Category Archives: WordPress

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!

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.

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.

About.com switching to WordPress

Sheila Coggins just published an interview with me on About.com Weblogs, which came out fairly well and talks a little bit about new efforts like WordPress.com.

The timing for the interview couldn’t be better. As people watching closely may have already started to notice, About.com has begun switching their sites over to WordPress from Movable Type. They’ve been doing it quietly and one-by-one for at least month now, you can see WP in action on Weblogs, Baby Parenting, entrepreneur, US politics, and many more. They’ve integrated it so tightly with their system most of the usual signs of a WP blog aren’t there, but the dead giveaway is the comments. In fact none of their older blogs seem to have comments enabled, just the upgraded WP ones.

About.com isn’t very “2.0” hip but they are still get some of the highest traffic on the web, easily within the top 50 sites in the world. From what I understand they haven’t made any changes to the core code, all of their customizations have been through plugins. They’re also looking at bringing a WP “powered by” link to the pages. (Which, as noted in the previous entry, is completely optional.) I’m very glad About has found a platform that will grow with them. 🙂

The good news keeps coming in.

German Focus

So the next trip to Europe I’ll have to catch the Netherlands and Germany, I’ve met some fantastic WordPress users (and future users) from both. There is someone on stage from a German media organization talking about how they’ve begun emphasizing blogs much more in their publication, Focus. After browsing a bit I noticed that blogs.focus.msn.de (yes that’s MSN) is all WordPress blogs — cool! What’s interesting about being Open Source is that the software turns up places you would never suspect or know about.

Yahoo on WordPress

Stephen Steele (is that a real name?) just wrote in that the new Yahoo Mail updates blog is on WordPress. As far as I know this is the first official Yahoo blog on WP I’ve seen. What makes it really interesting is it’s the first time I’ve seen third-party software (like WordPress) on the yahoo.com domain. You’ll notice every time they’ve done blogs before it’s been on a different domain like yahoo.net or ysearchblog.com, I imagine because of the incredibly strict security requirements anything with access to Yahoo.com cookies must meet. This is very exciting news. 🙂