Someone is running a WordPress 2.0 theme competition with some pretty sweet prizes. Winners of previous competitions run by Alex have gotten a ton of exposure all over the blogosphere. I think there is so much new functionality possible with the new functions in 2.0 that themes like Regulus take advantage of that it should be a factor in the competition somehow.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Google Irony
John Battelle – The real irony…. Alex Bosworth – Google’s Doublespeak. (Isn’t Alex their CTO’s brother? That’ll make for an interesting Thanksgiving dinner discussion.) I loved Google not just because of their great technology, but because they sold me a dream. Something bigger and better than just another company. Something inspiring and with soul.
Houstonist Interview
Houstonist did a quick interview with me, it was nice to chat about my home town for a bit. Covers a bit of history, and my top 6 favorite jazz albums right now.
Rich Adsense
Google Adsense begins rich-media testing. Thank goodness for Adblock.
DORM’d Podcast
BlogTalk Reloaded
I’ll be keynoting at BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna, Austria on October 2-3rd. Hopefully I’ll meet a few WordPress users while I’m over there.
Markup Survey
Ian Hixie at Google just published a really awesome web authoring survey of a billion documents. What I found most interesting about reading it was places that things I’ve worked on, notably WordPress and GMPG, popped up.
HTTP Headers — “A pretty significant number of pages include an X-Pingback header (more than the number of pages with the Set-Cookie2 header). In fact, X-Pingback was the 30th most-seen header in our data sample.”
WordPress is one of the few platforms that supports pingback, an alternative to Trackback with a real spec. Apparently there are enough WP pages in the world for this to make a blip on the radar.
Page Headers — “It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profileattribute, though. The three most-often used values are http://gmpg.org/xfn/1, http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/, and http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. This makes XFN the most popular HTML metadata profile!”
Too cool for words. 
Both of these profiles are included by default in some WordPress templates.
rel="pingback" and rel="bookmark" both skirt the charts in the link relationship page. No XFN values made the cut there.
The <a> element — “external seems to be mainly propagated by WordPress, but people have long been asking for a way to label their links as being external vs internal.”
Nice to get a direct mention there, and we’ve supported bookmark and tag from the beginning. All in all the report is a very interesting read, and kudos to Google for doing this type of research and sharing it with the web. I hope to see more of these in the future, it delights my inner markup geek.