Dissecting MySQL fulltext indexing and the mathematics behind it.
Moosecamp Presentation
There has been some good response to my Akismet presentation earlier this morning.
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.
Markup Survey
Ian Hixie at Google just published a really awesome web authoring survey of a billion documents. What I found most interesting about reading it was places that things I’ve worked on, notably WordPress and GMPG, popped up.
HTTP Headers — “A pretty significant number of pages include an X-Pingback header (more than the number of pages with the Set-Cookie2 header). In fact, X-Pingback was the 30th most-seen header in our data sample.”
WordPress is one of the few platforms that supports pingback, an alternative to Trackback with a real spec. Apparently there are enough WP pages in the world for this to make a blip on the radar.
Page Headers — “It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profileattribute, though. The three most-often used values are http://gmpg.org/xfn/1, http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/, and http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. This makes XFN the most popular HTML metadata profile!”
Too cool for words. 🙂 Both of these profiles are included by default in some WordPress templates.
rel="pingback" and rel="bookmark" both skirt the charts in the link relationship page. No XFN values made the cut there.
The <a> element — “external seems to be mainly propagated by WordPress, but people have long been asking for a way to label their links as being external vs internal.”
Nice to get a direct mention there, and we’ve supported bookmark and tag from the beginning. All in all the report is a very interesting read, and kudos to Google for doing this type of research and sharing it with the web. I hope to see more of these in the future, it delights my inner markup geek.
WordPress in its Terrible Threes
Mike Little points out that WordPress is three years old today. 🙂 Who woulda thunk it? Mike and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago, here’s a picture Khaled took of the event.
Millions of Blondes
I’m not going to particpate in it, but the “best blonde joke” (example) thing is driving thousands and thousands of hits every day to WordPress.com. It’s traffic on par with a front-page Digg, just constant and steady. Where did this thing come from??? (Continuing my tradition of being a month late to internet trends.)
Bloggies
The bloggies are now open, and for the first time ever WordPress is a nominee. However there is very good company like Blogger, Flickr, and Delicious. Flickr! My fav thing about the bloggies has always been the discovery aspect, finding blogs I had missed somehow. This year contains quite a few gems and I’d recommend going through everything and exploring a few you haven’t seen before.
Comment Spamosphere
Chuck Norris Facts 2.0
Chuck Norris 2.0. “Chuck Norris showers with AJAX but no water.” See also: Original Chuck Norris facts, New Chuck Norris facts, and the official Chuck Norris response. 🙂 Update: I highly recommend watching these Walker, Texas Ranger clips on Conan O’Brien. If that struck your fancy, you can always buy the DVD set, I just ordered it.
Google Privacy
Yahoo and MSN give up your information without a fight, Google fights it. Who do you trust your data with more? Also how would a Web 2.0 company with a much more fragile financial state respond to legal demands from the US Goverment? “We’re going to spend millions fighting the DOJ” seems like a rough way to start a board meeting. 😉 Hat tip: Eric Haller.
Livejournal Hack
I’ve been following the Livejournal hack closely because as someone who runs many services that allow user submitted content, any new developments in XSS are very important to stay on top of. So far the only official technical explanation I’ve seen is here on lj_dev. Since we don’t allow template editing or embedded JS or styles on WP.com I can’t think of any vectors for attack, but you never know with these things. More on moz-binding.