Apple WordPress Weblog

Asides

It’s been all over, but I’m finally getting to check out the new new Apple education weblog which, coincidentally, is run by WordPress. I would like to thank the people who emailed me about this, in chronological order: Mike Carvalho, Serge K. Keller, Matt Willmore, Michael, John Roberts, Kyle, Michael Biven, Andreas Mayer, Noel Jackson, Manish, Jasmeet. I need to blog faster next time. 🙂 Update: Within the past two hours they commented out the “Powered by WordPress” text on the page. Before anyone jumps the gun it is entirely within their right to do so under the GPL, which I and the other developers believe strongly in, but it’s too bad as I think that could have been excellent exposure.

It’s Not RSS

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New formats called RSS that don’t work with anything else, specifically referring (I assume) to the “RSS 1.1” effort. (Where RSS stands for RDF Site Summary.) The name of RDF Site Summary is a mistake in the first place, they should take this new development effort as a chance to correct it. (Also, publishers are getting tired of supporting the format du jour. Maybe it’s “easy” for aggregators to support the latest permutation, but the last thing I want to do is bloat WordPress with support for Yet Another syndication format. Four is enough.)

MusicBrainz

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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.

Solid State Laptops?

Asides

I’m in the market for a new laptop as my TX 690P (which I love) is getting old and beat-up from travel. Unless Apple comes out with something amazing this month, I have my eyes set on one of the new ultraportables with solid state flash drives, which means the laptop can be completely silent and fanless. However information on these gems seems sparse online, especially in English, and especially if you want to buy one. Anyone know how to pick one of these up in the US? Anyone have one yet?

iPod Supports Standards

Uncategorized

Standards like MP3? Nope, web standards. Go to the iPod sub-site and toggle your stylesheets using a favelet. Notice anything? Now check out the source; still crufty in places, but a giant step forward from Apple’s old code, which is still viewable on other parts of their site. Great!

I noticed this because I was on the site to check out the iPod Mini. Yes, I know that for $50 more I get 11 more gigabytes, but even the largest iPod still wouldn’t hold all my music. Realistically, I don’t 10,000 songs in my pocket. About a thousand should hold me for a few days between syncing. I thought the Minis were pretty silly until Elissa dragged me into an Apple store the other day and I saw one up close. My goodness those things are small, making the iPod feel gargantuan in comparison. Size does matter, a lesson I learned from my old 16.1″ Sony laptop, bulky digital camera, and the Visor Prism. My only concern about the Mini is I wouldn’t be able to use accesories like this voice recorder. That’s probably for the best though, as I need to stop recording concerts and such on hardware not meant for it and break down and get (another) MiniDisc recorder and a decent microphone.

While at the site I noticed the rollovers were so fast they had to be CSS, and checking under the hood I found not only a mostly-CSS layout, but pages just a few simple mistakes away from validating. It’s good to see a company that “gets it” in many other areas finally maturing in their web presence.

UPDATE: Apple properties which seem to be on the bandwagon:

This is obviously a work in progress becuase you have pages like this antivirus page which is very much old-school markup. Can’t wait to hear more about this, or an official word from Apple with more information about their new-generation markup. Are there any bloggers inside of Apple?

Curly Quotes in Movable Type

Uncategorized

I am happy to announce that the “curlyquotes” module for Movable Type has passed out of beta into the release stage. Many thanks to Todd of Dominey Design for testing and providing valuable feedback. Here are the updated instructions. For full details, please see this script’s info page, which lets you receive updates by email, leave comments, report bugs, ask for features, and ask questions, et cetera. Here are the updated installation directions:

  1. Install the MTRegex plugin. (Directions from readme.txt file)
    1. Get file.
    2. Place the ‘regex.pl’ file in your Movable Type “plugins” directory
    3. Place ‘regex.pm’ and ‘postproc.pm’ in a ‘bradchoate’ subdirectory underneath your Movable Type “extlib” directory.
    4. You should end up with something like this:
      • (mt home)/plugins/regex.pl
      • (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/regex.pm
      • (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm
  2. Create a new template module called curlyquotes with the code from here.
  3. Add <$MTInclude module="curlyquotes"$> to the top of all your templates.
  4. Replace all occurences of <$MTEntryBody$> with <$MTEntryBody
    regex="1"$>    .

Usage is free, in every sense of the word, but if you could throw a link back this way I would appreciate it. Also if you improve on the code in some way, submit your changes so everyone can benefit.

What this module does: It takes straight quotes/prime mark, and makes them proper typographer’s quotes, sometimes called “curly” or “smart” quotes. So basically it takes "this" and makes it “this” using the proper HTML entities. It also works with single quotes, apostrophes, and multi-paragraph double quotes. It slices and dices!

Why? Because there is no button for a curly quote or apostrophe on the keyboard. No really, see the old post for more.

