Video 4
Video 5
Video 6 (You’ve got to watch this one.)
I’m really at a loss for words.
QRIO knows your face. It’s equipped with a camera and the ability to analyze the images it sees. It detects faces and identifies who they are. It can even learn the faces of people it just met. And it responds to specific people individually, adding to the fun.
QRIO is equipped with wireless networking equipment, and can connect to your home wireless network out of the box. There might even come a day when it serves as a guide between people and information technology.
We made QRIO as quiet as …
Well Designed Weblogs? »
Or not.
Lars Holst, who has a beautiful WordPress-powered blog, has been doing a bit he calls Well-Designed Weblogs. I have been pretty disappointed with the second round (and to some extent the first round) of “Well-Designed Weblogs.” It is subjective, but quite frankly there are some sites I don’t see anything in. To me some look plain, unimaginative, squished — overall badly designed.
For the list to be a useful Lars should put a blurb about why a site was chosen so if there is some nugget of inspiration there that I’m missing, I can be enlightened. It would also shed some light on the subjective process he’s going through, which would be interesting. Round 2 has 37 entries …
New Yahoo Search »
Yahoo has flipped the switch and is no longer using Google for their search. (Some technical details.) The question on everybody’s mind: Is Yahoo’s search better than Google’s? Yes. Why do I think so?
Results are given as an ordered list, or <ol>, which is a good thing.
It shows 20 results instead of just 10.
You have an option by each result to open it in a new window.
They are somehow detecting RSS feeds for sites that have them, and linking to them directly and also allowing you to add them to My Yahoo. They seem to have gotten my RDF file instead of my RSS 2.0 file, which is prefered, but no worries. I’ve been meaning to replace that with a …
Highly Confidential »
I love it when I get forwards that, several people back in the forward chain, have something like the following:
This communication, including any attachments, is intended solely for the confidential use of the person(s) named above and is the property of [name removed]. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete/destroy the original. Any reader other than the intended recipient is hereby notified that any review, dessemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited.
CSS Style Competition »
There is still time to get your entries in for the WordPress CSS style competition, with the top prize currently at $70. Not bad for making a single CSS file. What’s great is no matter who gets the prize, the community wins as each entry is licensed under the GPL.
Update: It finished up with 38 entries, many of them quite good. Yes that’s 38 different designs you can use on your new WordPress blog after just updating one line. We might even automate that step too. :)
Best Postcard Ever »
My friend Becca just returned from the Dominican Republic where she taught English at several local schools and an orphanage for a couple of weeks. I’ve read over her notes from the trip and they sound really interesting, I hope she publishes them somewhere. When she came back she brought a “postcard” that was actually a picture she had taken on this gorgeous beach, “behind El Morro en Monti Cristi.”
It says:
1/30/04
Hi Matt!
- Rebecca
What I would give to be on that beach right now!
Orkut Cracking? »
I have been surprised that so far Orkut has remained amazingly responsive even under the incredible traffic I’m sure they’ve been getting. I still stand by my opinion that Orkut will be a success, however when trying to log in just now I was greeted with not one, but four distinct error messages each time I reloaded. This outage has been the exception rather than the rule, so I’m not particularly worried. (I still remember the day Google returned an error when I did a search.) For entertainment more than anything the screenshots of the errors are below. The first one is very verbose, more than what you usually see on production websites.
Link Archiver »
(Pardon my verbification.)
Here’s an idea for any website, though it could be particularly applicable to weblogs. I’m a reading junkie, I can’t get enough. When I come across a blog I like I often go back in its archives, which is a great way to get a feel for a site. It’s fascinating to see how some blogs have evolved over the years, how posting styles evolve, and to see what people were thinking around the time of important events.
There is one common thread in every archive I browse, I constantly run across dead links. Long-dead links. Dead permalinks even. I have read that the average life-span of a web page is 100 days—I think that may be generous. …
On Orkut »
What can I say, I like it. Orkut is a new social networking site funded by Google that takes the best of all the other sites out there and rolls it into one fast system. Let me emphasize fast. I gave up on Friendster because I’m not patient enough to wait minutes for every screen to load. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but every site I’ve tried so far (with the exception of LinkedIn) feels like it’s held together by spit and duck tape and run on a 486. Not to mention the atrocious markup.
