Jan
31
13

Firefox beat Internet Explorer in number of people accessing wordpress.org by about 80,000 in January. Of the people visiting with IE, over 90% were using 6.0. This makes web development much, much easier.

2

How to pitch an idea

2

Gigablast, the search engine run by one guy named Matt, allows you to do some interesting things with meta tags. Here is a search that finds all “generator” meta tags with “WordPress” and shows the tag itself in the search results. (About 1.5 million results.) I found out about this on the Gigablast blog which isn’t quite a blog. If Matt is looking for a better blog system, I have a suggestion. The results on Gigablast seem on par with Google’s for most things I tried, but the pages themselves need some UI and QA love.

0

Topix.net is built on flat files, not databases. My experience has been with the applications I do it’s easier to start with SQL and then cache to the filesystem/memcached.

7

How To Document Your Open-Source Tool, I don’t agree with it all but a good read.

0

There’s a new version of the One Click Backup plugin for WordPress.

9

The Register has a great interview with a comment spammer. Why can’t News.com do that type of story?

Jan
29
2

I caught the Tsunami benefit concert last night with Zack and friends and it was fantastic. I recorded some of the Ben Gibbard set and I’ll see about putting that up later.

Jan
28
0

With all the fuss and bother over TypeKey, you’d think it was the end of the world. It’s being called the Patriot Act of Weblogging because it’s an over-the-top reaction to a problem. People are saying they’ll never comment on blogs that require TypeKey. I haven’t seen this much commotion over vaporware since… MT 3. The FAQ tells you everything you could ever want to know about TypeKey, except whether it’s free for commercial use. I think as someone intimately aquainted with many of the technologies surrounding weblogs I can set things straight.

Calm down. There’s no need to worry. You can leave comments like you always have, TypeKey or no Typekey. TypeKey is basically a centralized authentication

It’s just like the old days, when you could comment on anything you wanted without hassle.

(WordPress only accepts trackbacks sent through POST because according to the spec, “TrackBack pings should now be sent using HTTP POST instead of GET. The old behavior is deprecated, and support for GET will be removed in January 2003.” It’s 2004 and Movable Type and TypePad GET trackbacks, so if you’re in a pinch you don’t have to use the trackback post form.)

But what if you don’t care about making people sign on to a centralized system, you just want to keep those odious spammers off your blog? Check back, I’ll have something for you tomorrow.

This is all in good fun, what Tantek would call “pulling pigtails.” I met some SixApart people at SxSW, including Mie and Joi, and they were delightful.

Jan
27
22

Aguas de Marco, the Waters of March, by Antonio Carlos Jobim. If you don’t let the flute/whistle in the middle bug you it’s quite enjoyable, their voices flow so smoothly.

11

du -sH “du: WARNING: use –si, not -H; the meaning of the -H option will soon
change to be the same as that of –dereference-args (-D).” Now why on earth would they change that?

2

Check out this video of Brad Mehldau playing “I’ll Be Seeing You” live at Yoshi’s. (Previous Brad Mehldau.) The song has beautiful lyrics too.

Jan
26
7

Dig Nicole in the Code is Poetry WordPress shirt. I’m thinking maybe the logo should go on the front? I got a grey one that is tagless, just like WordPress.

Jan
25
15

I’ve rediscovered the Firefox Bookmark Synchronizer and it really rocks. I’ve got it to save on close and reload on open so all of the computers I regularly browse on will always have the latest and greatest and greatest bookmarks. I can use bookmarks for cross-computer notes and to-read lists now, too. Another killer app for Firefox. Update: Link updated, should work now.

9

A little more Latin, this time Peueblo Nuevo from the Buena Vista Social Club, a delightfully chill song to slow down for a few moments and enjoy.

2

Andrew has made a Bittorent of every Apple commercial ever, or at least the ones he could find.

Jan
24
1

Niall Kennedy is joining Technorati. Looking forward to seeing him in SOMA more.

8

The MT sites I host have been getting hammered with this email spamming flaw that allows arbitrary emails to be sent out from any MT installation. Fortunately I can block it (though bluntly) through mod_security. If you run MT, please delete the comments script until a fix is out. Will link to more information as it’s available. Update: More at TextDrive. Update: Fix available.

17

New formats called RSS that don’t work with anything else, specifically referring (I assume) to the “RSS 1.1″ effort. (Where RSS stands for RDF Site Summary.) The name of RDF Site Summary is a mistake in the first place, they should take this new development effort as a chance to correct it. (Also, publishers are getting tired of supporting the format du jour. Maybe it’s “easy” for aggregators to support the latest permutation, but the last thing I want to do is bloat WordPress with support for Yet Another syndication format. Four is enough.)