Eric has a new version of Gatekeeper, the very effective spam plugin that lets you quiz people before they leave a comment. Compare installing Gatekeeper under 1.2 and 1.5 to see how far the plugin API has come.

Don’t bother with all the ultra-fancy javascript email encoders, plain entity encoding works just fine.

Doc Searls on framing in a blogging article. Market statistics aren’t hard to find, just ask one of the people indexing the darn thing. (Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, Bloglines…) To read the original article you have to register first—obviously an organization that “gets” the web.

It looks like LinkRanks have been owned, dominated by something call “deai.com.”

Another great extension for Thunderbird, inline spellchecking checks words as you type.

My new favorite cookie is French Vanilla Milanos. Too bad they don’t come bite-sized like the mint ones do now.

How many days, months, and years have you put into your site? Do yourself a favor and take a few hours to back up everything, right now. You’ll feel a lot better afterward. Anyone have any favorite backup tips they’d like to share? Right now I have my servers backing up to a remote fileserver over FTP nightly, and my home stuff is mostly flying without a net.

A Firefox theme for the bling-inclined

James Lee sent me a link to TB Quickmove, an extension for Firefox Thunderbird which lets you move messages into folders with hotkeys, which is what I really really needed. I only wish I could map regular letters.

Play the CSS maze

Announcing the Ping-O-Matic Global Network, a global and redundant array of servers providing Ping-O-Matic service and APIs.

What better way to celebrate 50,000 downloads of WordPress 1.5 than with a delicious recording of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman performing Lush Life. Lush Life was, of course, written by Billy Strayhorn.

Quantum scientists at University of Queensland are using WordPress to power their site, obviously sharp people. Another good use of WP as a CMS.

Opera 8.0 Beta 2 fixes an important CSS bug : “Fixed issues with styling of <fieldset>. This solves display issues with the WordPress administrative interface.”

The Web Photos Pro site is run mostly on WordPress, which I didn’t even realize until I saw the “Powered by WordPress” link. Great example of WP used as a CMS for an entire site. (The software looks cool too.)

A hack for a LDAP enabled WordPress 1.5. More and more large organizations with external authentication are using WordPress internally.