One Billion Spams
Alexa Blocks Statsaholic
Alexa appears to be blocking any image loads from the Statsaholic domain, which was recently renamed from Alexaholic. If you change or block your referrers, the images load just fine. Bad form on Alexa’s part, especially since Alexaholic put an infinitely more usable UI on Alexa’s data, which Alexa later updated their own chart widgets to copy.
Houston Meetup
I’m in Houston for a few more days and we’re doing a meetup on Monday night. Erica writes more about it here. Update: The meetup was a ton of fun and went late into the night. Thanks to everyone that came out!
LAist Interview
Summer of Code
WordPress is part of Google Summer of Code this year, with some real rock-stars mentoring. It’s a great opportunity for students, if you know anyone who loves solving problems and would be a good fit please encourage them to apply.
Apokalyptik
Demitrious has joined Automattic. Now go guilt him into blogging more. 🙂
Selling Links
“Let’s face it, we’re selling links here. Call it ‘buzz’ all you want, but it boils down to selling links. That skews Google’s index and they’ve come out against that quite publicly. If we’re all given the freedom to disclose in our own manner, we’re a moving target. If we’ve all got disclosure badges everywhere, it’s easy for them to penalize/ban us all.”
The comments on this PayPerPost blog encouraging disclosure are interesting, it seems even their own users recognize that they’re doing something Google should/will penalize.
Perhaps rather than trying to find better ways to hide from Google, they should just stop the questionable behaviour in the first place. This is one of the reasons we took an early stance by banning PPP on WordPress.com, and other blog hosts should do the same.
WP Meetup and WordCamp 2007
March 9th in Austin we’re going to have a WordPress meetup at BarCampAustin. I heard the fighting robots caught on fire so there’s no competition at that timeslot anymore. Also, you heard it here first, WordCamp 2007 will be on 7/21 and 7/22 in San Francisco.
OpenID on WordPress.com
You can now use your WordPress.com URL as an OpenID, and we’re going to release the MU plugin that does it after getting some kinks worked out. This is also a bit of a coming out for Simon Willison, who implemented it all. Welcome to the team. 🙂
Twitter and Dodgeball
Last year at SxSW was definitely the year of Dodgeball, this year I think it’ll be more about Twitter. Though I’ll certainly miss the cross-street goodness of DB. Here’s my Twitter.
Code: OOP or POO?
At SxSW
Just a quick reminder, I’m going to be in Austin at SxSW next week and if you see me please introduce yourself. I’ll have a stash of WordPress stickers at all times. 🙂 There is also shaping up to be a little meetup on Saturday at Barcamp around 6, so block that out. Finally I’m speaking on Monday.
Number 16
PC World did an article on “The 50 Most Important People on the Web” and I came in at #16 and the youngest on the list. Thanks to everyone who emailed and wrote, it was a very pleasant way to wake up this morning.
Blank Slate
Daring Fireball: Blank Slate talks about basing your work off a template vs. starting from scratch. I think both can be valid, there are enough (over 1000) WP templates out there that finding one that’s close enough to what you want and customizing from there can be a great way to bootstrap and get started quickly. But longer term, invest in design. (This reminded me I have a long todo list for this site to catch up with.)
71Miles on WP Framework
71Miles is a cool new travel site with a twist PM readers will find interesting — it’s built with WordPress. How? Adam Rugel writes “The nuts and bolts of our site is WordPress, it’s our foundation and content management system. We extended it to manage our content feeds: Google Calendar XML for the events calendar, map, and mobile product and Kayak’s brand new hotel API for the hotel deals. We tricked out the custom fields in WP to do a lot the work for us, and we’ve got the categories set up so that we can scale to roll out dozens of editions (NYC, LA, Chicago…). At any rate we’re loving the platform…” Definitely one of the coolest uses of the WordPress framework I’ve seen in a while.
One Man Star Wars
Last night I saw the One Man Star Wars Trilogy performed by Charles Ross. The Force is strong with this one. Last night I was there as “press,” but I had independently bought tickets for Thursday night and I’m thinking about going again, it was pretty entertaining. Afterward I was able to interview Charles for a few minutes, and Glenda has uploaded a video of the interview to Youtube. (Warning: Low light.)
Podcast 8
Podcast #8, which I mistakenly call #7, includes comments on podcasting, wallets, chipping, McDonalds, and Microsoft Office 2007. Hopefully this one shouldn’t sound all chipmunk in flash players. 3:30.
USPS and Speaker.gov
Jim Amos just wrote in that Campbell-Ewald launched a new WordPress-powered site for the US Postal Service, called Deliver Magazine. Congrats to Jim and Naoko McCracken! Ryan noticed the other day that Nancy Pelosi has a WordPress blog at Speaker.gov called The Gavel. Cool domain name, and good to see WP being used in the political realm, especially since none of the Presidential candidates for 2008 are using WP (yet). If you come across or instigate WordPress being used someplace cool, be sure to write in.
MooPress
Jeremy Keith just pinged me via IM that Moo.com, the cool printing guys, use WP to power their entire site.