Announcing the WordPress Plugin Repository, since the announcement I’ve been adding dozens of new plugins and developers. This is Open Source development and collaboration at its best.

Well the Shuffle and mini look pretty rocking, and both seem absolutely something I’d want to by. The Shuffle fits my listening habits pretty well and the mini looks like it could make a pretty swank gateway server for my living room. (I have a big beige box running Gentoo in there now.) Hook up two big external drives and you’re good to go. In other news, the official Apple WordPress Student blog has been pretty busy lately. When the story about it first broke there wasn’t a whole lot of content up there, but now it has filled out nicely.

PunBB is the forum software I recommend most people use, and they just released a new version. They are, as far as I know, only the second system to release a table-less thread view. (The first being wp.org/bbPress.) They took a different approach than I did, and if you view the source it’s actually pretty heavy markup, but this is putting valid forums into the hands of many more people. Looks like an excellent release. Hat tip: Alex.

Videora is like podcasting for video, using Bit-Torrent. Om just interviewed the creator of it. What I think is neat is it works without needing a special element (like <enclosure>) in the RSS, which incidentally means it works with non-RSS2.0 syndication formats as well. It doesn’t need any new formats, and works today. This is how I think other aggregators that support rich media will evolve, it’s podcasting without the hassle on the publisher end.

It is definitely a stay-at-home and drink-hot-chocolate kind of day here in San Francisco. And I’m totally okay with that. Now if only I could get the 64-bit Windows installation disk to recognize my SATA controller, life would be good. I’m not a fan of Linux for desktop usage yet (I’ve tried it about once a year for 4+ years now) but I might be pushed in that direction, ironically, because of better hardware compatibility. This might be easier if I had a non-USB floppy drive, but I’m not inclined to go out in this weather just to get one.

The WD Raptor drive got here yesterday, now all I need to finish up this new workstation is to pick a motherboard/CPU combo. (And get matching memory.) Can’t decide whether to go P4 or Athlon 64.

I met Merlin Mann last night at the Creative Commons party last night and even saw the hipster PDA in action. Pretty neat stuff, I may even make the 43 Folders meetup on Tuesday Wednesday, but first I should probably finish up GTD. (I’ve never gotten to Part Three, which may speak for itself.)

When I saw Giga Om at Jay’s lunch yesterday he happily informed me that his site, which is now on WordPress 1.5, handled Slashdottings two days in a row and all of the traffic from the LJ/6A story without a hiccup. I asked if he was running Staticize which increases the performance of WP significantly and he said no. (!)

The WordPress Planet aggregator is back, though it still needs a better design.

To download the new Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) software you need to verify that you’re a customer “running genuine Microsoft Windows.” I’m pretty sure mine is legit, at least the guy on Market street said it was. Of course on the confirmation page, it seems you can get by their million-dollar verification system by choosing “No, do not validate Windows at this time, but take me to the download.” Hat tip: Robert Scoble.

It seems some users are not optimistic about the future of an Open Source LiveJournal, especially in light of the recent changes to their Social Contract ( “They completely gutted the Free Software section.”), which was supposedly changed because “Lawyers didn’t like ‘contract’ in the name ‘social contract’ because it does not have the structure of a contract.” Seems to work for Debian though, which has lawyers out the wazoo.

LivePress is “a Live Journal compatibility and synchronization plugin. It is designed to let WordPress users continue to use their Live Journal accounts with minimal hassle. It adds support for moods, music, synching posts between WordPress and Live Journal accounts and implements the lj-user and lj-cut tags in WordPress.” Then there’s Croissanga, which provides similar functionality for Xanga, another journaling site with millions of users that is frequently overlooked. Hat tip: Wordlog.

The 6A comment spam article was written by John Gruber?

It’s confirmed and official now. Especially interested in this: “Will LiveJournal stay open source? The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source…” Another interesting thing is that on the 6A site they’re calling everything LiveJournal does “weblogging” which I doubt few bloggers or LJers would, but it’s clearly a deliberate wording on their part. Glad this is out the door, interested to see where it goes. Congrats to Om for the scoop, too—the 6A press release reads a lot like his post.

According to PubSub, I am suddenly much, much less popular. Was it something I said? Fortunately this has no correlation with my actual traffic. Hat tip: Weblog Tools Collection.

Dan has an interesting photo calendar he’s selling with some fantastic dog pictures and for every $25 calendar sold $20 is going to the Red Cross. The donations are a fantastic idea, but isn’t the Red Cross already maxed out for donations they can send to many of those places? Others can speak to that issue much better than I.

The flood of truly vile Trackback spam today sadly confirms what I was worried about months ago: if we lock down commenting (with things like WP Hashcash and Typekey) it’ll just push them to Trackback. All the captcha in the world won’t fix Trackback. Our last line of defense is the content-based filters like Spam Karma, Spaminator, and Three Strikes.