Jeremy’s New Job
New Job (Again) for Jeremy Zawodny.
OS CMS
Open Source CMS review at Linux Insider. “Although WordPress appears to be very simple, its power lies in a well-planned interface and design. In addition, its product development is extremely active.”
WP and Safari
This ZDNet article says Safari doesn’t work with WordPress as well as IE. I’m assuming he’s referring to the quicktags which just can’t be done in Safari because of JS limitations, but is anyone else having issues using WordPress with Safari?
PHP Charts
The PHP + Flash chart maker has been updated with some neat new features. Been very happy with this over at Ping-O-Matic and we’re going to expand what we’re doing a bit.
Metadata-Aware Grep
Wouldn’t it be cool if once Reiser4 and other metadata-aware filesystem are more widespread you could have metadata-aware grep
that allows you to search from the command line like you can from the iTunes search box, keying on any or all of the available data.
Typo
I had a small typo in my new random photo SQL code so on every page load it was selecting all 9,000+ photos in random order instead of just one. Fixed now, so page loads should be a lot faster. (Everything is cached except for the random photo.)
iChat Concert
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is blogging with WordPress now. Hat tip: Joi and Jean-Luc.
15 Questions
Zeldman asks Derek 15 questions in 1998. Kids these days need 21 questions.
Yahoo and RSS
Yahoo is standardizing on RSS 2, and everyone knows Google loves Atom 0.3. Battle of the titans?
Global Test
Now you too can take “The Global Test”.
1.3 Cleanup
A few comments about some of the code changes in 1.3. Very nice to see people appreciating some of the hard work we’ve put into this iteration. In a perfect world we could stop the clock and rewrite large portions of the code from scratch, but that would take a long time and break a lot of things in the process. All programmers want to do this, it’s our weakness, but every time I get this urge I think of Netscape and how devastating their rewrite downtime was. We’re making some substantial changes but doing it gradually while introducing new features and responding to users needs.
For example, in 1.3 “the loop” is called very differently but it’s completely backward compatible with everyone’s 1.2 loop code. We deprecate things over time so any structural changes that need to be made come gradually for people upgrading, there’s nothing to drastic every time. This also saves a huge amount of time in support. (Regular users don’t want to have to redo their templates, hackers don’t want to relearn code they already knew.) Same for the new theme system we’re introducing, it adds a lot of flexibility, radically changing how the front end of WordPress operates (like plugins for templates and styles) but all the new stuff is completely optional. I’ve transitioned most of my custom code into a personal “theme” that makse upgrading a lot easier for me (which is good because I do it almost daily).
Next time you get the urge to rewrite from scratch think about the testing your code has gone through, all the edge cases that have already been addressed, the existing installed base, and how many new bugs you’ll introduce with the from-scratch code.
xPodder
Bloglines Trouble
“There is a problem with the database. Please try again later” — Been seeing this a lot at Bloglines lately. I wonder if they’re going to go through the same awkward growing period Technorati went through.
Command Line Tricks
Senuti
Senuti, iTunes backwards. Clever. Hat tip: again Steve Jenson.
XMPP
XMPP WG RFCs. One day I will blog entirely in acronyms. Hat tip: Steve Jenson.
Squarespace
Squarespace has a fantastic site but the software is underwhelming, as are their “featured” sites. Searching around shows about 500 sites visibly powered by them. Anyone know anyone actually using it? I think there are some good ideas there WordPress could learn from.
Browser Bumpers
Browser Bumpers, neat idea, one I can’t use because of Synergy. I’m ready to throw a Fitt.