Jason just wrote in that Ford Motor Company has launched a WordPress site, and it’s pretty kickass. How cool that the first Fortune 5 company to use WP goes beyond just a regular blog and really shows what can be done with a powerful framework.
Category Archives: Asides
Working Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync doesn’t suck anymore. In fact, it works great, just like you would expect a Google product to. I’ve replaced Foxmarks with it.
Static File Web Server
Philip Greenspun asks What’s the best web server program for a lot of static files?
Habari
Habari is a new PHP5, object-oriented, database independent blog project that includes some people who have contributed to WP in the past. Should be worth keeping an eye on once they get a release out, it reminds me a lot of Drupal meets Serendipity.
RTL support
RTL support in WordPress 2.1, I’m really looking forward to the release of 2.1 this month. Our internationalization efforts is probably where I learn the most new stuff day to day.
ALA Style Guide
The A List Apart Style Guide is fantastic, a nice concise refresher for anyone who writes to be read.
Dojo Offline Toolkit
How WordPress Spoils Developers
How WordPress Spoils Developers, I get the impression Brian is bullish on the future of WP. He’s right that we have a lot left to work on though, after 2.1 is out the door I think there’s going to be a ton more core development. Update: I agree far more with the developer-friendly bits than the “no room for anyone else” bits. If the latter arguments were true, WP itself wouldn’t exist and the fact that it’s never too late for something new is a point I emphasize in my talks a lot.
Macworld Meetup
Some folks are putting on a WordPress Meetup at Moscone Center around MacWorld next week. I’ll be there, you should too.
Couldn’t Live Without
For the second year WordPress has made the Techcrunch Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without list. If you count Akismet and WordPress separately, we actually made it twice. Thanks Mike!
John Mayer
John Mayer’s blog is good, but someone tell his personal ninja to hook him up with permalinks.
Build a Better You
Reader’s Digest helps you with your New Year’s resolutions, which we’re tracking on WordPress.com. Hat tip: Jeremy Boyd.
2006 Predictions
Thomas Hawk takes a look at all the predictions people made for 2006 and how right or wrong they were. I don’t know why, but I love prediction posts because they get people’s imaginations going.
Focusing on Market Share
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE — “[A] study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.”
Being blocked on your own blog
When you read about anti-spam problems like this with no recourse
, it means the spammers are winning. Akismet is platform-agnostic, and it already works great for all self-hosted systems, why shouldn’t it be available to people on Typepad? (Or Blogger.) If the folks on Fourth street don’t want to pay for an Akismet site license (though I’m sure we could work out a discount for their volume) they could just make it an option for users to specify an API endpoint, like a ping server address. This would also open up the market to anti-spam services besides Akismet, since anyone could clone the API if they wanted.
Performancing and PayPerPost
PayPerPost, a company I still consider highly distasteful (when you’re forced to change a core aspect of your business because of the FTC, that’s a bad thing) has bought Performancing Metrics. On the bright side, Performancing’s ad and Firefox products were not part of the deal.
Google and Technorati
Critical Look at Prototype JS
Prototype.js != $(). I’ve been thinking about other JS libraries lately, like Moo, jQuery, and Dojo. (jQuery and Dojo both use WordPress for their blogs.) We need to make a final final decision about what JS framework we’re going to stick to for a year or more before we release WP 2.1.
Crippling Vista DRM
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. I’ve been considering a new laptop once Microsoft finally ships Vista and Sony et al start bundling it, but reading things like this seriously makes me reconsider. (I’m a big fan of the TX series.) I’d love to read a differing viewpoint. Hat tip: Simon.
More on Google Tips
Blake Ross has a good look at the Google Tip issue I blogged about the other day, and an interesting suggestion for a better way to do it. Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose.