coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you really nice shadows, I’ll have to check out how he did that.
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.
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.
1.6m Downloads in 23 Hours
23 hours hours ago, WordPress 4.3 was released. It’s already had 1.6 million downloads and counting. For a look at what’s new in this version you can watch the quick video above, or check out the blog post.
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. 🙂
“The reality is that more and more decisions, including decisions about life and death, are being made by software,” Thomas Dullien, a well-known security researcher and reverse engineer who goes by the Twitter handle Halvar Flake, said in an email. “But for the vast majority of software you interact with, you are not allowed to examine how it functions,” he said.
The Times has a great look at hacker and car manufacturer mishaps and makes the case over and over again for Open Source. It’s great to see more of the world waking up to the importance of open source.
The Capitalist Manifesto
The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To a Point). A fair summary view of financial goings-on, with a bit of preaching at the end.
Velocity and the Bottom Line
Velocity and the Bottom Line. How performance touches everything on the web, and includes a quote from me about the importance if of speed to the user experience. You can check out my whole presentation, the Moral Philosophy of Performance, on Blip.
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.
Mario and NUX
In this video Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss World 1-1, or the very first level in the very first Super Mario Bros. It’s fascinating how every element on the level is designed to introduce you to a mechanic of the game, or how Mario moves and jumps. This is interesting if you like Mario, but also important for any developer in any medium who is thinking about the NUX (new user experience) of their product. I sometimes joke that in WordPress we put people on the boss monster level the first time they enter the dashboard. There have been improvements but still so much to do to naturally introduce people to our interface.
Tech blog idea: A site that covers the top headlines on Techmeme 6, 12, or 18 months after they happened, and explores the delta between what people said was going to happen when they raised funding, or did an acquisition, and what actually happens after time has run its course. We keep covering announcements like they matter. Can also compare analyst and commentator predictions for claim chowder.
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.
Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances
The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.
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?
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.
CFP Observation
For a conference on privacy, there sure seems to be a lot of unencrypted traffic on this network.
Squeezebox2
There is a new Squeezebox out, and it looks awesome. I just wish they hadn’t raised the price so much! I really need 3 to do what I want to do, which is full multi-room audio, but at that price it may be economical just to have someone come out and wire the place up.