Truemors, the new rumor site from Guy Kawasaki, is built on WordPress. It joins 71miles as a cool app built on the WP framework.
Category Archives: Tech
Thunderbird Tags
It is pretty annoying tha the “tag” system in Thunderbird bears no relation to any tagging system implemented within the past four years. It is, at best, a non-folder-based categorization system, and doesn’t even have a particularly good UI for that. Thunderbird 2 also took away the views dropdown, which was an eminently useful feature, and the only way I can find to replicate it is to create search folders, which are of course are a lot clunkier. Might be time for a downgrade. Update: You can add back the views dropdown from the customize menu. Sweet! PhotoMatt.net readers rock. 🙂
NanoWeb
Nanoweb is an entire webserver, like Apache or Lighttpd, written in pure PHP.
Technorati and Authority
Did anyone notice how Technorati is now showing an Authority score for blogs? I searched for it on Technorati, which took me to this blog talking about the feature, which seems to indicate it’s an alias for number of unique blogs linking in the past 180 days. It would be neat if the number had a little more secret sauce.
So using the new number, WordPress.org has 634,821 unique active blogs linking to it, and WordPress.com has 496,462. Given that I know we have 931,951 live blogs on WordPress.com, Technorati seems to indicate that about 53% of them are active, which seems within the realm of possibility. However I don’t think the same methodology works for all sites, for example Livejournal which claims 12,877,330 live blogs only shows up with 481,843 in the last 6 months in Technorati, seems unusually far below their million blogs updated in the past 1 month, even taking into account a huge number may be private.
Yahoo, Microsoft, PHP
If Microsoft were to buy Yahoo, I wonder if it would have an impact on PHP?
New Sphere
Sphere, which I’m an adviser to, has just re-aligned. What do you think? Update: They also have a WordPress plugin.
Scaling Large Scale Web Services
One day I’m going to do a presentation on Scaling Large Scale Web Services with one slide: Use PHP. 😉
Alexa Walled Garden
Access to Alexa Traffic Graphs via undocumented APIs will be closed within the next few weeks. Lame lame lame — an image tag is not an undocumented API. Recommended replacements: Quantcast, Compete.
Vista, SSD, and Sound
So I managed to snag a 32gb flash solid state drive. (Here’s a picture.) I personally think SSDs are the future and a computer sold with a regular hard disk in five years will seem as quaint as selling one with a tape drive is today. However the technology is still really early, as evidenced by the difficulty I had obtaining one, the cost, and the relatively small storage size (larger sizes are promised or announced, but only 32GB is commercially available). 32gb is more than enough for my primary HD, as anything heavy I can store on a cheap and slow SATA drive or on the network.
I spend a lot of time on my desktop, so I’m fairly sensitive to the speed of things there. I year or so ago I upgraded to a Western Digital 10k Raptor SATA drive and I was pleasantly surprised by the speed boost, more than I normally get from upgrading the CPU. So I thought the SSD would be a nice chance to refresh my desktop and also do a clean install of Windows Vista, which I’ve had laying around. I decided not to touch the CPU, memory, or graphics card, which are a FX-55, 4gb, and Radeon X800 respectively. Installing the SSD was easy, I just needed an IDE converter because it is laptop size.
First off, I like Vista better than Windows XP. There are just a lot of little things, like when you press Windows + M it minimizes windows on both monitors, that are a lot more polished. Also, thanks to the SSD, install and boot times are incredibly fast. Launching programs also feels snappier. The visual effects seem fine on my slightly-old video card, and in general everything feels great. There is also a benefit to wiping the OS and starting with a fresh, I probably had some cruft accumulated before which may have contributed to a slowdown. I don’t know if Vista is worth an upgrade, but if you’re going to start fresh I would go for it.
I have run into two problem, one large and one small. First, about 24 hours after I had set things up, I came back to the computer and it said it had rebooted to recover from a “blue screen” error. I have no idea what caused this, but it hasn’t happened since.
