When I saw Giga Om at Jay’s lunch yesterday he happily informed me that his site, which is now on WordPress 1.5, handled Slashdottings two days in a row and all of the traffic from the LJ/6A story without a hiccup. I asked if he was running Staticize which increases the performance of WP significantly and he said no. (!)
WordPress Planet Back
The WordPress Planet aggregator is back, though it still needs a better design.
Windows AntiSpyware
To download the new Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) software you need to verify that you’re a customer “running genuine Microsoft Windows.” I’m pretty sure mine is legit, at least the guy on Market street said it was. Of course on the confirmation page, it seems you can get by their million-dollar verification system by choosing “No, do not validate Windows at this time, but take me to the download.” Hat tip: Robert Scoble.
Open Source LiveJournal
It seems some users are not optimistic about the future of an Open Source LiveJournal, especially in light of the recent changes to their Social Contract ( “They completely gutted the Free Software section.”), which was supposedly changed because “Lawyers didn’t like ‘contract’ in the name ‘social contract’ because it does not have the structure of a contract.” Seems to work for Debian though, which has lawyers out the wazoo.
Livejournal and Xanga
LivePress is “a Live Journal compatibility and synchronization plugin. It is designed to let WordPress users continue to use their Live Journal accounts with minimal hassle. It adds support for moods, music, synching posts between WordPress and Live Journal accounts and implements the lj-user and lj-cut tags in WordPress.” Then there’s Croissanga, which provides similar functionality for Xanga, another journaling site with millions of users that is frequently overlooked. Hat tip: Wordlog.
6A Aquires Gruber?
LJ Buyout
It’s confirmed and official now. Especially interested in this: “Will LiveJournal stay open source? The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source…” Another interesting thing is that on the 6A site they’re calling everything LiveJournal does “weblogging” which I doubt few bloggers or LJers would, but it’s clearly a deliberate wording on their part. Glad this is out the door, interested to see where it goes. Congrats to Om for the scoop, too—the 6A press release reads a lot like his post.
LinkRank Smackdown
According to PubSub, I am suddenly much, much less popular. Was it something I said? Fortunately this has no correlation with my actual traffic. Hat tip: Weblog Tools Collection.
Dan’s Calendar
Dan has an interesting photo calendar he’s selling with some fantastic dog pictures and for every $25 calendar sold $20 is going to the Red Cross. The donations are a fantastic idea, but isn’t the Red Cross already maxed out for donations they can send to many of those places? Others can speak to that issue much better than I.
Trackback Spam
The flood of truly vile Trackback spam today sadly confirms what I was worried about months ago: if we lock down commenting (with things like WP Hashcash and Typekey) it’ll just push them to Trackback. All the captcha in the world won’t fix Trackback. Our last line of defense is the content-based filters like Spam Karma, Spaminator, and Three Strikes.
The Cultural Divide
Six Apart and Live Journal
I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?
98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)
WordPress App of Year
Mike and Clay wrote in that WordPress has been named Web Application of the Year by ArsTechnica. Wow, that’s quite an honor for the entire team.
PikaHolic
Oh my, must be seen to believed.
MusicBrainz
I remember reading about MusicBrainz forever ago but I’ve really started using it in earnest today and it’s totally blowing me away. Running a little slow though, this might be the application that gets me to upgrade my computer. Why don’t these guys have every music site and VCs pounding down their door? Fantastic, moderated metadata plus collection management? That’s hot.
SpamAssassin Plugin
This new WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin speaks to spamd
directly and doesn’t have the Perl dependencies the old one did.
First American in 1924
Apparently Robert Cronk was the first American born in 1924 and is very proud of that fact. I got an email from him, presumably because of the genealogy site I admin: “In a cursory examination of your website, I notice, in addition to all the others born on January 1st, there are five specified as being born on January 1, 1924. I would like you to pass along my greetings to these five persons, because I, too, was born on January 1, 1924. I know it is premature, but January 1, 2004, is fast approaching, so I would like to say to everyone who shares that date as a birthday, HAPPY BIRTHDAY and HAPPY NEW YEAR from the FIRST AMERICAN BORN IN 1924.” Browse around the site a bit, it’s certainly one of the less traversed corners of the internet. (Yes, I am just now getting to email from 10/2003. I said I was catching up.)
More Dvorak
My Dvorak article has been translated into German for this German Dvorak resource.
Om Malik on WordPress
It looks like Business 2.0 writer Om Malik is back on WordPress.
Spanish WordPress History
My Spanish isn’t what it used to be but this history of WordPress looks good.