I got word a little bit ago that 2Wire, makers of the modems everyone with SBC DSL gets and a cool new DVR, are using WordPress internally. “We tried salesforce.com and now we use WordPress exclusively!”

Earlier I noticed that FreeBSD has a WordPress port, which means you can install WordPress automatically, just like on Debian and Gentoo. Only with Free software. 🙂

I may have to take back the nice things I said about MySQL earlier, I had forgotten how much of a pain the new collation stuff is. I’m sure they could have added character set support in a more transparent fashion.

It seems I’m seeing more and more great designs in WordPress blogs, where previously the really gorgeous stuff was either hand-rolled or on another system. Citizen Dmitri is a great looking WordPress blog, Binary Bonsai is still one of my favorite designs right now (try out the LiveSearch). I need to start keeping up my well designed list again. Hat tip for Citizen Dmitri: Dave.

New Kleptones mix which I have temporarily mirrored locally from Andy. (Individual files.)

I’ve been enjoying Lifehacker.

The Technorati Tag API is Broken, or so asserts Kevin Burton. The post is a little old and the comments don’t seem to have gone anywhere. I think the tag having to appear in the URI is a weakness, and a restriction that isn’t reasonable under many hosting enviroments. That said, my understanding of rel="tag" is that they don’t have to link to Technorati at all, they can link to your own taxonomy and not Google bomb key terms. (As WordPress does in 1.5.) You don’t even really need to use the links, since they spider categories and dc:subject from RSS feeds anyway, but if you do tag you posts using the link method, it might be worth using nofollow.

Study: Few bugs in MySQL database, which is good to know, since an increasingly large portion of my life is being put into MySQL. (And Apache, and PHP, but not so much Linux anymore. I’ve been setting up a new FreeBSD server and it rocks.)

Semantics in Markup of Ranked Tag Lists and the accompanying CSS demo is really cool. Too bad Technorati probably won’t adopt something like this. Perhaps another taggregator will?

Mark Ghosh takes a fair and balanced look at WordPress 1.5 Gamma. “Wow!”

It seems like Feedster has redesigned and looks a lot better. Some silly validation errors, but I’m sure they’ll get to that soon enough.

While Googling for Light HTTPD information I somehow came across leahhttpd, an interesting HTTP server, with many of the features you’d expect. However, its default error pages are certainly unique.

Wallpaper of the day: Texas Bluebonnets (click on picture for full-size)

My entry on Trackback Spam has been getting a lot of traffic today, unfortunately.

Firefox beat Internet Explorer in number of people accessing wordpress.org by about 80,000 in January. Of the people visiting with IE, over 90% were using 6.0. This makes web development much, much easier.

How to pitch an idea

Gigablast, the search engine run by one guy named Matt, allows you to do some interesting things with meta tags. Here is a search that finds all “generator” meta tags with “WordPress” and shows the tag itself in the search results. (About 1.5 million results.) I found out about this on the Gigablast blog which isn’t quite a blog. If Matt is looking for a better blog system, I have a suggestion. The results on Gigablast seem on par with Google’s for most things I tried, but the pages themselves need some UI and QA love.

Topix.net is built on flat files, not databases. My experience has been with the applications I do it’s easier to start with SQL and then cache to the filesystem/memcached.

How To Document Your Open-Source Tool, I don’t agree with it all but a good read.

There’s a new version of the One Click Backup plugin for WordPress.