Get your feet wet with WordPress is a Webmonkey tutorial on WordPress. Considering my earliest web learning was on Webmonkey (anyone remember the 216 really safe colors?) this is a little surreal. It’s also a great introduction article.
Gallery: 6-2-2006
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Startup Podsession
I joined Om and Niall’s podcast last week to talk about Startup Dos and Don’ts. Their podcasts are nice and short, about 20 minutes. Om tries to bait a Rails flame war but it doesn’t quite happen. 🙂
MySQL Counters
Check out this cool INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE feature in MySQL 4.1. This will make some logging code I have much easier and cleaner than it currently is.
Yahoo Search Broken (again?)
[inurl:yahoo.com search], no results found. This search worked fine days ago. Contrast. This is why WordPress.org search is broken. Any suggestions for better web search API providers? I loooove the way Yahoo provides results as serialized PHP in addition to XML (every API provider should do that!) but the underlying search product seems to be built on a shaky foundation.
Bulletproof Startup
How to shoot a bullet through your startup, this applies internally to big companies too — just replace “angel” or “VC” with VP or CEO.
Bill Gates and Jay-Z
Bill Gates meets Jay-Z, for real. Definitely a fashion mismatch.
Web2 Spam
Nick Bradbury says “Any new Web 2.0 company that hasn’t considered the spam problem automatically isn’t worth my time.” I forget who said it, but my favorite definition of social software is “things that get spammed.”
New Money
Have you seen the new US money they’re printing? I had gotten used to the 20s but I got a 10 at the grocery store the other day and it really surprised me — it’s totally orange. I miss the green. Bringing things full-circle, my second blog post ever was about meeting the US Treasurer and talking about the new colors. The more things change…
New Spam Stats
Akismet has a new spam and ham stats zeitgeist page, guess which is bigger. Not an inspiring trend.
Web 2.0 Band
I’m going to start a Web 2.0 band, thinking about calling it “The Standards.” Any other name ideas? Hat tip: Glenda.
Mark All as Read
I have finally embraced the freedom afforded by “mark all as read.”
WordPress.com Accounts
You can now get an account on WordPress.com without creating a blog, something people have been asking for a fair amount.
Web 2.0 Myths
Om writes on The Myth, Reality & Future of Web 2.0 in a great article, and also takes a dig at my lack of Indian gastronomic experimentation.
Adaptive Path Blogs
Adaptive Path has a new weblog, and it’s…
Shuttle
Khaled has drawn back the curtain on Shuttle. It’s a fantastic set of work by an exceptional group of people (Khaled, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar, Bryan Veloso). There are some pretty significant shifts in there so it’ll be integrated incrementally rather than overnight, and I also plan to test out things on WordPress.com first and watch usage to make sure none of our assumptions are too far off, but I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty significant milestone for WordPress and we have some exciting months ahead of us. Everyone should thank the Shuttle team. (Note: There will be some ongoing design work as well, especially as new features are added to WordPress. If you’re a kick-ass designer who can juggle code as well as Photoshop, drop me a line.)
Back to Toronto
After just enough time to do my laundry and eat some BBQ, I’m heading back out to Toronto. My passport is packed! This time it’s for Canada’s Web 2.0 Mesh Conference, which looks to be pretty interesting (despite the Web 2.0 moniker). The folks I met last time were so great, I’ve really been looking forward to this trip. Update: An airline problem has me stranded in Philidelphia for the night, I’ll be arriving at the conference late tomorrow afternoon.
Trying Shangri-La
So I’m going to take a whack at this “Shangra-Li Diet” thing I’ve read about on several blogs, most notably here. I’m not having a weight crisis, but I think 5-10 pounds would put me in a healthier class for my height. I bought the book and read it this morning, it basically just repeats itself a lot and seems to have a lot of filler, but it may be useful to some folks as a motivator. You can get all the important details from various blogs. Mostly I’m interested in it to see if the mind hacking really works, and I’m willing to endure Glenda making fun of me about trying something out of a diet book for the sake of you guys ;). Apparently I don’t own any sugar, extra light olive oil, or a scale, but I’ll post updates as I get going. Update: The author has a WordPress blog.
Gallery: 5-9-2006
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Share Your OPML
Share Your OPML has relaunched and appears to be built on WordPress. This was one of my favorite services a few years back and was far ahead of its time. I still think moving OPML around is too hard, it would be nice to have some sort of OPML normalization service that could log into different accounts at places like WordPress, Bloglines, and Google reader, grab your file, auto-discover any feeds for entries that don’t have a xmlUrl
, and merge everything together using the updated
attribute. Hat tip: Niall and Johan.