The Harvard Gazette is now on WordPress, with a beautiful magazine-style design. There’s a whole meme/argument going around a few blogs and Twitter saying WordPress isn’t a CMS. Who cares what you call it, look at the amazing sites you can create. (And manage content on.) Who woulda thunk it. I thought WordPress was only good for “just a blog” — what are these Harvard gonzos doing? Fie! I say.
Category Archives: Asides
IntenseDebate auto-login
WordPress.com User Accounts now auto-login to IntenseDebate blogs no matter where they’re hosted, any website in the world. Connect services like Facebook’s and Twitter’s always require at the very least a click or two, and in worst case can be a full login and several bounces to the origin site, which increases the friction of commenting and can actually decrease the number of comments you get. (Oh noes!) This is much smoother, and faster. Previously this was only available if you actually hosted on WP.com, now it’s for any website, anywhere.
PubSubHubBub
WP.com is now Pubsubhubbub-enabled, and the code we used to do that is now available as a plugin as well. It took me 30 seconds to add to this blog using the dashboard “add plugin” functionality and searching for “pushpress.” I love it when we’re able to do these simultaneous releases, it falls in line well with WP.com’s goal of all its useful code being available to everyone, for example the custom CSS release.
OS Enemy of State
Guardian: When using open source makes you an enemy of the state. “The US copyright lobby has long argued against open source software – now Indonesia’s in the firing line for encouraging the idea in government departments”
Thunderbird in 2010
Thunderbird in 2010 by project lead David Ascher, who I met with a few days ago. I’m sticking with Thunderbird for this year, just hoping for some kick-butt Gravatar integration.
Future of Reading
10 media and tech luminaries on the future of reading, I’m number 10. Also includes Jimmy Wales, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jarvis, and Kevin Rose.
Jay-Z
As I noted on Twitter, Jay-Z now has a WordPress-powered blog. It’s bare right now, but hopefully they really start to stretch WP soon. By the by, Jay, let’s grab a bite and talk tech and design. 😉 Hat tip: Michael Koenig.
Seven on Seven – Rhizome
In April I’m going to be participating in an event called Seven on Seven put on by Rhizome. “Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new — be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine — over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.”
Start Project
As reported on BoomTown, I’m joining some cool folks including Biz Stone, Chris Sacca, Mike Tatum, and David Liu as an adviser to The Start Project.
WPtogo is now WordPress Android
We’ve just released WordPress for Android 1.0 which is a continuation of the WpToGo development now under an official WordPress banner, and of course as Free Software. Congrats to Dan and the team on making this happen. Mobile stuff is really starting to come together for WordPress. I’ve been playing with this on my Nexus One for about a week and loving it.
Better Firefox Checker
After the Deadline, the enhanced spelling and grammar checker, has just released a new extension for Firefox that enables AtD functionality on any textarea on the web, which is really killer. This is one of the possibilities I was most excited about when we acquired AtD. For more check out the coverage on Download Squad and Lifehacker.
To Munich for DLD
I’m heading to Munich, Germany for the DLD conference where I’m going to be on a panel. If you’re there say howdy and I’ll show you my Apple Tablet. (Just kidding. :))
WordPress Foundation
The WordPress Foundation website is now live, and some interesting things coming for it soon.
Stanford Daily
It looks like the Stanford Daily, Stanford University’s newspaper since 1892, is now on WordPress.
Polldaddy Billion
Polldaddy just became the second Automattic web service to reach a billion pageviews a month. (I’m not counting Gravatar.) They also just updated their WordPress.org plugin to including ratings. Watch for some other major updates coming up soon. Update: ReadWriteWeb gives some context to the story.
Trying out Nexus One
This week I’ve taken the SIM card out of my iPhone and put it in the Nexus One, which I’m going to try to stick with for the next week. I love my 3GS, but I’m just hungry for something else as the iPhone has felt a little stagnant lately, and the Nexus has the most beautiful hardware — it’s a pleasure to hold and look at. So far I’m really happy with the screen, the grass live background, the Google and Facebook contact syncing, news/weather widget, Google Voice (!), and I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to the UI. (Only other Android device I’ve tried was the G1, and that lasted 10 minutes.) I’m not impressed with the email application IMAP support, the app store seems a bit anemic, and the camera application crashed once when I was trying to take a picture. I’ve found equivalent apps for the most-used stuff on my iPhone.
WP.com Tips
My Tips on WordPress.com, a good summary of a lot of the features that launched last year which in hindsight was a ton.
Google & China
Google is taking a new approach to China. This is a big deal, they’re basically implying the Chinese government has been hacking Google accounts to compromise human rights advocates. Interesting the note at the end where they say these decisions and investigations were entirely in the US, it’s almost like they’re trying to protect their employees there.
Custom CSS
There have been a few requests for the plugin that drives the custom CSS feature on WordPress.com. We wanted to clean it up before releasing, and ended up adding a feature that stores the CSS better (in the posts table) and also adds revisions so you can revert to an old version of your custom CSS. The plugin is now available on the WordPress.org directory, free for everybody. Enjoy!
Secret History of Kubrick
The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet, a nice article by Tina Daunt.