I needed to play around with a SQLite database today (we switched all our bug tracking from Mantis to Trac) and it really strikes me how immature all of the SQLite administration tools are, especially considering the incredible competition like phpMyAdmin. I ran into tons of cryptic errors, scripts not doing anything, not handling magic quotes properly, and a million other problems most PHP programmers fix after a few months learning the language.
Google’s RSS Ads
A blogger applies for Adsense RSS and finds “As I had suspected, during the inital testing phase they are only accepting blogger.com and Movable Type/ TypePad blogs as of this time.” I would love to know from someone at Google (maybe Jason Shellen?) if there was any technical or logistical reason they decided not to support the 140,000+ WordPress users or if it was just a lack of communication, which is entirely possible (and very plausible considering how busy everyone is). I would encourage WP users to sign up for Adsense for Feeds and list “WordPress” in the “Other” field. Update: Communication has started. (Thanks, Jason F.!)
Blogging at Google
Point, counterpoint and smackdown. Hat tip: Jeremy.
Subversioning WordPress Upgrades
Here is the simple script I use to upgrade all the WordPress sites I run on a single server in one fell swoop. Each site is a Subversion checkout of the WordPress trunk so getting the latest changes and merging them with my version is a simple command, however remembering to do each site was a pain. It also helped me figure out exactly how many WordPress installation I’m responsible for upgrading. (Twenty-seven.) Just fill out the array with the site roots of each install (use locate wp-login.php
to find them) and run the script on the command like php upgrade-sites.php
. I also like to put the time
command in front to see how long things take.
Wordlog Trouble
Wordlog, an excellent WordPress news site that’s almost a year old, still isn’t in Google. Seems to work in every other search engine in the world.
Disable GreaseMonkey
How to disable GreaseMonkey, now if only Google would let us disable Autolink.
Straussian Star Wars
Episode III
I just got home from seeing Star Wars Episode III, and it was a fantastic movie. Totally worth staying up to 4 AM for. Not just a great Star Wars movie, but a Good Movie independent of anything else out there. Then again I’m a total sucker for epic space sci-fi and cheeseball storylines, but go see it and decide for yourself. I’ll probably catch it once or twice more this weekend.
High Traffic Sites
Just got this email, “I am the artist manager for Bob Ricci, famous parody artist. Our site www.BobRicci.com (http://community.bobricci.com) caters to more than 350,000 hits a day from fans worldwide. I wanted to let you know that in our years of being online and having to support such a large amount of global traffic WordPress.org is the only software we have found that is able to withstand the amount of traffic and offer us a community/news service in the online marketplace.” Sweet!
Google Evite
Google Evite and look at the second hit. It’s about time for another party, we’re about to hit half a million downloads since we started tracking.
At Gnomedex
I’m very much looking forward to Gnomedex in a few weeks and I noticed today that my bio is up on the speaker page. It says I’ll share “Why style is just as important as substance.” I know they can’t be talking about my fashion sense, so I’ll take the safe route and stick to stylesheets.
Red Herring Alert
I just got a Google alert for a Red Herring article on Six Apart set to publish in a few days. They mention us here: “Critics of Six Apart say that WordPress, a blog publishing platform developed by a grassroots team, is more robust than Movable Type. WordPress is also open source and free. But things are different in Six Apart’s cash-crop enterprise space, where support and security are at the top of the list. Half of Movable Type servers sit behind a firewall, says Mr. Berkowitz.”
Foto Mateo
In the interest of expanding the Photo Matt audience we’ve commissioned a team of expert translators to create Foto Mateo. 😉 Update: To clarify, this is a joke. It just is a Google translate proxy of this site. Read the comments for more. Thanks for everyone who emailed in that it was, in fact, a very bad translation.
Update Phishing
I just got a spam/phishing email that looks exactly like a Windows Update notification, and every link in the email is to a real Microsoft site, save one. The download link, which I must “Install now to maintain the security of your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an attacker to run code on your computer,” goes to a file named Windows-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe
on the domain windowsupdatenow.net
. I’m sure the exe will do awful things to whoever falls for this. I hope Microsoft/Scoble get their lawyers on whoever is behind this, I’ll admit until I noticed the download link domain the email seemed totally legit.
Blogging Without Borders
Blogging Without Borders just hit Version 2.0, and continues to fight censorship around the world. One of the best uses of Drupal I’ve seen, and the first I know in terms of “citizen media” which is starting to get hype these days around things like Bayosphere.
Newsgator and FeedDemon
Scoble hinted at the story Om just broke, that Newsgator will be buying FeedDemon. Should be interesting.
More Stand Up
I’m the #1 hit for Dave Matthews new CD, and the comments keep coming in. Also, Boing Boing drives a noticeable amount of traffic, which is unusual.
The Ping Matrix
The Ping-O-Matic Matrix display, which I use for spotting spam. I was always a big Matrix fan. 🙂
MDX
Test the new Mountain Dew. Hat tip: Forever Geek.
Really Moblogging
“I’m going to keep updating the site via a PDA and an Iridium satellite phone (using a tweaked version of WordPress that we’ll be releasing as open source once I’m back in June).”