I’ve noticed a lot of the blogs updating to 1.5 are using Kubrick, which is great, but a lot of blogs look the same now! Time to spice up your life a little with Owen Winkler’s awesome Kubrickr. What does it do? Well first you type in a word and it searches Flickr for all the photos with that tag and that have a Creative Commons license. Pick one of them, then it lets you choose which part of the photo you like and it crops the photo then gives you a download with the graphic to upload to your blog. How cool is that?

We had some great music at the upgrade party. Update: Nicole has some video!

This blog seems to be stealing other people’s original content and republishing it, making it look like the author is writing for the site. Example: Original — Copy. This is the first time I’ve used nofollow in an entry. Update: In the comments Dan says he gave permission, so I apoligize, but it did look really fishy.

I’m going to be at the Free/Libre Open Source Usability Sprint today, tomorrow, and Sunday trying to pick up as much as possible. If you’ll be there be sure to say hello.

Is Simon finally going to switch? We already use his excellent XML-RPC library.

The Texas Make-A-Wish Foundation manages their entire site with WordPress 1.5, very cool. Dig those Pages.

Local Area Security, the Linux security project, is now run by WordPress.

“Even though there have been significant changes in the admin interface and (i assume) the way that certain aspects of the application work, I had no problems upgrading.”

Yum!

More reviews are coming in, “Cleaner code, faster execution, and maybe it’s just my imagination but I actually detect a hint of lemony freshness too. Seriously ecstatically happy with my blog since running WordPress and it has been trouble free and effortless (as a blog should be). If you’re thinking of putting one up and joining the Jones’, I recommend it highly and if you’re thinking of switching I heartily encourage it.”

Announcing WordPress 1.5, okay now you should link it and spread the good word. 🙂 1,400 words and it still doesn’t cover everything.

Richard emailed me about a blog called News in Chinese which shows news written in Chinese, as you may suspect, but what’s cool is when you hover over a word it gives you the English translation and enlarges the Chinese character.

Elise’s look at weblog tool marketshare is interesting if not the most accurate. I’d much rather see numbers from someone who could programatically actually determine what blogs use, like Technorati or Feedster. Anyway I tried to follow along in the audience and typed “wordpress.org” into Google, which gave me a helpful page with “link to” and “contains term” links, which I assume is Elise’s methodology. Link to returned 288,000, as is in her chart, but contains term gave 674,000, which is radically different than the 5,000 she attributed to WordPress. I sent a note suggesting she look at this number, to which she replied to Google for www.wordpress.org, which I did. The “contain this term” link returned the even more modest “Results 1 – 10 of about 981,” so obviously the chart should be updated to 1 instead of 5 immediately.

An awesome flash java name chart from the 1900s through now

Jonas has a Technorati Cosmos plugin which is kinda neat. I think it may have the wrong approach though, here’s how a really nice Technorati plugin would work: watch the site cosmos feed for incoming links, if the link isn’t to the root use the same code we use for Pingbacks to determine what post it’s linking to, if one at all, then check if the incoming link already exists as a Trackback or Pingback, and if not insert it into the comment table chronologically in line with the rest of the comments. (And send a notification email.) Cosmos should work transparant of other forms of commenting. Bonus points if it works with referrer data too, call it “remote-comments.”

Some pictures from the party last night, the first I’ve seen so far. People didn’t clear out until almost 3 AM, I’m still recovering. I also ended up with an extra Powerbook, which I’m sure someone will claim. 🙂 I heard the Flickr tag will be upgradeparty. Technorati tag: upgradeparty.

Music for the party tonight? Ellington of course, playing with and compisitions by Billy Strayhorn.

Dougal on WordPress 1.5. Several people have asked if “Strayhorn” is a poke at Longhorn. Nope.