A neat thing about Orkut is that it’s invitation-only, so everyone there is connected to the original seed guy and programmer …
Only In Texas »
Just in time for the Superbowl, Homer Simpson let loose on US nuclear weapons facility.
In the first incident, highly-skilled operatives inadvertently drilled into the warhead’s core, provoking a full-scale evacuation of Pantex. They later made a second Chernobylesque blunder by bodging a highly-explosive warhead part back together with tape.
Had they subsequently dropped the component, the likely outcome would have been a “violent reaction", with “potentially unacceptable consequences", as safety board chairman John T. Conway rather conservatively put it.
Hat tip: evilbunny on #hwug.
Back In Town »
The ride back from Austin earlier tonight was a delight. The stars were gorgeous, I felt like the only person on the road, and the music was excellent. The trip was enjoyable and a much-needed break. On Saturday I also had the pleasure of having lunch with Jacques Distler. His links may be terribly crufty but his markup is impeccable and most importantly he’s a swell guy. Before I knew what happened we had already talked almost two hours, and the conversation could have continued for many more. If two bloggers meet and no one takes a picture it didn’t happen, so I took the oppurtunity to try out the new phone camera and snapped this:
Enjoy it, I paid 25 …
The Beginning of the End »
Jacques Distler was flooded by random comments using a script specially designed for MovableType called FloodMT. Terrato.org seems to be down however the scripts are still widely available. We are working hard to address this sort of problem, for example comment throttling has been in WordPress from the beginning, but it is not a trivial problem.
Dvorak on Linux Console »
For my benefit more than anything. I always forget how to change the keymap on a linux console session:
loadkeys /usr/share/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak.map.gz
This seriously could have saved me an hour or two earlier today.
QWERTY is so painful! Switch to Dvorak. You’ll thank me later.
Update: Matt Brubeck informs me I could just use loadkeys dvorak in most modern distrobutions. Thanks!
Light of Experience »
From Jeffrey Zeldman, A Little Death:
To avoid pain, we began to feel less. The price is a wall you build around yourself. At first the wall protects you; then it merely shuts you off from the light of experience and the warmth of love.
It Feels So Good to be 3 »
A birthday present from Google: I have overtaken that other guy and I am now the #3 Matt in the world. Go look at it now, because Google can be a harsh mistress. If things continue to go well I might reach #1 and have to take down all my sites, like I promised.
For those of you commenting on the phantom ping from yesterday, I actually posted something and took it down. Don’t worry, a little editing and it’ll be back.
So I’m 20 »
This is it. Last year my birthday was loud and surprising, this year it was chill. Both have their attraction.
Awww thanks. :) Mad props to Craig for the WordPress header (currently in rotation).
While I’m here I’d also like to wish a happy birthday to Dave, who had a birthday a few days ago and didn’t tell anyone. ;)
Assorted Links »
50 Miler Panorama is one of the coolest panoramas I’ve seen. Zach’s dad sent me an email detailing a little of the process:
Dan Hale here - Zach’s dad, and the guy who created the panorama. I did this one entirely by hand in Photoshop. I made nine shots that day, placing the people in only the middle third of the frame of each. I shot with a super wide lens - a 17mm on a 35mm camera. The stitching was painstaking as I wanted to overlap the shots in such a way as to hide the transitions. This process was complicated by the fact that the cloud movement between shots varied the brightness, contrast and color of light. Evening that …
Return of the Posting »
The hiatus is over.
Peace and blessings manifest with every lesson learned
If your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned
The holidays could not have been better, a delightful mix of friends and family that I will remember fondly for years to come. Presents, the least important part of the holidays, were notable this year in quality and thoughtfulness. Thank you. Presence, friends I have not seen in some time have been in town, and the new place has been somewhat of a hub. I consider myself lucky and blessed to be surrounded by such great people.
Just as writing is a habit, not writing is a habit. In my quest for relaxation over the past weeks I have developed …
