The Google Blog

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As nearly everyone in the world has noticed, Google has a blog now. It’s too bad they didn’t go with the /blog/ URI because this one has extra redundant redundancy, and that doesn’t seem very Google-like. The new blog is very generic, it barely seems like a Blogger blog. On the same day Blogger releases gorgeous XHTML+CSS tempates from Doug and the crew, Google releases its blog with a table-based layout and funky HTML 4 (with no doctype). Also, Blogger uses utf-8 encoding by default now (like WordPress) and Google’s blog uses iso-8859-1.

So there isn’t a lot of information on their blog yet. The first post was signed by Ev, but after that it’s been non-entities writing (and modifying) the posts, which is very weird for a blog. Where to go for more information? Their Atom feed of course. The first thing I noticed was the <id> element, which contained tag:big.corp.google.com,2003:blog-1720. Big corp, ha! So who’s the mysterious author of the two entries after Ev’s?

<author>
<name>A Googler</name>
</author>

Well that’s helpful. Their second post on outsourcing has a more interesting bit of metadata.

<issued>2004-05-10T15:30:52-07:00</issued>
<modified>2004-05-11T17:40:57Z</modified>
<created>2004-05-10T22:39:01Z</created>

Bloggers edit their entries all the time, but “A Googler” actually changed quite a bit, removing a paragraph on outsourcing to India. Perhaps Google is already sharing more than they had planned, but I’ll stop now before they take away my Gmail account.

Plugins From CSS Guru

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The infamous Eric Meyer, as you may know, powers his blog with WordPress. In the course of customizing WordPress to meet his needs we chatted quite a bit and he extended the functions he needed to extend using the 1.2 plugin format, and he is now sharing his work with the community. See his Meyerweb WordPress tools and hacks page.

Update: Whoops! I thought I was writing on the WordPress development blog. I’ll leave it here since I already pinged everyone and your aggregators have probably already grabbed it, but if you want to link please link to the entry on wordpress.org. That’s what I get for multitasking while writing a post.

Offline

Personal

It was not long ago that we measured online time in minutes. You knew exactly how long you had been online in a given period because you were billed for the time you were connected. The first computer game I bought—One Must Fall 2097 by Epic Megagames—was downloaded on a Compuserve account (it was paid for online; ecommerce and delivery in 1994!) and cost about $10 over its price in usage charges. Connection was a luxury.

Now, I have no idea how much time I spend online. It would be easier to tally up hours I’m commuting, sleeping, and (sometimes) eating and subtract that from the number of hours in a day, if I wasn’t scared of the results. I just vaguely remember what it was like to count the online hours instead of the offline ones. I’d like to recapture that magic, and it’s a beatiful night outside.

Sting

Personal

I’m in the midst of finals, so there is not a lot of time for extra-curricular writing here. Things have still been busy. Most notably, I am now a member of the Web Standards Project, and you can see where my bio will eventually go. A friend in San Francisco told me the other day that whenever I come up in conversation it’s as “Photo Matt,” partly because no one can remember my last name. This was exciting to hear because it puts me a single word away from one-word celebrities such as Sting, Prince, Common, Madonna, Ludacris, Seal, and Poe. I suppose I’m in the less-exclusive two-word celebrity club with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Puff Daddy (P. Diddy?), Big Boi, and Andre 3000. Right. The reason I think it’s all funny is that the filename of my bio is photomatt.html, breaking the convention of every other bio on the WaSP site. I guess Molly forgot my last name.

Once again, sorry for the unexpected break in posting. As my schedule settles things should return back to normal, whatever that may be. Besides, all the action is on WordPress anyway, which is fast-approaching its version 1.2 release. Version 1.0 was a big deal and made a lot of necessary architectual changes that we really needed to move forward, but I think 1.2 is the one that’s going to make waves. As a welcome side-effect of WordPress’ recent surge in popularity, there has been a lot more activity with volunteers sending in patches and working on documentation, both of which are sincerely appreciated. The official chat channel has been busy too, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net. I currently have two bots running in the channel, wpbot and pressbot. Wpbot is based on the interesting Mozbot package, which has great logging features and a few other nicities, but just wasn’t what I was ultimately looking for. What I really wanted was JiBot, and that’s what pressbot is. It was more involved installation than Mozbot—I had to download and compile Python, SQLite, and a number of Python packages—but it has been totally worth it. I have been doing a number of development-related setups lately, especially on Windows, and I can’t wait until I get a free moment to write about them. My productivity and organazation has improved several-fold as a result of a few pieces of well-connected open-source software.