Better Trackback?
There is talk of pushing for Trackback to become a standard. A few of the problems with Trackback are immediately apparent: horrible internationization support, bad auto-discovery, proclivity for spamming, no verification, historical baggae of category junk, bad spec. Fix all these and you get… pingback. Pingback is big enough now to make a blip in Google’s markup survey, and is supported by a wide range of platforms. The question is whether people are going to want to support an existing and robust standard or want to put their name on something new, the global “not invented here” syndrome where everyone wants their 15 standards of fame. (As someone who has been involved in several standards myself, I admit the draw is strong.) What Pingback does need is a better advocacy site, like atom has.
A pro-PHP Rant
Harry Fuecks – A pro-PHP Rant. Hear hear. Sometimes I feel guilty about how easy it has been to scale WordPress.com from 1 to 110,000 blogs in just a few months.
Myspace Paper
Danah Boyd on Myspace – Identity Production in a Networked Culture.
Hack WP for NY Times
I was at the New York Times last week and one of the things that blew me away were how many WordPress blogs they’re running. I had seen 2-3, but it turns out they have almost 25 running on both sides of the paywall and they’re going to be doing even more with WordPress as time goes on. (There are also some interesting things going on with Times Select.) There’s more good news: they’re hiring. Khoi Vinh writes “A thorough knowledge of weblog publishing software, especially WordPress, is required.” Sounds like a great gig for whoever gets it. Bringing things full circle, Khoi’s site is one of my favorites and an inspriation for the new WordPress.org.
Bray on PHP
Tim Bray wonders about PHP. Answer: Worse is better. Applications evolve when (and if) they need to.
Imposter
There is some joker wannabe hacker pretending to me and asking others for sensitive information. Here are some tell-tale signs: IMing from a misspelled version of my IM addresses, like “saxmat02”; emailing from a gmail account with my name; using bad English (more than I normally do); asking for passwords, etc. These are all things I’d never do. If you ever have any doubt that the person you’re talking to might not be me, just call me on my cell or use one of the other contact methods here.
NYC Valentine
In New York for Valentine’s Day.
Mathematics of Full-text
Dissecting MySQL fulltext indexing and the mathematics behind it.
Get Random
Get random on WordPress.com, I really really really like this feature. (We’re about to hit 100k blogs.)
OS CMS
I’m in Vancouver at the Drupalcon Open Source CMS conference, and it’s been great thus far. Congrats to the organizers. I’ll be speaking on Thursday.
Theme Explodes Traffic
The effect of releasing a good WordPress theme on traffic and stats. With stories like this and all the success Micheal has had after Kubrick and K2 I really don’t understand why more professional designers aren’t falling over themselves to address the WordPress theming audience which is huge, growing by thousands every day, and very enthusiastic.
30 Boxes
I’ve been really digging 30 Boxes, as reviewed by Mr Hawk here and Mr Malik here, I’m moving all of my calendaring (online and off) into it. They’re doing some neat stuff with profiles and sharing that I think will take people a while to fully grok. The only thing I think it needs is better timezone handling (I travel a lot). Check out their blog. (Powered by WP.) Update: I keep finding cool features like it automatically detects when you enter a birthday and offers to repeat it every year. The whole site is like a giant easter egg.
New Theme Competition
Someone is running a WordPress 2.0 theme competition with some pretty sweet prizes. Winners of previous competitions run by Alex have gotten a ton of exposure all over the blogosphere. I think there is so much new functionality possible with the new functions in 2.0 that themes like Regulus take advantage of that it should be a factor in the competition somehow.
Google Irony
John Battelle – The real irony…. Alex Bosworth – Google’s Doublespeak. (Isn’t Alex their CTO’s brother? That’ll make for an interesting Thanksgiving dinner discussion.) I loved Google not just because of their great technology, but because they sold me a dream. Something bigger and better than just another company. Something inspiring and with soul.
Houstonist Interview
Houstonist did a quick interview with me, it was nice to chat about my home town for a bit. Covers a bit of history, and my top 6 favorite jazz albums right now.
Rich Adsense
Google Adsense begins rich-media testing. Thank goodness for Adblock.
DORM’d Podcast
BlogTalk Reloaded
I’ll be keynoting at BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna, Austria on October 2-3rd. Hopefully I’ll meet a few WordPress users while I’m over there.