Freshly stolen CSS? Is the Creative Commons enforcable?
Monthly Archives: May 2004
Stopdesign
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.
Reply Highlighting
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.
Teach Yourself Movable Type
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?)
mezzoblue
Dave Shea redesigns, the new look is called “Proton.”
TextDrive
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.
I Got It
Nikolai’s Photos
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.
Upgrading
“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. 😉
Slashdot Again
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.
Pocket PC Theme
Irony in your palm: WordPress PocketPC Theme. Anyone want to try this out and let me know how it looks?
WordCount
Java and PHP
Rafe Colburn on Java and PHP.
Let’s Be Honest
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.
More than one H1
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.
Textile 2 for WordPress
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.
Pinging
The pinging continues. If you haven’t set http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
to be your default ping in your blog software yet, why not?
Charamel
Nice Thunderbird theme called Charmel. Best I’ve used. Hat tip: Rick Yribe
Feature Creep: PowerPhlogger
It’s always sad to see a good project go a direction that you’re not going to follow it in. Case in point: Power Phlogger. It’s a neat stats application that I was always partial to because it gave information like user resolution and color depth that you don’t usually get from stats programs. It is called through javascript or a backup “image” so you only get “people” in your stats, not bots. It makes it easy to view your stats in terms of actual people visiting your site, what pages they went to, how long they spent on each, information that I find a lot more useful than “X number of people came to your site in May, here are the browsers they used.” Most web logs (not weblogs) have a lot of redundant information that can be easily abstracted in a relational database. (Okay, weblogs too.)
However it’s been half a year since the application has been updated, and much longer since there have been any significant upgrades. They basically stopped working on it to focus on PowerPhlogger3, which is going to be built from an entirely new codebase. That should have been my first warning. Part of the reason WordPress has been so successful when other PHP blogging applications that started about the same time haven’t is that it built on the b2 codebase rather than rewriting everything from scratch. The old code had a lot of problems, but it’s something we’re improving incrementally with each version. (The old code also did a lot of things right.) What if the Firefox developers had decided they needed an entirely new rendering engine and we had to wait 3-4 years for the first release of Firefox? The release date for PPhlogger has fallen back again and again, and no code is currently available to the public. It went from requiring PHP 4.2 to not working on anything but PHP 5, which hasn’t even been released yet and is a long way from being available on most hosts. Along the way they created yet another PHP5 framework. Whenever version 3 comes out it will run on a dozen different databases (11 more than I need). Everything is object-oriented now.
I’m sure all of this is very exciting from some sort of computer science standpoint of code purity, but on the other end there is an impatient user. The situation is made worse by the fact that, as I have found on wordpress.org, PPhlogger 2 does not scale well, to the point of slowing down everything else on the server. I ended up just removing it. I’m going to have to turn it off on this site soon. To some extent logs become useless when your traffic grows; you just can’t watch stats like you used to. That’s why services like Technorati are popular amoung high-traffic bloggers—they extracts meaningful data (who’s linking to me?) out of the noise of web stats. I’m looking for another program that will do this.
PowerPhlogger’s first release candidate will come out “no earlier than July 2004,” a date that has been moved several times. I hope I am wrong in thinking the project has jumped the over-architected shark and they release an amazing product that is fast, useful, and stable.
Dusty Apple
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?