Thanks Apple
Apple have updated their student blog to say “Powered by WordPress.” Thanks! Here is the context.
Eating around SF
Open Table let’s you make reservations online and here’s the best of San Francisco.
WordPress-ive
J. Michael thinks WordPress is WordPress-ive. “And their website’s Installing and Upgrading WordPress wikis are the sort of Help pages most every open source app I’ve ever used was lacking. They’re simply a pleasure to use. […] WordPress fills a specific need I’ve had since my very first website back in the mid-late nineties, and I simply can’t believe it’s free.”
Online Journalism Review
WordPress in the Online Journalism Review with a very positive write-up. Hat tip: Newley Purnell.
Movable Type 3.2
The new version of Movable Type sounds very nice, and they’re doing a good job telling its story through a series of entries. I recommend people read what they’re adding and if anything particularly strikes your fancy let us know so we can consider it for WordPress. Inspiration for WordPress has always come from many places, from 37signals or Adaptive Path to other weblogging platforms or content management systems.
Blog Census
Is anyone doing anything to replace or update the Blog Census? It still doesn’t count WordPress blogs, two years later, and that there are only 3 Textpattern blogs. Right now at Ping-O-Matic we have a database of over 5.6 million blogs, if anyone has a smart crawler I could throw at that list it’d be great to get a more realistic view of the State of the Blogosphere.
WP in MacAddict
A few people have written in to point out WordPress is in MacAddict this month as well. Last time I went to Border’s to pick up Linux Journal they didn’t have it so I’ll try again today and pick up both. When it’s all done I’ll try to post pictures.
WordPress Translations
Since 1.5 has been out for a few months now it occured to me to check how the translation efforts have been going. We had a ton of requests from our localization community that we addressed in the bugfix releases for 1.5 and we use the gettext translation framework, which (I’m told) makes localization a pleasure. Of course the place to go is the Codex, which has a page detailing over 35 language packs as well as about a dozen foreign-language sites from Hebrew to Turkish to Japanese dedicated entirely to that country’s WordPress community. Also my copy of the German WordPress book came in the mail today and judging from the screenshots it looks pretty comprehensive.
DB Backup
WordPress Database Backup plugin, can save to file or email it to you. Can combine with the WP-Cron plugin to run at specified intervals.
AARP
“Dear Mr Matthew Mullenweg, Our records show that you haven’t yet registered for the benefits of AARP membership, even though you are fully eligible.” Only $12.50/yr!
Yahoo RSS Search
Niall scoops Yahoo RSS Search, which I played around with a bit this morning thanks to a ping from him. I got very good results with it. They seemed to spider permalink page HTML, so I would get results from people mentioning me in comments to an entry, but I didn’t get blogroll noise like I do from Technorati. Should be interesting to see where it goes. Should also be interesting to see the spin from Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Pubsub, etc in response to one of the giants knocking on their door.
Google Spell Checker
The source code to Google’s new toolbar for Firefox has some entertaining details and reveals their new spell checker web service, which I think is really nice. Who’ll be the first to rewrite the AJAX spell checker for WordPress to use this web service instead of the PHP pspell extension?
Dave Hyatt Switches
Dave Hyatt, best known for his work on Mozilla and now Safari, has switched from MT to a new blog on WordPress.
Cacti
Cacti server monitor, to check out later.
GPL Not Needed
“We don’t need the GPL anymore. It’s based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn’t make lots of people nervous about adopting it.” — ESR. Some interesting arguments. I don’t agree with it all but it’s a good read nonetheless.
XML-RPC Vulnerability
To clarify for all the confused people WordPress is not affected by the recent XML-RPC problem that lots of other apps were. We use different, more secure libraries for XML-RPC. The problem was discovered by the same guy though, I imagine he was auditing our code and found totally unrelated, which we fixed in our recent release. Of course you wouldn’t guess that from the title, “PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits.” Let’s go down the list: PostNuke – content management; WordPress – blogging; Drupal – content/community management; Serendipity – blogging; phpAdsNew – ad serving; phpWiki – wiki (not blogging); phpMyFAQ – FAQ management. If it bleeds it leads, right? 😉
Import and Export
Marc asks about export in the next version of WordPress. It’s actually the very first item on the list because it got bumped from 1.5 because of time constraints. The main holdup has been WordPress supports rich data like custom fields and slugs, which users love, but it makes a lossless import and export a pain. Most other blog tools have a WordPress importer already simply because it’s a market leader, so don’t think the export will improve portability much, but it should make a nice way to backup and restore a WP blog.
Jeff Jarvis on WP
Jeff Jarvis is switching to WordPress, assisted by his thirteen year-old son. That reminds me that we need to make the MT import process easier, which is one of the things on deck for 1.6. Hat tip: Dan Farber via email.
Web Design Patterns
Nice overview of different Web Design Patterns. Happy 4th!