Apparently Robert Cronk was the first American born in 1924 and is very proud of that fact. I got an email from him, presumably because of the genealogy site I admin: “In a cursory examination of your website, I notice, in addition to all the others born on January 1st, there are five specified as being born on January 1, 1924. I would like you to pass along my greetings to these five persons, because I, too, was born on January 1, 1924. I know it is premature, but January 1, 2004, is fast approaching, so I would like to say to everyone who shares that date as a birthday, HAPPY BIRTHDAY and HAPPY NEW YEAR from the FIRST AMERICAN BORN IN 1924.” Browse around the site a bit, it’s certainly one of the less traversed corners of the internet. (Yes, I am just now getting to email from 10/2003. I said I was catching up.)

My Dvorak article has been translated into German for this German Dvorak resource.

It looks like Business 2.0 writer Om Malik is back on WordPress.

My Spanish isn’t what it used to be but this history of WordPress looks good.

The new Three Strikes WP spam plugin has bayesian filtering now.

IllustRender is a WordPress plugin that “replaces illustration code in your posts with the actual illustration.

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

Daniel writes in that Bucks County Courier Times has a WordPress-powered blog section that looks pretty heavily customized. I’m told it’s one of the larger papers over there.

Carthik estimates there are at least 400 WordPress plugins. If so, we’ve got about 15% of those in the repository already.

This comment from Indi says that “Blogs are fun for leisure, but they are saving lives right now in Sri Lanka.” Sarvodaya looks like an excellent organation to support in this crisis. See also: Bloggers without Borders.

Nominations for the 2005 Bloggies are open, this is the real weblog awards, not that thing that was making rounds the other month. You don’t have to fill in everything to nominate but at least do “Best Application for Weblogs” and be sure to check the box at the bottom that you’d like to be on the panel. Only takes a minute. 😉

I’ve noticed WordPress downloads and newsletter subscriptions are about 60% above the daily average the last few days. Maybe people are making new year resolutions to switch?

The PHP homepage has a phpBB smackdown, but unfortunately no permalinks. Apparently the phpBB asserted that the problem was due to a bug in PHP (which I had heard as well) when in fact it was a input validation error in phpBB. More snark!

“This week, 90% of the attempts to activate FeedDemon have been with cracked serial numbers.”

Cleaning up a bit more from the party and I’m finding little Channel 9 people all over the house in strange places. It’s funny, and a little scary. Michael Eakes has some pictures of the fellows when they were still orderly.

Thanks to everyone who came out. The dinner was excellent and the after-party was packed. Judging from the number of cups and such I think about 40-50 people came out, but I really don’t have any idea. Much to my surprise, pictures are already online! You can browse Nicole’s afterparty and geekdinner tags, Jasmeet’s geek dinner tag, and Jonas’ photos. Some other people (Om and Russell) were taking photos but I don’t know where they went. There might be something to this Flickr thing. Scoble looks like he had a good time here.

After every good party, there’s an afterparty, and Robert’s geek dinner Thursday night is no different. When it turned out the venue was just a stone’s throw from my place in SF it just made sense to allow the festivities to continue after the restaurant kicks us out. So after the dinner we’ll walk down to my place (about two blocks) where the fun can continue with food, refreshments, and of course wifi. Everyone is invited, as long as you’re XFN Friendly. (Though I’m willing to make an exception for Marc.) If you haven’t already let me know you’re coming via email or IM please leave a comment so I can stock up accordingly. 🙂

Mark Ghosh (of WLTC fame) is marrying the love of his life. Congrats!

Those of you who I had given my address to as “333” please change that to “355.” Sorry for the confusion! I just got a heap of Christmas cards today that had gone to the wrong address.

Comment Spam is a thing of the past. That method I’ve found to be 100% effective in stopping bot-based spam, but you still need some sort of content moderation for manually-entered spam. A version of Stopgap Extreme called WP Hashcash is in the new plugin repository and undergoing shared development. The repository has over 55 plugins already and it hasn’t even been officially announced. 🙂 (And this doesn’t count.)