WordPress 1.5 upgrade party on Tuesday. I had originally planned for it to be Monday, but forgot about that whole Valentine thing. If you want to host an upgrade party in your area, let me know!
Open Source Blogs?
So I’m playing around more with Newsburst today, and one thing that struck me was the organization of the defaults. Where in the world did they come from? You could do this with most any category, but let’s take a look at “Open Source”:
- Builder.com.com — not sure what the site is doing, but the feed does have two mentions of open source software, but it seems to just be re-branded stories from News.com, so I’m not sure what the point is.
- Linux Dell Blog — Frequently down but hardcore open source.
- jfleck — I suppose the connection is he contributes to Gnome. Okay… No posts about OS on the front page, and even the category they subscribe to looks to be updated about twice a month.
- Kuro5hin — A great site, but nothing about Open Source in the feed lately. It’s more tech-culture.
- Linux.com — dry, but valid.
- linux kernel monkey log — valid.
- Miguel de Icaza — Good choice.
- NewsForge — groovy.
- Lockergnome Tech News Watch — covers tech but not too much OS
- Scripting News — Many things, but not an open source blog. Besides, it’s listed several other places already.
- Slashdot — who would argue with this?
What would be cool if Newsburst let me tag a feed when I subscribed to it, then highlight popular tags and the most popular “sources” within them. Forget what they think “open source” is, I want the opensource tag.
The way to get people hooked on blogs has nothing to do with RSS feeds or river of conciousness displays or whatever, it’s all the fantastic content that’s being created out there by people in the trenches. If you had a passing interest in learning about open source, you would get 60+% junk if you subscribed to that channel group. Where is Blake Ross’ passion about Firefox, Mitch Kapor, ZDNet’s OS Blog, Sitepoint’s, Spread Firefox, or anything from the people that are creating the applications that are changing the way we live, work, and play? Are blogs that talk about open source that hard to find?
MySQL Considered Dangerous
Why upgrading MySQL 4.0 to 4.1 is a royal pain, from a MySQL employee.
Email Confession
CNET Aggregator
It looks like CNET has an aggregator called Newsburst. I dig the name, but I don’t think it was intended to be public yet. Is it just me or does it seem like bloggers get all the scoops these days? Disclaimer: I work for CNET but I don’t speak officially in any way, and I’m not affiliated with News.com team that did Newsburst. (Though I think John Roberts is a cool guy.)
Technorati Updates
Technorati has finally updated the cosmos for WordPress and it’s showing 74,931 incoming blogs right now. That’s about 30,000 blogs more than the last update.
Pfister on 1.5
I would recommend reading Jenna Pfister’s great review of 1.5. I’ve been working with the 1.5 codebase so long now that I’ve actually forgotten some of the new features—I may use this article when writing the release announcement. Hat tip: My WordPress dashboard via Feedster.
PHP Guru
I’m looking for someone to work closely with on a few interesting projects and I thought my blog would be a good place to find the best and brightest. It is paid contract work, and could keep you busy for a few months. Experience with WordPress is a must, and being in the bay area is a strong plus. Email me if you’re interested and include links to any WordPress plugins or other code you’ve written.
All About Models
This is funny because I just saw Zoolander again on Monday, but Models.com has a new WordPress blog which features—you guessed it—lots of models. Looks great. I found the site because they made a donation to WordPress.
43 Things Story
43 Things’ word on the Salon story, on their blog of course. (Powered by Textpattern.) “I guess we have faith that the blogosphere will get the story straight even if Salon distorts it.” Update: They’ve removed the bit I quoted! I don’t know what that means.
Ta-da Ta-Don’t
My Ta-da List down again, and I’m faced with the fact that it’s a Monday and everything I need to do is on that list. I’m reminded why I distrust hosted services. I don’t want to be upsold to Basecamp, I just want a simple online service to manage my tasks.
2WirePress
I got word a little bit ago that 2Wire, makers of the modems everyone with SBC DSL gets and a cool new DVR, are using WordPress internally. “We tried salesforce.com and now we use WordPress exclusively!”
WordPress in FreeBSD
Earlier I noticed that FreeBSD has a WordPress port, which means you can install WordPress automatically, just like on Debian and Gentoo. Only with Free software. 🙂
MySQL Collation Errors
I may have to take back the nice things I said about MySQL earlier, I had forgotten how much of a pain the new collation stuff is. I’m sure they could have added character set support in a more transparent fashion.
Well Designed
It seems I’m seeing more and more great designs in WordPress blogs, where previously the really gorgeous stuff was either hand-rolled or on another system. Citizen Dmitri is a great looking WordPress blog, Binary Bonsai is still one of my favorite designs right now (try out the LiveSearch). I need to start keeping up my well designed list again. Hat tip for Citizen Dmitri: Dave.
Kleptones
New Kleptones mix which I have temporarily mirrored locally from Andy. (Individual files.)
Lifehacker
I’ve been enjoying Lifehacker.
Technorati Tag API is Broken
The Technorati Tag API is Broken, or so asserts Kevin Burton. The post is a little old and the comments don’t seem to have gone anywhere. I think the tag having to appear in the URI is a weakness, and a restriction that isn’t reasonable under many hosting enviroments. That said, my understanding of rel="tag"
is that they don’t have to link to Technorati at all, they can link to your own taxonomy and not Google bomb key terms. (As WordPress does in 1.5.) You don’t even really need to use the links, since they spider categories and dc:subject from RSS feeds anyway, but if you do tag you posts using the link method, it might be worth using nofollow
.
MySQL not Buggy
Study: Few bugs in MySQL database, which is good to know, since an increasingly large portion of my life is being put into MySQL. (And Apache, and PHP, but not so much Linux anymore. I’ve been setting up a new FreeBSD server and it rocks.)
Semantics in Markup
Semantics in Markup of Ranked Tag Lists and the accompanying CSS demo is really cool. Too bad Technorati probably won’t adopt something like this. Perhaps another taggregator will?