Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Well Designed Weblogs?

Design, WordPress

Or not.

Lars Holst, who has a beautiful WordPress-powered blog, has been doing a bit he calls Well-Designed Weblogs. I have been pretty disappointed with the second round (and to some extent the first round) of “Well-Designed Weblogs.” It is subjective, but quite frankly there are some sites I don’t see anything in. To me some look plain, unimaginative, squished — overall badly designed.

For the list to be a useful Lars should put a blurb about why a site was chosen so if there is some nugget of inspiration there that I’m missing, I can be enlightened. It would also shed some light on the subjective process he’s going through, which would be interesting. Round 2 has 37 entries — some great, some mediocre, some bad. If it could be distilled to the five or six very best, in Lars’ opinion, it would be a lot more meaningful than the catalog it is now.

But if it’s just a list with screenshots, there are better places to go.

CSS Style Competition

Design, WordPress

There is still time to get your entries in for the WordPress CSS style competition, with the top prize currently at $70. Not bad for making a single CSS file. What’s great is no matter who gets the prize, the community wins as each entry is licensed under the GPL.

Update: It finished up with 38 entries, many of them quite good. Yes that’s 38 different designs you can use on your new WordPress blog after just updating one line. We might even automate that step too. 🙂

On Orkut

WordPress, , ,

What can I say, I like it. Orkut is a new social networking site funded by Google that takes the best of all the other sites out there and rolls it into one fast system. Let me emphasize fast. I gave up on Friendster because I’m not patient enough to wait minutes for every screen to load. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but every site I’ve tried so far (with the exception of LinkedIn) feels like it’s held together by spit and duck tape and run on a 486. Not to mention the atrocious markup.

A neat thing about Orkut is that it’s invitation-only, so everyone there is connected to the original seed guy and programmer (whose name is Orkut, incidentally) which I think is an interesting idea. Scott Allen (who has a great new WordPress-powered blog) says that’s the most innovative thing about Orkut.

Scott remarked to me that he didn’t see Orkut flourishing the same way Ryze or Linkedin have because it mixes the personal and business aspect of things, while those two are mainly for business networking and only flirt with personal aspects. It’s too soon to tell, but I think Orkut is going to be a big success. It does a lot of things right.

So go check it out, and if you’re having trouble getting in let me know and I’ll send you an invite. If you’re already on, introduce yourself.

So I’m 20

Birthday, WordPress

This is it. Last year my birthday was loud and surprising, this year it was chill. Both have their attraction.

WordPress Birthday logo

Awww thanks. 🙂 Mad props to Craig for the WordPress header (currently in rotation).

While I’m here I’d also like to wish a happy birthday to Dave, who had a birthday a few days ago and didn’t tell anyone. 😉

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Assorted Links

WordPress, ,
  • 50 Miler Panorama is one of the coolest panoramas I’ve seen. Zach’s dad sent me an email detailing a little of the process:

    Dan Hale here – Zach’s dad, and the guy who created the panorama. I did this one entirely by hand in Photoshop. I made nine shots that day, placing the people in only the middle third of the frame of each. I shot with a super wide lens – a 17mm on a 35mm camera. The stitching was painstaking as I wanted to overlap the shots in such a way as to hide the transitions. This process was complicated by the fact that the cloud movement between shots varied the brightness, contrast and color of light. Evening that out took a lot of work. I did have the presence of mind when I did the shooting to use a constant shutter speed and aperture. I could go on and on about this labor of love. All in all it recon it took me 14-17 hours or so of work in PS to get to its current state.

    Wow. Hat tip: Zach.

  • Nightly builds of WordPress. Oh, and 1.0 is out. More on that later.
  • Adam Gessaman has the best response, Locke, Property, and Software, to the lame Aaron Swartz screed on Nick Bradbury’s On Piracy. One thing though, I’m tired of people making comments about Aaron’s ideas in relation to his age. Either talk about his age and be safely ignored, or treat his ideas independently.
  • How to fix <abbr in Internet Explorer. Nifty.
  • :hover anything in Internet Explorer. Awesome.
  • Simple Quiz from Dan Cedorholm has some of the most high-threshhold discussion of CSS and HTML semantics around.
  • Tantek is naked. Now what he really needs is to shed some of that extraneous list markup that really isn’t adding much to the semantic richness of his site. At least one level of that list could be eliminated. I’m not going to call Tantek’s markup bloated, but he could shave a few K off with that list markup. There are some novel ideas there though. I wonder what he could do with a good content management package. I’ve got a version of WordPress running with markup very similar to Tantek’s, but the blog isn’t public yet so I can’t link it.
  • Joi asks Are Blogs Just? I really like how he brings in things from all over the spectrum. Joi continues to pleasantly surprise me.
  • Apparently US money has a watermark of some sort so that if you open it up in Photoshop or try to print it the equipment has built-in guards. Pretty crazy.
  • WordPress nightly builds. Builds are released nightly, bugs are released hourly. Get 24 new bugs in every release.
  • Drawings from a guy on acid.
  • Cruft-free URIs in WordPress. 3 steps, one of which is clicking to the options screen and another which may be automated in a future version.

