Dougal on WordPress 1.5. Several people have asked if “Strayhorn” is a poke at Longhorn. Nope.

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.”

coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you really nice shadows, I’ll have to check out how he did that.

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.

Quantum scientists at University of Queensland are using WordPress to power their site, obviously sharp people. Another good use of WP as a CMS.

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.

University of Houston, which I attended for 2 years, created a profile of me for their “You Are the Pride” campaign. In the list I am currently alphabetically sandwiched between Carl Lewis and Hakeem Olajuwon.

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.

Days after Flickr, Snapfish is acquired by HP. Quick, start some more photo sites to sell.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Dougal takes a look at built-in spam measures in WP and SpamLookup, I think we could integrate more in the next release.

For a conference on privacy, there sure seems to be a lot of unencrypted traffic on this network.