If you don’t like the look of the current WP backend be sure to check out SpotPress. Also check out the Tiger Admin, which is grrrrrreat. Update: Tiger is now a Greasemonkey script.

I would be remiss to not point out fellow developer Alex’s new launch of the online aggregator Feed Lounge. I must still have a little country left in me, because whenever I hear the word “feed” I think the food you give the pigs and horses. But it’s good for bloggers too, and Alex’s new endeavor has the finest interface I’ve seen yet on an online aggregator. It’s a closed beta right now, so you can’ try it out yet, but you can go admire how their entire site is built in WordPress. I think it worked especially well for their FAQ section, maybe we should do that on wordpress.org. I wonder if this will be a quick flip?

Lorelle, one of the shining stars of the amazing WordPress Documentation team, just wrote a nice article about the new Codex front page.

How long before we’ll see ads in podcasts? Well Noah Glass of Odeo fame has registered PodAds.com. (Back in 10/2004.)

Andy is doing some sort of weird remote commenting with Sxip thing, if you’re into that you might want to drop by.

Dating an Apple Developer, which is somewhat generally applicable. Hat tip: Mr Haughey.

While poking around and calibrating all my monitors the same way today I found the setting for making the Mac OS X gamma similar to that found on PCs, personally I prefer to see things how most of my users are going to see them. It’s under System Preferences, the Displays, Color, and then click Calibrate.

This AJAX spell checker seems pretty interesting and functions a lot like Gmail’s. Has anyone written a plugin using it yet?

I’m going to be at CTC in a few weeks in New York and to warm things up Arieanna Foley quizzed me “about collaboration tools, open source, and how companies can get going using non commercial collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis.” Worth checking out.

“In fact, the ease of putting up pages on wordpress was amazing. I wouldn’t hesitate to use wordpress to manage content for almost any small business’s website.”

Google Sitemaps seem strange to me, but you can generate them with WordPress now.

Nirantar, a Hindi blogzine, has a special WordPress edition up. Judging from the cover I’m pretty sure this has an interview I did with them in it. I hope my terrible jokes translated well.

A community is an investment, if you create one and they feel disempowered it can get ugly and sad. With WordPress we don’t have the resources to address all of the community requests, but we do try hard and make progress every week and I think people appreciate that.

I had missed this great Newsforge review of WordPress when it came out.

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.