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.

Travel Troubles

Personal

By the way, I’ve never been happier to be home. It’s the little things — like using a mouse and a real keyboard. Unfortunately getting here took the better part of 19 hours. They actually had the hood up on the plane that was supposed to fly me overseas, which was a long delay. I overheard someone say “if they get out the duct tape I’m staying here.” The connecting flight in DC was very missed, but after 45 minutes in line I got the last seat on a direct flight to SFO leaving in about two hours. Then I spent more than two hours in line trying to get a boarding pass and through security, the height being my ticket was once again tagged SSSS which mean I got the “special” treatment at security with my flight set to take off in 8 minutes. (I swear I’m on some sort of list.)

The very worst was I had bought some matchbooks for my sister (who collects them) and they were in my suitcase. The guy asked how many there were and I said “two” because that’s how many I bought at souvenir places. He found another (a free one from a hotel) and another TSA guy came up and said “which two of these do you want?” and took the third one away from me. I was shocked, and said “Are you going to keep that?” and he replied “Well you’re not getting it back.” I stumbled away to the shuttle and ran to the gate, 10 minutes after it was supposed to leave and all the doors were closed but luckily the plane hadn’t left yet. I finally got in around 1 AM and it was too late for BART so I just took a cab. Now I’m home and warm and dry and clean and being back after travelling so intensely makes it seem that much better. Time to disappear under some sheets…

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.

German Focus

Asides, WordPress

So the next trip to Europe I’ll have to catch the Netherlands and Germany, I’ve met some fantastic WordPress users (and future users) from both. There is someone on stage from a German media organization talking about how they’ve begun emphasizing blogs much more in their publication, Focus. After browsing a bit I noticed that blogs.focus.msn.de (yes that’s MSN) is all WordPress blogs — cool! What’s interesting about being Open Source is that the software turns up places you would never suspect or know about.

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?

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.

Salon Article

Asides

Blogging grows up, not as interesting as it could have been, but a good overview of Six Apart. When I talked to Farhod about two weeks ago I estimated around 15k WordPress blogs. Today the WP blog crawler has over 18,000 in its database. Six months ago the list was small enough to list every WordPress blog on the counter page. Nine months ago you could count the number of WP blogs on your hands. Since I started writing this entry 82 people have downloaded WordPress for free. It’s not where we’re at, it’s where we’re going.

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!

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?

Liz Gannes writes for AllThingsD, Automattic Grows Up: The Company Behind WordPress.com Shares Revenue Numbers and Hires Execs. In addition to Stu joining as CFO and Paul as Consigliere/Automattlock, we’ve been on a hiring roll the past month or two with excellent folks joining at every level of the company, including two more Matts. If you’re passionate about Open Source and making the web a better place, like we are, there’s never been a better time to join. My favorite thing about logging in every morning is the people I work with. Friends say I work too much but it hardly feels like work at all. Update: Now in Techcrunch too.

It’s Not RSS

Asides

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.)

Image Toolbar Header

Uncategorized

I’m doing some code cleanup around here, and I came to a line in my <head> that is soley to work around an Internet Explorer feature I don’t want on my site.

A highlighted example of an Internet Explorer image toolbar.

Here is the standard way to remove it:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />

Since the http-equiv attribute is meant to be simply a document-level replacement for real HTTP headers, and I have the ability to send out real HTTP headers, I decided to try out removing this line and replacing it with this bit of PHP, which according to the spec is functionally equivilent:

<?php header ('imagetoolbar: no'); ?>

Looks funky, but according to the HTTP 1.1 specification user agents should ignore headers they don’t recognize, so there’s no harm. However in my testing I was disappointed (though not terribly surprised) to find that Internet Explorer did not respect the header. I have trimmed other parts of my markup quite a bit though, and I’m willing to sacrifice this one line.