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Category Archives: WordPress
New WordPress Theme Directory
Thomas Silkjær has put together an awesome new WordPress theme directory with uploading, tags, voting, download counters, and more. I hear there is even more on the way.
WordPress no-www
After being frustrated with mod_rewrite mojo, I wrote a quickie no-www plugin for WordPress that redirects people to the non-www version of your URLs, in the spirit of no-www.org. Update: This is now built into WordPress through the “canonical URLs” feature, just go to the General Settings page and remove “www” from the blog and WP URLs.
Harvard Blogs WordPress
The Harvard Berkman Center blog server has been switched to WordPress. This means anyone with a .havard.edu email address can get a WordPress blog on theri domain in seconds. They’re using MU.
Next Generation CMS
WordPress + Textpattern = WordPattern. 😉 (Big kudos to the Textpattern folks.)
Invalid Atom
“Next time someone tells you Atom 0.3 is invalid because the validator says so, point them to this page. The validator is full of it, because it doesn’t reflect reality.” If Robert had comments, I would say “I never suggested Bloglines was “best-effort software development” (though I do love it and use it myself) but merely that it has an overwhelming market share. We’ve been tracking feed stats on WordPress.com and Bloglines and Newsgator online both dominate. The Web Standards project never casts stones from an ivory tower, they’ve always advocated practical standards for pratical benefits. Ben’s comment was akin to someone saying that the site sucked because it used XHTML 1.0 instead of 1.1, or if the validator decided to instantly “deprecate” all sites using HTML 3.2, 4.0, and XHTML 1.0 when 1.1 came out.”
LiveJournal Ads
LiveJournal is adding a new service level with ads. They seem to be approaching it pretty sanely, and I imagine an ad-supported version of Typepad will follow soon. We’ve considered this approach on WP.com, basically opt-in ads, but (like Brad) I really really dislike advertising on personal pages.
Plugin Video Tutorial
Create a WordPress plugin in under 5 minutes with Mark Jaquith. This is awesome, I’d love to see more of this.
Zeldman Switches
I can now tell my kids about the day the inimitable Jeffrey Zeldman moved from almost 11 years of hand-coding to use WordPress. He wrote a bit about his thinking in Why WordPress? I’m about to walk out the door to go to Austin for SxSW, which last year was amazing and I thought it couldn’t get any better. When I started WordPress I had a one or two people in mind that in my wildest dreams would someday use the software, and that drove much of the development. Zeldman has switched, and I couldn’t be more honored. Now there’s even more work to do.
Archives Page Tip
I’m finally fixing all the bugs on photomatt.net, converting a lot of old stuff into WordPress Pages and generally tidying a few things. For my archives I wanted to display a list of recent entry titles like Hemingway does, but I ran into the problem that it would only show 10 at a time (or whatever you have set in your options) and then makes you page through the rest, which sucks. But, thanks to WP, the fix is easy! I added query_posts($query_string . '&showposts=1000&order=asc'); to the archive.php template right under the header call. Basically what this says is to take the current page query and add the part that shows a bunch of posts, in this case 1000, and also to sort it chronologically instead of newest to oldest. (Eric would be happy.) Since it’s in my archive template it doesn’t mess with any other pages. That’s all!
SxSW Meetup
Reminder: WordPress meetup at SxSW. 78 signups so far, I’ll try to bring shirts. 🙂
Meeting Dean
I finally got to meet Dean Allen, a charming fellow and one of the original inspirations for WordPress. In fact we link to Textpattern on our About page.
Theme Explodes Traffic
The effect of releasing a good WordPress theme on traffic and stats. With stories like this and all the success Micheal has had after Kubrick and K2 I really don’t understand why more professional designers aren’t falling over themselves to address the WordPress theming audience which is huge, growing by thousands every day, and very enthusiastic.
New Theme Competition
Someone is running a WordPress 2.0 theme competition with some pretty sweet prizes. Winners of previous competitions run by Alex have gotten a ton of exposure all over the blogosphere. I think there is so much new functionality possible with the new functions in 2.0 that themes like Regulus take advantage of that it should be a factor in the competition somehow.
Markup Survey
Ian Hixie at Google just published a really awesome web authoring survey of a billion documents. What I found most interesting about reading it was places that things I’ve worked on, notably WordPress and GMPG, popped up.
HTTP Headers — “A pretty significant number of pages include an X-Pingback header (more than the number of pages with the Set-Cookie2 header). In fact, X-Pingback was the 30th most-seen header in our data sample.”
WordPress is one of the few platforms that supports pingback, an alternative to Trackback with a real spec. Apparently there are enough WP pages in the world for this to make a blip on the radar.
Page Headers — “It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profileattribute, though. The three most-often used values are http://gmpg.org/xfn/1, http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/, and http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. This makes XFN the most popular HTML metadata profile!”
Too cool for words. 🙂 Both of these profiles are included by default in some WordPress templates.
rel="pingback" and rel="bookmark" both skirt the charts in the link relationship page. No XFN values made the cut there.
The <a> element — “external seems to be mainly propagated by WordPress, but people have long been asking for a way to label their links as being external vs internal.”
Nice to get a direct mention there, and we’ve supported bookmark and tag from the beginning. All in all the report is a very interesting read, and kudos to Google for doing this type of research and sharing it with the web. I hope to see more of these in the future, it delights my inner markup geek.
WordPress in its Terrible Threes
Mike Little points out that WordPress is three years old today. 🙂 Who woulda thunk it? Mike and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago, here’s a picture Khaled took of the event.
SxSW Meetup
A tentative WordPress meetup for SxSW is starting to come together, the date and time may change, so sign up if you’re interested. This is also the first time I’ve used Upcoming and I must say it’s pretty slick.
Newsforge on WP
Newsforge thinks WordPress 2.0 is better than ever. Aw shucks. 🙂 There is still a lot of work to do still, nice reviews are great but we’re still working our butts off on the next version.
WP2 Thoughts
WordPress 2.0 “Duke” is available! Like 1.5 when it first came out I expect it will take a few months before the full implications of this release are realized. There are some surface changes (see 5 little things I like about WP 2.0) that still need some polish in places, but I think the underlying architectual changes are really rock solid. Interface changes are easy to iterate on in future versions. WordPress.org also has a rocking new design from Matt Thomas, and there will be some more action there in the coming months.
WP on Yahoo
Check out the new bundling of WordPress with Yahoo Hosting, which is why I was biting my tongue so much last week. 🙂 We’re sitting next to Movable Type on their blog page, but I’m completely comfortable with new users trying out both and making their decision from there. (I often recommend it.) The other part of why this is interesting is the Akismet angle, which I wrote more about here.