Robozilla, the DMOZ link checker.
Scavenger Hunt
Nick is doing a scavenger hunt in return for Gmail invites. I’ve got a few extra invites now too. Interesting offers considered. I’ll throw in a free copy of WordPress. UPDATE: If you just email asking for an invite, you will be immediately deleted. Leave a comment with your interesting offer.
Interview
On Sax, Love, and WordPress. An interview. Read and (hopefully) enjoy.
Wikipedia Blocked in China
On Wikipedia in China (or lack thereof): “You know, it’s not accessible from public internet. I have to find a proxy server to get that page. I know it’s just a click in a open internet world, but now i have to hate the knowledge blocker, it’s their own fault.”
Broken Kode
WordPress, I LOVE YOU. Interesting post, but rambles a little bit and has two inaccuracies. Textpattern is under an open source license now. b2evo can import from MT. I like the name of his category, “Cerebral Interviews.”
Redirection Proposal
As many people have heard now, blogs that were previously hosted at weblogs.com are now needing to find new homes. Dave is going to be sending people their backup files but it looks like a lot of links may be broken, and some people proposed keeping a list of the old and new URIs.
Why not go one step better? I apologize if this is not technically feasible for whatever reason, but here’s my idea. DNS is very flexible, Dave can have specific A records for subdomains of sites that are going to stay under weblogs.com, and then set up a wildcard * A record to point to a different IP. This IP could be anyone running a service that would allow people to redirect their old domains to their new ones. Technically this would be pretty simple, no more than a few hours of hacking. The machine serving the redirects could have a wildcard virtualhost entry in Apache and a simple PHP script (or Python script, or RewriteMap) to serve 301 Moved Permanently
headers depending on the hostname.
It could redirect to whatever the site owner wanted. The hosting overhead would be minimal. I’m willing to personally commit to writing the code and hosting it for at least 2 years.
More on Sun Blogs
Counter
WordPress Blog Counter: 10,000 and counting. I remember when the list was so small each blog was listed and linked below the count. (It was just a few months ago.)
Pictorialis II
Pictorialis II: Framed! Another one to watch.
Trucking Along
2004-06-11 – 104,040 pings. Thank you!
Whoops
Sorry about the comment funkiness, while adding in the caching plugin I also upgraded to 1.3-pre-alpha, which has a different method of calling the comments template.
Staticize Reloaded
The caching plugin I pointed to the other day was very well-executed but it didn’t meet my needs for several reasons, mainly that it cached every bit of output, which wouldn’t be appropiate for things like my random photo. (Or my non-rotating photo formerly known as the random photo in the header. It’s on break right now.) My site is a pretty neat system of PHP includes, and I want to preserve that because it makes my life easy and doesn’t slow anything down any perceptable amount.
So I took the Staticize plugin and added support for dynamic non-cached sections, cleaned up the code a bit, fixed a weird problem where it would just show a blank page if it couldn’t write the file, fixed the problem with edit links and the comment form, and made it fit with the WordPress code a little smoother. Full instructions are included with the plugin, but to install just make sure your wp-content
folder is writable (you may have already done that when setting up WP) and activate the plugin, and it will start working immediately.
I have a couple more improvements in mind for it already, but it’s fully functional and I’m running it right now.
Does Time Change All?
Microsoft Research on web searching: Does Time Change All?
WaSP Survey
Take the WaSP web survey, because your opinion will make a difference to what the organization does in the future.
Mosquito Bites
So it wasn’t even the first day of the bug tracker’s existence when bug notes got rowdy and prompted Shelley to write a post lamenting WordPress developer communication and more. I started to write a reply in the comments, but it got pretty long so I decided to post it here.
Shelley: Different people particpate with the development process at different levels. While I appreciate the point you were trying to communicate, it seems like an inappropiate place to role play a clueless user. (Particularly posting under your own account.) Ryan and I fully realize that the reply would mean very little to someone who didn’t know PHP or diff, but it was a dialogue between you—Shelley Powers the bug reporter who has written several advanced hacks and plugins for WordPress—and a developer who wants to address the problem. Someone else probably would have been treated differently. In the past you have been very indignant when someone assumed you didn’t know something and addressed you at a level you deemed patronizing. In that situation, how is anybunny supposed to respond?
It’s silly for it to come up in the first place. Communication is much more than 50% of successful application, it’s 100% essential because without it the code doesn’t really matter. The project falls in the forest without making any sound. However the bug tracker doesn’t seem like the best place to make this point. If you really feel strongly about this, why not write some guidelines or best practices in the wiki and send a note to the documentation list.
There a thread on the forums which addresses some of this.
Kicksology
Kicksology.net, an amazingly well-done site dedicated to basketball shoes.
Waterfall
A fresh look at the waterfall. Hat tip: Charles Miller.
Late Night Recipe
Must be performed before 1 AM, depending on your location.
- Go to Wendy’s.
- Get a combo with fries and a chocolate frostee. You’ll like this so Biggie size it.
- Take lid off frostee.
- Dip a fry in the frostee.
- Enjoy!