Not technically open source, because I don't know which license is best for regular text, but I just put a Creative Commons Sharealike license on the WordPress.com terms of service and Automattic privacy policy. People were stealing them anyway, might as well make it legit. 🙂 Feel free to grab bits and pieces and search/replace your company/project in. If you want to throw us a link as a thank you, I'd be flattered.
User-Generated Content
Why People Aren’t Using Your Website
Next Generation CMS
WordPress + Textpattern = WordPattern. 😉 (Big kudos to the Textpattern folks.)
WordPress Widgets
Note to self
When flying to Canada, BRING YOUR PASSPORT. Update: I wrote the preceding from my Blackberry at the ticket counter. After I found out about the passport, I rushed to the departure area and got the world’s best cab driver. His English was atrocious, but he understood what was going on. There was thankfully no traffic on 280 to SFO to my house and he did it in about 15 minutes. Ran in, grabbed the passport, ran back out. Lost a minute while he tried to ask me if I had “all three things”: passport, tickets, and ID. He says a lot of people run in to get a passport and leave the tickets on the table. He took 101 back to SFO, which had a bit of traffic. Big tip. No line at ticket counter, the flight was delayed. The lady was so kind, she switched me to the last window seat on the flight to Las Vegas and I got an upgrade to first class from Vegas to Toronto. (Maybe I’ll get some sleep.) No line at the security counter so I breezed through. Had time to grab a reuben at the deli. Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life.
In Toronto
I’m getting ready to hop the redeye to the lovely city of Toronto for the iSummit conference where I’ll be speaking about social media (whatever that is). Thursday night there’ll be a GTA blogger meetup which sounds like it’ll be a blast — I had no idea there were so many bloggers and WordPress users in Toronto. If you’ll be in Toronto any time before Saturday please drop me an email or try to come to the meetup Thursday night, I’d love to meet more folks out there.
Awesome Spellchecker
We now have inline-spellchecking on WordPress.com, and it will be in core for WordPress 2.1. It works a lot like Gmail, certainly one of the best I’ve seen in any web editor. Automattic sponsored the good folks at Moxiecode to develop this feature. All GPL, natch.
Microsoft iPod Redux
Remember that great Microsoft iPod video? (The old link doesn’t work anymore.) It turns out it was actually created by Microsoft. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Dell vs. Sun
The Sun Doesn’t Shine for Me, or why Dell is kicking Sun’s butt. I can attest to a similar experience, except that I gave up long before Jason did.
Y! Search Frustrations
Why Yahoo search still sucks. Why Google doesn’t. Too bad Google can’t get off their butt with great APIs (available in JSON and PHP serializations) like Yahoo has. I guess I’ll try to hack something out using inurl: or intitle:. Not to mention Yahoo still can’t handle basic HTML entities in titles.
Hours and Work
There’s no correlation between hours worked and work done. I think this is why traditional corporate structures are starting to crack at the seams, and the distributed model companies like Automattic, MySQL, SocialText, and many others use will start to gain real legs and acceptance. The best example of this was at a place I used to work: after lunch everything seemed to shut down. Several people obviously got very sleepy after lunch and would spend 2-4 hours of the afternoon on auto-pilot. (This was me sometimes too.) It would have been infinitely better for them to take a one hour nap and get back to productive work than spend 3 hours in an obviously hampered state. Happy, healthy, well-rested people work orders of magnitude better.
Invalid Atom
“Next time someone tells you Atom 0.3 is invalid because the validator says so, point them to this page. The validator is full of it, because it doesn’t reflect reality.” If Robert had comments, I would say “I never suggested Bloglines was “best-effort software development” (though I do love it and use it myself) but merely that it has an overwhelming market share. We’ve been tracking feed stats on WordPress.com and Bloglines and Newsgator online both dominate. The Web Standards project never casts stones from an ivory tower, they’ve always advocated practical standards for pratical benefits. Ben’s comment was akin to someone saying that the site sucked because it used XHTML 1.0 instead of 1.1, or if the validator decided to instantly “deprecate” all sites using HTML 3.2, 4.0, and XHTML 1.0 when 1.1 came out.”
Open Source Tax Credit
Is an Open Source tax credit a good idea?
New Blackberry
I talked Ryan into getting the new Blackberry 8700c, and he shares his thoughts. I got mine last week and I can honestly say it’s the (second) best phone I’ve ever used, and the best PDA. This is coming from the guy who founded the Houston PalmOS Users Group. Great screen, battery life, SMS and email support, and very intuitive UI. I also have a Blackberry 7520 (the one with GPS) and it’s a real clunker compared to the 8700. I’ve been recommending the 8700c to everyone I know. Now I just need to get SSH running on this thing…
LiveJournal Ads
LiveJournal is adding a new service level with ads. They seem to be approaching it pretty sanely, and I imagine an ad-supported version of Typepad will follow soon. We’ve considered this approach on WP.com, basically opt-in ads, but (like Brad) I really really dislike advertising on personal pages.
Best Search Ever
My favorite search site in the world is Big.com. I’ve introduced it to a dozen or so people and they all love it too. Update: Big.com was launched on a WordPress weblog.
Plugin Video Tutorial
Create a WordPress plugin in under 5 minutes with Mark Jaquith. This is awesome, I’d love to see more of this.
Polish Interview
I did an interview with the Polish WordPress community, which they translated into Polish, if you’re into that sort of thing.
SxSW WordPress Meetup
Just a final reminder, tonight from 6-8 PM at the Thistle Cafe there will be a WordPress dinner/meetup/party. I checked out the venue last night and it’s really great. It’s the same place Bar Camp Austin is going on. By the way, since WP.com supports SSL and this site doesn’t, all future conference blogging will be at a matt.wordpress.com. Yay for secure blogging.