Quick and easy emerge guide.

TV hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

Shelley’s Parable of the Languages, a re-run, but one of those re-runs that makes you feel nice and fuzzy.

66,639 pings on Ping-O-Matic yesterday, let’s see if we can beat that today. 🙂 I rewrote the pinger deamon in Python, because the old PHP one was crashing the system on a regular basis. The new one is amazingly light, and was ridiculously easy to write. So now Ping-O-Matic is powered by PHP, Python, Perl, and caffeine. Right tool for the right job.

I’m not sure why they’re still working on a WordPress Blacklist when that functionality is built in to 1.2 in a very robust fashion. At this point patches to improve the included blacklist/moderation would be more useful to the average user, I think.

Work-safe art, John Ashcroft would approve.

RSS 2.0 specification clarifications. This looks simple and effective, two things I like. If this goes through I’ll update WordPress’ RSS import to follow these guidelines.

Harry Potter 3 was fun. I could see it again.

WordPress subscribe to comments plugin from Jennifer. Upload two files, add one line to your template, and activate the plugin on your admin page. Beautiful.

Fellow WP developer Alex has released his cursor-aware quicktag code under the LGPL. This is one of my very favorite features of WordPress, and its ease of use is one of the main reasons I haven’t adapted a meta-language like Markdown personally.

Tanya — Raving Lunatic: “At one point he said “they can have my organs after I’m dead. Not before,” and I found myself thinking, “well that’s perfectly sensible. I can get behind that.””

I could enjoy these more if I cared for the design of the site itself. Sequels always have trouble.

Meet The New Blog—Same As The Old Blog.
“In other words, dear comment spammers and trolls, you are both now officially extinct. The asteroid has hit, and you are a herd of triceratops. Time to die.” Aaron doesn’t dig the template structure.

Derek Featherstone: One Word: ImPressive. “OK, I admit it. I’m on the WordPress bandwagon.” When did we become a bandwagon? Derek outlines several reasons why he chose WordPress, including its syntax, templates, and learnability. He has a nice clean design over there as well. Congrats and welcome to the family. 🙂

PearPC, a PowerPC Architecture Emulator. My fake OS X Sony laptop can finally be complete. At the very least it’d be useful for debugging Safari and Mac IE problems. I’ll try to install it next week.

Ping-o-Matic did over 60,000 pings yesterday. I just finished rewriting the pinging engine to make it even faster. Are you pinging it yet?

Jeffrey on the new Glassdog and the web. Happy ninth birthday. HTML wasn’t easy enough, and it isn’t getting any easier. Blogs aren’t anything special, they’re just a function of software that makes it easy to maintain content. Compare the usability of the top 3 blog packages with the top 3 “content management systems.” Blogging software is the simplest mechanism for “In-depth explorations of every imaginable topic.” That’s the revolution.

“Odd what you find when you decide to just follow comment link after comment link – why do some people seem to think that to use WordPress you must know PHP ?”

Jill/txt is having some problems switching to WordPress, maybe we can help? Two documentation pages that come to mind are styling lists and The Loop.

A few useful Windows keyboard shortcuts. I remember seeing a very comprehensive list somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.