Announcing the new WordPress hosting page. Update: I forgot to thank Chris Messina for helping out with the design of the page.
Jakob Nielsen
I went to the BayCHI event last night which had speakers from Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, A9, and Jakob Nielson. I mentioned WordPress and thanked him for his free articles, which I usually enjoy even if I don’t agree with them. Niall snapped a picture of Jakob and I on his Sony F828.
150k
WordPress 1.5.0 broke 150,000 downloads earlier today.
Gallery: 4-12-2005
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
I suppose now is a good time to blog that I’m going to be speaking at the 15th annual conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Seattle this Friday on the panel “Unstoppable Speech (or, The Revolution Will Be Podcast).” If you’re in the area you should check out the conference, it looks excellent. I’m also looking for things to do in Seattle, any suggestions? Anyone interested in a WordPress meetup?
Default Spam Handling
Dougal takes a look at built-in spam measures in WP and SpamLookup, I think we could integrate more in the next release.
Blogging Autosave
This Blogger autosave feature is something I’ve been wanting to do for WordPress for a while, but I had envisioned it as an asynchronous javascript updating the draft every minute or so if the post was over 50 words long. Perhaps this cookie approach is better. Anyone want to try it for WP?
UK Liberal Democrats
Peter Westwood wrote in that the UK Liberal Democrats election blog is on WordPress and looks pretty professional. I have no idea about UK politics, but it’s nice to see WordPress being used in more and more high-profile sites.
USF using WordPress
Mark Jaquith wrote in to say “The University of South Florida in Tampa is using WordPress to run student blogs. http://blog.usf.edu/ The blogs are available to each of the school’s 42,000 students! The blogs have some pretty slick features like an included Gallery photo album, a unified login system, del.icio.us integration, Flickr integration, and pre-installed CSS varieties. They even provide unified RSS/Atom feeds for all of the blogs.” I don’t know what to add to that, except that this is fantastic. I wonder how long before other universities start to follow in their footsteps?
WordPress Lessons
WordPress Lessons on the Codex are looking good, in fact the entire Codex is becoming a fantastic documentation resource. Kudos to Lorelle for kicking these off.
XFN Graph
XFN Graph is a tool that you give a URL and it then spiders all the XFN relationships and shows them in a neat graph/map.
NADD Redux
Om on why I can’t pay att… ooh look, shiny!
Amazon on WordPress
Joe Clark wrote in that the Amazon Development Center, India has a WordPress blog. I’ve never seen india.amazon.com
and the whole thing feels very different from Amazon’s other sites. What’s the story?
Larry on Poetic Code
Niall caught this quote: “Larry is a believer in the code is poetry model, especially for coding a language such as Perl.”
Ryan on Microformats
Caption Machine
Caption Machine is a site where people upload funny photos and submit captions, and they just moved to WordPress 1.5. Here’s a good example. Tim writes in they have 21,000 captions and counting…
WordPress in Higher Education « WordPress Support
WordPress in Higher Education — “Penn State is also telling all of the participants (about 200 leaders in higher education) about how they use WordPress for courses, portfolios, content mangement and about everything else.”
More Random
The random photo database has been re-synced so you should now start to see more recent uploads in the rotation.
Braindead Finder Behaviour
Because of what I consider totally braindead behivour in the OS X Finder I appear to have lost about 60 pictures from my trip. When I offload pictures from card I generally drag the 100PENTX
folder from the card onto my desktop and I leave things in that folder until I have a chance to compress the pictures, divide them into days, and upload them. Well OS X does this crazy thing where when you drag the folder onto the desktop it asks you if you want to replace the folder with the same name. On Windows I always say yes and it just adds the new pictures to those already in the folder. In OS X it apparently means delete the folder that’s already there with no way to recover it and replace it with the one you’re dragging. This happened to me a few times and I couldn’t figure out what was happening, luckily though I had backups on my iPod. Unfortunately going back over the pictures from the trip it seems a day is missing. Fortunately it was a day of mostly travel so I’ll live, but still a bummer. Updates: John Gruber weighs in, and here’s the exact message in Windows.
New update: Robert Scoble put me in touch with Bob Day who had this to say:
If the question is just “Why do merge by default?”, there are lots of
answers.1. Because it maps well to operations that users are likely trying to
accomplish (see the scenario of dropping a picture folder from a
camera).
2. Folder replace can be done by deleting the destination folder first,
and then copying. If you have replace be the primary method, then merge
becomes a very tedious process.
3. Because it is less destructive?
…Please realize that having a camera that uniquely assigns picture
numbers until you reset them becomes very important with this merge
behavior. If your pictures are all uniquely named, the default of
replacing files with the same name will allow you to not lose any files.Also realize that this is a complicated scenario for most users. Almost
any choice is going to be bad for some users.And yes, the behavior is a concious choice. We had to implement this
feature in Windows 95.
I followed up that “So before that [Windows 95] folders were deleted and
overwritten?” Bob responded: “I need the source code to Windows 3.1 to confirm. Anybody remember “File
Manager”? wow, that is old.” And dug up:
Ok, archeological discovery over. (wipes the dust off his sleeves)
Win3.1 would say the same thing for folders as it did for files:
“Replace filewith file ” And if you said “yes” for a folder, it would try to delete the
folder first, which would error out if the directory
wasn’t empty. Not sure what the error message is there.
I would love to get similar background for the Mac OS X behaviour.
Paris Hilton Podcasts
Om says Paris Hilton Now PodCasting, someone call Dave Winer. As long as she doesn’t start a WordPress blog I think we’re okay — I’m not ready to jump the shark just yet.