Another great review:
“It’s beautiful, light-weight, easy to manage, and by goodness it’s got so many features I feel like a spoiled rich kid with 20 Ferraris, 10 Lambos, 5 Lotus Elises, and a spit-shined Bentley. This thing is powerful, yet compact. Don’t even get me started on their plugins systems.” And that marks the 300th ping on the announcement entry.

There’s been a lot of talk about pop-unders that get by Firefox and Safari and I’ve seen them myself. The ones I’ve seen are using the technique I first saw on SitePoint, did the ad makers get some “fresh thinking for web developers and designers”?

coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you really nice shadows, I’ll have to check out how he did that.

The Web Spam Squashing Summit announcement has quite a bit of spam on it. Unfortunate, but an excellent illustration of the problem.

I’ve noticed a lot of the blogs updating to 1.5 are using Kubrick, which is great, but a lot of blogs look the same now! Time to spice up your life a little with Owen Winkler’s awesome Kubrickr. What does it do? Well first you type in a word and it searches Flickr for all the photos with that tag and that have a Creative Commons license. Pick one of them, then it lets you choose which part of the photo you like and it crops the photo then gives you a download with the graphic to upload to your blog. How cool is that?

We had some great music at the upgrade party. Update: Nicole has some video!

This blog seems to be stealing other people’s original content and republishing it, making it look like the author is writing for the site. Example: Original — Copy. This is the first time I’ve used nofollow in an entry. Update: In the comments Dan says he gave permission, so I apoligize, but it did look really fishy.

I’m going to be at the Free/Libre Open Source Usability Sprint today, tomorrow, and Sunday trying to pick up as much as possible. If you’ll be there be sure to say hello.

Is Simon finally going to switch? We already use his excellent XML-RPC library.

The Texas Make-A-Wish Foundation manages their entire site with WordPress 1.5, very cool. Dig those Pages.

Local Area Security, the Linux security project, is now run by WordPress.

“Even though there have been significant changes in the admin interface and (i assume) the way that certain aspects of the application work, I had no problems upgrading.”

Yum!

More reviews are coming in, “Cleaner code, faster execution, and maybe it’s just my imagination but I actually detect a hint of lemony freshness too. Seriously ecstatically happy with my blog since running WordPress and it has been trouble free and effortless (as a blog should be). If you’re thinking of putting one up and joining the Jones’, I recommend it highly and if you’re thinking of switching I heartily encourage it.”

Announcing WordPress 1.5, okay now you should link it and spread the good word. 🙂 1,400 words and it still doesn’t cover everything.

Richard emailed me about a blog called News in Chinese which shows news written in Chinese, as you may suspect, but what’s cool is when you hover over a word it gives you the English translation and enlarges the Chinese character.

Elise’s look at weblog tool marketshare is interesting if not the most accurate. I’d much rather see numbers from someone who could programatically actually determine what blogs use, like Technorati or Feedster. Anyway I tried to follow along in the audience and typed “wordpress.org” into Google, which gave me a helpful page with “link to” and “contains term” links, which I assume is Elise’s methodology. Link to returned 288,000, as is in her chart, but contains term gave 674,000, which is radically different than the 5,000 she attributed to WordPress. I sent a note suggesting she look at this number, to which she replied to Google for www.wordpress.org, which I did. The “contain this term” link returned the even more modest “Results 1 – 10 of about 981,” so obviously the chart should be updated to 1 instead of 5 immediately.

An awesome flash java name chart from the 1900s through now