Problem With Trackback

WordPress

Today I was cleaning up some of the trackback code for WordPress when a number of things struck me about Trackback, which I’m sure someone has thought of before but I’m surprised they haven’t been addressed in the specification.

First off, what is trackback? On movabletype.org there is a Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack that is pretty thorough. Interestingly though they mention the names of several “tools” that have implemented TrackBack (as <strong> no less) they don’t link to any of them. If you’re not familiar with Trackback go read the first section of that to get up to speed.

A commonly requested feature is the ability to send a trackback ping when editing an entry. This has been especially needed since we’ve implemented post status flags (so you can, for example, save your post as a draft and work on it later). There are a couple of logical steps to implementing this, the first of which being that we need to track what pings have and haven’t been sent yet. Then the posting code had to modified a bit to only send trackback pings when an entry was published, and to not ping a URI that had been pinged before, et cetera. Not terribly hard stuff, just a bit of code to go through and some testing to make sure everything worked right.

Now that we have a nice record of pings that have been sent, I thought it would be nice to add that data to the default template for WordPress, as Trackback suffers from the same one-way linking problem it was trying to solve. That is, if I trackback another site my ping will show up in their comments or their trackbacks, but there’s nothing on my site indicating I sent that ping.

Then I realized that this set of pinged URIs I had was close to useless. What does a URI like http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55 mean anyway? If you enter it in your browser you get an XML error back. If you append a query string to it with ?__mode=rss with some implementations you will get a RSS .91 feed of trackbacks sent from that entry, from which you could extract the actual URI of the resource that http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55 is relevant to, but what a hassle. You can sweep things like this under the rug with a convoluted “auto-discovery” functionality (which is using sloppily embedded RDF instead of <link>… why?) but these problems are easy enough to solve that they should be.

(A side note, a URI tied to a unique ID system specific to a particular software platform does very little to suggest permanence to me. Are we going to have sent ping URI link rot?)

On Blogrolling Hack

Essays, WordPress,

I think the importance of this issue cannot be understated. My thoughts from the WordPress Dev blog: Blogrolling Hack Illustrates Need for Decentralization.

This morning it seems that sites who manage their blogrolls using blogrolling.com’s service had their links hijacked, every link being replaced by one to “Laura’s Blog,” which predictably redirects to a porn site. As painful and unfortunate as this is, I think it illustrates an important point that as a weblogging community we should be heading away from centralization as a rule, not flocking to every free or low-cost centralized service that pops up.

To me one of the greatest things about weblogs is that they shift power and control away from monolithic organizations and into the hands of users, where it is ultimately more secure. I have a friend who lost three years of her writing when a free online journal service decided to fold and delete everyone’s entries. I know people who hardly use email because their hotmail or yahoo addresses are flooded with so much spam as to make them useless. People who don’t host their own comments have their discussion at the mercy of some third party provider of varying reliability. Many of you reading this had your blogrolls hijacked this morning. In the weblog world blogroll links represent a web of trust — you freely giving a piece of your credibility to another site as a gift to that site and your audience. Today that trust was betrayed for many people.

There is more on the link. I’d love to hear some feedback and assist people in moving away from centralized services, even if it isn’t to WordPress. What are the other alternatives? If you want to move away but you’re having trouble with code somewhere just let me know and I’ll try to help you out.

A Thousand Resolutions

Personal, WordPress

For the next two weeks I’m going to try to write at least a thousand words a day, every day. Some of these words will be here, others may be other places, and some might not even be destined online. (Gasp!) When I met Tyler Cowen he told me that writing every morning is just about the best thing you can do to improve. We’ll see how this goes. I’ve always thought lots of reading was crucial to good writing as well, however my reading time is currently monopolized by John Locke. And thus if I start to write like him, it is within your rights to slap me upside the head.

One thing that’s making it nicer is WordPress has an option to make your posting <textarea> as big as you want and I already know all the quicktag shortcuts by heart so posting is as easy and pleasant as using a good editor like Dreamweaver or Topstyle. My textarea is currently 50 rows high, which is growing on me.

I would like to have more links in entries.

Dig Those Permalinks

Meta, WordPress

A little afternoon hacking has produced a new WordPress feature that is in the CVS for the curious. Thoughts? So are you ready to use WordPress yet?

Old links of the style /p123 are being permanently redirected to the new format using a very simple PHP script and a modification of my old mod_rewrite rules. No link left behind! The RSS feeds (feedii?) should be fixed as well. This is a feature I’ve been wanting for a long time and it has been surprisingly easy to implement so far. I need to tweak the bread crumb function still, but that’s an issue specific to this site, not the general implementation.

Also now notice that the date attached to each post is in fact a multi-level link, an idea I stole from the best, Dunstan Orchard.