The Lifecycle of Bloggers.

I’m using this nifty plugin from Scott Yang which was pointed out to me by Alistair. It’s actually replacing a bit of code and mod_rewrite rules I had to do the same thing, I wish I had thought of this sooner. I could see something like this making it into the core.

So what’s the best way to compress Javascript code? I found a couple of online services that didn’t work and this Perl script which seemed nice but was a little overzealous perhaps because the resulting code errored out.

Official WordPress Themes page, fresh and shiny. I feel like when Neo in the Matrix says “I know kung-fu.” I know javascript. Not really, but normally I stay as far away from JS as humanly possible but I was able to cobble together some pieces to make this work pretty much exactly how I wanted. Thanks to Chris Messina for the original mockup.

Designing Headers, one of the latest of hundreds of pages of documentation the great WP doc team has been working on. Should help you spruce up that default template a bit.

The Secrets of WP Theming Part 1.

Even though I’ve stepped down as the organizer for all of the Meetup groups I was involved in, they kept bugging me every few days to “be an organizer” for the very groups I had left. Want to delete yourself from Meetup entirely? Here’s the remove from Meetup link.

Has anyone else started seeing Adwords with city names under them? I just saw one like this “Got a favorite burrito? Vote for your favorite burrito in the San Francisco Bay Area! www.burritobot.com San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA” when I searched for burrito.

“BayCon is one of the five largest regional annual science fiction and fantasy conventions in the United States, and has been held annually since 1982.” With a program schedule that includes everything from “People for the Ethical Treatment of Mars” to “Historical Swordfights – How They Were Done” to “Belly Dancing Workshop.” Well I just got word that WordPress will be joining the party with a WordPress BoF at 1 PM on Sunday in the Chardonnay Room. I’ll be there and I promise not to try out any of the belly dancing I learned the previous day.

Customizing WordPress with Greasemonkey, I expect to see a lot more of this in the future. Any other GM scripts for WP? Hat tip: Billy via email.

I needed to play around with a SQLite database today (we switched all our bug tracking from Mantis to Trac) and it really strikes me how immature all of the SQLite administration tools are, especially considering the incredible competition like phpMyAdmin. I ran into tons of cryptic errors, scripts not doing anything, not handling magic quotes properly, and a million other problems most PHP programmers fix after a few months learning the language.

A blogger applies for Adsense RSS and finds “As I had suspected, during the inital testing phase they are only accepting blogger.com and Movable Type/ TypePad blogs as of this time.” I would love to know from someone at Google (maybe Jason Shellen?) if there was any technical or logistical reason they decided not to support the 140,000+ WordPress users or if it was just a lack of communication, which is entirely possible (and very plausible considering how busy everyone is). I would encourage WP users to sign up for Adsense for Feeds and list “WordPress” in the “Other” field. Update: Communication has started. (Thanks, Jason F.!)

Point, counterpoint and smackdown. Hat tip: Jeremy.

Here is the simple script I use to upgrade all the WordPress sites I run on a single server in one fell swoop. Each site is a Subversion checkout of the WordPress trunk so getting the latest changes and merging them with my version is a simple command, however remembering to do each site was a pain. It also helped me figure out exactly how many WordPress installation I’m responsible for upgrading. (Twenty-seven.) Just fill out the array with the site roots of each install (use locate wp-login.php to find them) and run the script on the command like php upgrade-sites.php. I also like to put the time command in front to see how long things take.

Wordlog, an excellent WordPress news site that’s almost a year old, still isn’t in Google. Seems to work in every other search engine in the world.

How to disable GreaseMonkey, now if only Google would let us disable Autolink.

The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading. Excellent!

I just got home from seeing Star Wars Episode III, and it was a fantastic movie. Totally worth staying up to 4 AM for. Not just a great Star Wars movie, but a Good Movie independent of anything else out there. Then again I’m a total sucker for epic space sci-fi and cheeseball storylines, but go see it and decide for yourself. I’ll probably catch it once or twice more this weekend.

Just got this email, “I am the artist manager for Bob Ricci, famous parody artist. Our site www.BobRicci.com (http://community.bobricci.com) caters to more than 350,000 hits a day from fans worldwide. I wanted to let you know that in our years of being online and having to support such a large amount of global traffic WordPress.org is the only software we have found that is able to withstand the amount of traffic and offer us a community/news service in the online marketplace.” Sweet!