Spring Ping Thing

Uncategorized,

Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s Spring and time for me to stop teasing and come forward with something dramatic.

Announcing Ping-O-Matic, the automatic pinging fanatic that handles the pinging of almost a dozen different update services. Erratic server responses making pinging problematic? Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic results page and let us handle the dirty work.

With the dream team of Dougal and yours truly, you knew it was going to be cool. What you see is just the beginning. Think a unified XML-RPC interface (One Ping to rule them all, One Ping to find them…), think ping queueing, think quality of service and response graphs, think different, think global blogtimes, think update aggregation, think Ping-O-Matic.

So spread the word from here to Beijing. More than just a fling, we’re committed to being the Kings of Pings. We take this ping thing seriously, so you don’t have to.

Bing!

Automattic Toni

Automattic, Yahoo

Another nice birthday present! I have no idea (really) how he got this, but Om has the scoop on Yahoo VP Toni Schneider leaving to join Automattic. We were originally going to announce this at the end of the month when Toni actually left but I guess now is as good a time as any. 🙂 Toni was the CEO of Oddpost and after joining Yahoo led, amoung other things, their really cool developer network.

I first met Toni shortly after I moved to San Francisco and I’ve wanted him to be a part of Automattic pretty much since the idea first entered my mind. We’ve spent many long meals over the past year discussing the Automattic idea before it even had a name. I’ve been on cloud nine since (somehow) I convinced him to leave the incredibly cushy corporate job and rough it out in startup world again. I’m very very excited about some of the things coming down the line.

Update: Toni has blogged about it here. He also has a WordPress.com blog that used to have a bunch of cool cars on it, hopefully that’ll come back somewhere. 🙂

Update 2: It’s on Digg, and I’m curious what linking to the Digg story will do. Digg it if you think it’s interesting.

Vertical Mac OS X

Asides

Since everyone is talking about Macs today — did you see the iPhone — I thought it would be a good time to pose to my highly intelligent readers a question that has vexed me for months. I have a Dell 24″ monitor attached to a Mac Mini, my preferred configuration for this is vertical (you can turn the Dell on its side) but I can’t find the setting in OS X that lets you put the screen into portrait mode. Any tips? Update: It was right under my nose. System Prefs -> Displays -> Rotate. Thanks to Daniel and Barry.

Better Trackback?

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There is talk of pushing for Trackback to become a standard. A few of the problems with Trackback are immediately apparent: horrible internationization support, bad auto-discovery, proclivity for spamming, no verification, historical baggae of category junk, bad spec. Fix all these and you get… pingback. Pingback is big enough now to make a blip in Google’s markup survey, and is supported by a wide range of platforms. The question is whether people are going to want to support an existing and robust standard or want to put their name on something new, the global “not invented here” syndrome where everyone wants their 15 standards of fame. (As someone who has been involved in several standards myself, I admit the draw is strong.) What Pingback does need is a better advocacy site, like atom has.

I’m going to try out intermittent fasting for a few weeks, after hearing about it for several years from fit-minded friends. It’s tough to find a link on it that doesn’t have some sort of newsletter popup or sell an ebook, but Tim had a good guest post on it in 2008 which ends on a skeptical note, and this beginner’s guide to intermittent fasting by James Clear is awesome for its graphics and straightforward way of introducing the concept and ways to approach it. I’m going to aim for a late lunch and a normal-timed dinner, since like James dinner is often my most social meal.

Update: I also forgot that I wrote about this with a few more links and some good comments in January.

Spam Blogs

Asides

You should read spam and fake blogs, another problem I’ve been seeing a lot lately is entire blogs being scraped and their content being re-published with ads on it. Structured formats like RSS make this easier than before. The dark side to the numbers all the blog search engines have been toting is that a LARGE percentage of these are fake blogs, so much so that I currently block over 80% of all incoming pings to Ping-O-Matic as obvious spam. This has been a huge resource burden as well. We have around 2 million legit pings per day, do the math.

Note to self

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When flying to Canada, BRING YOUR PASSPORT. Update: I wrote the preceding from my Blackberry at the ticket counter. After I found out about the passport, I rushed to the departure area and got the world’s best cab driver. His English was atrocious, but he understood what was going on. There was thankfully no traffic on 280 to SFO to my house and he did it in about 15 minutes. Ran in, grabbed the passport, ran back out. Lost a minute while he tried to ask me if I had “all three things”: passport, tickets, and ID. He says a lot of people run in to get a passport and leave the tickets on the table. He took 101 back to SFO, which had a bit of traffic. Big tip. No line at ticket counter, the flight was delayed. The lady was so kind, she switched me to the last window seat on the flight to Las Vegas and I got an upgrade to first class from Vegas to Toronto. (Maybe I’ll get some sleep.) No line at the security counter so I breezed through. Had time to grab a reuben at the deli. Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life.