Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Vanilla Sponsored Links

Asides

Vanilla, the popular open source forum software, is now embedding sponsored links in every download so when you install it they’re on your site. This strikes me as a bad idea the same way sponsored themes are, except worse because it’s in the core code. This and things like the sale of Pligg say to me that many open source web products are having a hard time transitioning to businesses. It also bothers me when people cite “hosting costs” as the reason for doing something like this. Hosting has never been cheaper, there are plenty of free resoures like Sourceforge and Google Code, and plenty of people would donate hosting if it was asked for, including myself.

Airport Security?

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I just found a pocketknife in my laptop bag. This is not unusual, except I remembered that I must have taken it with me both to and from Houston earlier in the week, passing through security both times with a 2 inch blade in my bag. This happened once before, but was caught on the return flight. Total I have passed through airport security at least 4 times with a forgotten pocketknife, and only once did they stop me. A 25% hit rate? That’s just going to frustrate me more next time I’m standing in a security line for an hour.

Blocked in Turkey

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People trying to visit WordPress.com from Turkey are seeing this message: “Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance.” I didn’t realize Turkey had a great firewall like China. This is really unfortunate because we have a really passionate Turkish community that gets about 12 million pageviews a month. Any good tips for people to get around the block? Update: This comment has the story and resolution. We’re back Update 2: It appears we’re still blocked, here is more info.

MovableType 4 vs. WordPress 2.2

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Mashable compared MovableType 4 and WordPress 2.2. I wouldn’t agree with Byrne that “Movable Type 4.0 is light years ahead of its predecessor not to mention any other blogging tool on the market” but they have caught up to a lot of basic features — pages, WYSIWYG, pagination, user registration — that have been lacking in the platform for a while. That, plus the fact that they support WordPress imports and cloned our pages API does show that they’re gunning for some switchers regardless of what they may say in public. (I’m cool with both of those by the way, it was good of them to adopt existing standards instead of invent new ones. In fact it’d be nice if they could export to WXR as well as it’s pretty semantically rich and the current MT export format leaves a lot of important stuff out, like slugs.)