Thanks to everyone who came out on such short notice. It was great seeing Chris Messina, Scott Beale, Marc Weidenbaum, Om Malik, Nicole Lee, Glenda B, Ryan King, Craig Cook.
MySQL not Buggy
Study: Few bugs in MySQL database, which is good to know, since an increasingly large portion of my life is being put into MySQL. (And Apache, and PHP, but not so much Linux anymore. I’ve been setting up a new FreeBSD server and it rocks.)
2WirePress
I got word a little bit ago that 2Wire, makers of the modems everyone with SBC DSL gets and a cool new DVR, are using WordPress internally. “We tried salesforce.com and now we use WordPress exclusively!”
Open Source Blogs?
So I’m playing around more with Newsburst today, and one thing that struck me was the organization of the defaults. Where in the world did they come from? You could do this with most any category, but let’s take a look at “Open Source”:
- Builder.com.com — not sure what the site is doing, but the feed does have two mentions of open source software, but it seems to just be re-branded stories from News.com, so I’m not sure what the point is.
- Linux Dell Blog — Frequently down but hardcore open source.
- jfleck — I suppose the connection is he contributes to Gnome. Okay… No posts about OS on the front page, and even the category they subscribe to looks to be updated about twice a month.
- Kuro5hin — A great site, but nothing about Open Source in the feed lately. It’s more tech-culture.
- Linux.com — dry, but valid.
- linux kernel monkey log — valid.
- Miguel de Icaza — Good choice.
- NewsForge — groovy.
- Lockergnome Tech News Watch — covers tech but not too much OS
- Scripting News — Many things, but not an open source blog. Besides, it’s listed several other places already.
- Slashdot — who would argue with this?
What would be cool if Newsburst let me tag a feed when I subscribed to it, then highlight popular tags and the most popular “sources” within them. Forget what they think “open source” is, I want the opensource tag.
The way to get people hooked on blogs has nothing to do with RSS feeds or river of conciousness displays or whatever, it’s all the fantastic content that’s being created out there by people in the trenches. If you had a passing interest in learning about open source, you would get 60+% junk if you subscribed to that channel group. Where is Blake Ross’ passion about Firefox, Mitch Kapor, ZDNet’s OS Blog, Sitepoint’s, Spread Firefox, or anything from the people that are creating the applications that are changing the way we live, work, and play? Are blogs that talk about open source that hard to find?
WordCamp Denver
WordCamp Denver at the Art Museum, which was a fantastic venue.
Dougal on 1.5
Dougal on WordPress 1.5. Several people have asked if “Strayhorn” is a poke at Longhorn. Nope.
Cosmos Plugin
Jonas has a Technorati Cosmos plugin which is kinda neat. I think it may have the wrong approach though, here’s how a really nice Technorati plugin would work: watch the site cosmos feed for incoming links, if the link isn’t to the root use the same code we use for Pingbacks to determine what post it’s linking to, if one at all, then check if the incoming link already exists as a Trackback or Pingback, and if not insert it into the comment table chronologically in line with the rest of the comments. (And send a notification email.) Cosmos should work transparant of other forms of commenting. Bonus points if it works with referrer data too, call it “remote-comments.”
Image Headline Plugin
coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you really nice shadows, I’ll have to check out how he did that.
We’ve lost two incredible souls this week: first Dan Fredinburg in Nepal and now Dave Goldberg has unexpectedly passed. I encourage you to Google articles about their lives, like this one about Dave Goldberg or this on Dan, because both were unique and incredible individuals. In an example of how software can have unintended effect on emotions, I just realized I had a pending friend request on Facebook from Dan, probably years old. 🙁 Going through a lot of emotions, but a good reminder that life can be fleeting and to make time for friends and those who you love, something both of these men were great at. May they both rest in peace.
At Spam Summit
I’m at the web spam summit and it’s going pretty well. I think some excellent things will come out of this. I wouldn’t want to be a spammer these days.
EG Blogging
QiSci
Quantum scientists at University of Queensland are using WordPress to power their site, obviously sharp people. Another good use of WP as a CMS.
Lush Life
What better way to celebrate 50,000 downloads of WordPress 1.5 than with a delicious recording of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman performing Lush Life. Lush Life was, of course, written by Billy Strayhorn.
Open Source Business Conference
So there is an Open Source Business Conference happening in a few weeks a few blocks away from me and I just randomly came across the site. After SxSW, reading about OSBC is like being in another world: it’s $1500 to go, only two days long, the language on the site is sickeningly corporate, and I haven’t heard of a single person there. Then again, this is an “open source” conference with Microsoft as a platinum sponsor. A real Open Source conference would have no fees, everything would be web streamed, the line between speakers and attendees would be thin or non-existant, and the topics would not focus so much on money. Actually, it would be a bit like Bloggercon.
Snapfish Acquired
Days after Flickr, Snapfish is acquired by HP. Quick, start some more photo sites to sell.
Seattle Trains
The Seattle airport is crazy, I had to get on three separate trains to get from my landing terminal to the departing one. I’m glad I wasn’t in a hurry.
Fitlog
Matt Haughey’s Fitlog is a
great use of custom fields for what has been called “datablogging” lately. We will be expanding our XML-RPC APIs with WordPress extensions to allow more remote programatic access to advanced WP features such as custom fields in the future.
Amazon on WordPress
Joe Clark wrote in that the Amazon Development Center, India has a WordPress blog. I’ve never seen india.amazon.com and the whole thing feels very different from Amazon’s other sites. What’s the story?
The official URL for Amazon’s new browser, Silk, is amazon.com/silk which right now redirects to amazonsilk.wordpress.com. This is not a VIP deal or anything, it’s just a free blog on WP.com which Beau noticed from their press release. I’m guessing they just wanted a quick and easy way to make a functional and beautiful website, which is kind of the whole idea of WordPress. 🙂
Default Spam Handling
Dougal takes a look at built-in spam measures in WP and SpamLookup, I think we could integrate more in the next release.