More importantly though, something is seriously wrong with the sound. System sounds, and playing music through iTunes or Windows Media sounds great… for about 5 minutes. At some seemingly random point all the sound switches to this really awful distortion which is painful to the ear. When this happens I have to close the application that was playing sound, be it a Youtube video in Firefox or an MP3 in Windows Media, and restart the application for any sound on the computer to return to normal. This sucks. I’m just using the standard nForce sound card built into my motherboard, nothing fancy, and according to Vista it can’t find a better driver for it. I’ve googled around a lot but can’t find anyone with a similar problem, but if I figure out a fix I’ll update this entry to help future net searchers.
DoubleClick and Kevin Ryan
I just read about DoubleClick being acquired for 3.1 billion by Google. Coincidentally I met Kevin Ryan, co-founder of DoubleClick, earlier today. These days he’s involved in several startups, he showed me a cool demo of one called ShopWiki. It’s a shopping search engine that indexes everything, not just paid feeds like Shopping.com does, and you can do cool stuff like search by color and neat range stuff.
Clipmarks
Clipmarks is probably the best implementation I’ve seen of the idea of bookmarking a part of a page.
JS-Kit Ratings widget
JS-Kit Ratings widget is a small, registration free JS widget you can use to allow people to rate things on your site. I think this is a pretty neat approach to things.
Buzz TV
Technorati Buzz TV yesterday: “Before Jesus was a carpenter he was a… gay escort?” No blog reactions at the time of this post. Has Technorati gone tasteless, or are you going to subscribe to the videocast and use Technorati more now? I’m curious about your thoughts.
Thunderbird Release?
What ever happened to Thunderbird 2? The nightly builds claim to be version 3 now.
Blogger Ads above Search Results
I had read a few stories about Google services being advertised above search results as a “tip” but I hadn’t realized it was this prevalent. In their position if I was trying to get more users I might do the same, but for some reason this surprised me coming from Google. (It wouldn’ from Microsoft. Hat tip: Mark.
MT Export Helper
Split Your MT Export File. I wrote a quick little web service to intelligently split large export files from Typepad and Movable Type into more manageable chunks.
Firefox Followup: Parakey
Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross’ secret new project, Parakey. It gets to the meat on the third page.
“Although it looks like a Web site–down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section–it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera.”
It uses a new language called JUL. I haven’t found anything about Parakey online, besides Parakey.com registered about a month ago. Most disappointing quote from the article?
“If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”
I’m guessing this might be a misquote. Investors are for money, advice, and connections, not product leadership. There are good examples now of scalable businesses being built on top of open source — don’t let anyone take you down a path you can’t believe in 100%. Think long term. I don’t know who Parakey’s investors are, but I’m sure Blake hooked up with (or could demand) folks smart enough to understand this.
Update: Blake says in the comments, “That is, indeed, a misquote. Parakey will be open source, as I repeatedly told the magazine while the article was being edited.”
WordPress Firefox Extension
I think a WordPress Firefox extension (add-on) would be pretty cool, I have a ton of ideas for it but I’m curious what you guys would like to see in it. What would make blogging easier for you? Any talented FF extenders who would like to take on the project and get paid?
Cranky Geeks
I was on the Cranky Geeks show yesterday with John Dvorak. So far there are two polar comments on my appearance: “Didn’t quite like the WordPress guy. He seemed disingenuous and what he said was redundant.” “I think that the WordPress guy was great.” I hope that means something is right. We now return to our regularly redundant programming programming.
Bloglines Update
I’m a few days late on this, but I think the new Bloglines updates are really slick, they’re subtle but they really improve the usability of the product. Bloglines is my favority aggregator, online or offline, and I admire the restraint they have. It would be easy for them to add every possible feature, instead they keep things simple and, since January, fast. Simplicity is far harder than complexity. Especially in a big organization.