It’s becoming more and more painfully obvious that Meetup has jumped the shark, we might as well start a group working on an open source alternative for WordPress users. Anyone interested in working on this?
On Spreading Firefox
Chris Messina, one of the guys who built Spread Firefox, has announced he’s moving on due to the direction the site is going. Of course, watch what you say about the matter.
More Ta-Da
Open Source Usability
Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement. Mentions the usability review in the comments. At the next FLOSS Sprint Eugene has asked for WordPress to be one of the main projects.
Pulse of Freedom
“The Pulse of Freedom is a site published by the protesters at Martyrs’ Square, Beirut, from a tent city.” This is an inspiring story: “A group of Web masters, graphic design artists, writers, and photographers stayed up all night for several nights in a row putting the Web site together.” They chose WordPress. “As far as I’m aware this is the first Web site of its kind anywhere in the world. The leaders of a democratic revolution are openly blogging about their experience from the center of the action.” Echoditto writes about their part in Blogging from Beirut. “I am writing this post from a tent city in the Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, a place which is filled with the energy and excitement of a burgeoning democratic movement.” Hat tip: Mike Carvalho via email.
Geek Lunches Dangerous
Scoble got in trouble for the very long geek lunch/meetup last Saturday in Seattle. He also relates a funny story from the afternoon. We had about 15 people come and go during the meetup and it was a lot of fun — thanks to all who came out.
MT 3.16
Congrats to Jay and his team on Movable Type 3.16. There are some “orange level” security problems fixed, so be sure to upgrade! It’s a day for releases.
Squeezebox2
There is a new Squeezebox out, and it looks awesome. I just wish they hadn’t raised the price so much! I really need 3 to do what I want to do, which is full multi-room audio, but at that price it may be economical just to have someone come out and wire the place up.
Adam Trachtenberg
Stewart Ugelow writes in that “Adam Trachtenberg, eBay’s technical evangelist and author of O’Reilly’s
“Upgrading to PHP 5”, has switched to WordPress.”
Drupal 4.6
Drupal 4.6.0 is out and has some very cool new features, not the least of which is it’s joining the generation of new publishing tools that ping Ping-O-Matic by default. 🙂 Congrats to the Drupal team on the release.
Adobe and Macromedia
Adobe to aquire Macromedia for $3.4 billion. Whoa! At first I thought this was a late April fool’s joke.
Bla-bla List
Someone cloned all of Ta-da List into Bla-Blah List which uses Flash for the interface instead of HTML/JS. What’s even more interesting is it’s all Open Source, so now I could run my own copy of Ta-da on one of my machines. Too bad the backend is in Java and not something I could easily run, like PHP, Python, Ruby, or Perl.
Seattle Meetup Location
Okay so it looks like the best place in terms of size, price, and location of those suggested is The Pike Pub & Brewery which sounds like a fun, laid-back place perfect for a meetup. Thanks to Scott and Jane for suggesting it. Still going to meet at 1 PM. It looks like there are going to be some great people attending, so it should be a lot of fun. Oh, and the tag for today is “wordpressmeetup“. 🙂
Gallery: 4-16-2005
Auto-imported from old gallery:
CFP Observation
For a conference on privacy, there sure seems to be a lot of unencrypted traffic on this network.
Seattle Meetup
Okay, so the Seattle meetup is going to be on Saturday at 1 PM in downtown Seattle. Exact location to be determined. Scoble is going to suggest some places and come out and Scott Berkun is also trying to make it out. Should be some interesting conversation. If you leave a comment with an email I’ll email you when we know the place. Update: Here’s the skinny.
Firefox Counter
Get a Firefox download counter for your blog, I wrote a quickie plugin for WordPress that’ll grab and cache the number.
Hosting
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.