How long before we’ll see ads in podcasts? Well Noah Glass of Odeo fame has registered PodAds.com. (Back in 10/2004.)
Keyboard Chair
I wonder if one of these is actually comfortable, if it would work with my chair, and if I would be shunned from the non-geek community if they ever saw it.
bbPress Goes Gold
The big news today is bbPress 0.72 “Bix” has been released, the first officially released version of the blazingly fast forum software 2 years in the making. It includes some of the things WordPress has become well-known for, like spam protection, easy extensibility, and WP-like customization.
WordPress & Techmeme 100
Whenever I visit a site I can usually tell whether it’s WordPress or not within an instant — there’s just something about a WordPress site that is distinctive. Super-clean permalinks are usually a dead giveaway. One thing I’ve been noticing a lot lately is on my guilty pleasure for tech news, Techmeme, it seems like almost every link I click is to a WordPress-powered site. Fortunately Techmeme provides a leaderboard showing both rank and % of space a site has taken up in headlines in the past thirty days.
The list changes almost every day but went ahead and took a snapshot of the top 100 as of January 16th and ran down the platform for each one, here’s how it ended up:
WordPress comes in at 43%, custom or bespoke systems at 42%, and then the others. When you take into effect Techmeme’s “presence” factor WP jumps to 48.8% of presence in the top 100 and all Blogsmith, Drupal, Blogspot, Tumblr, and Typepad combined are 8.4%. If you curious of the raw data, here’s the spreadsheet with the platforms.
This is just a snapshot, it’d be interesting to see how this evolves over time. It’s a small slice of the world of websites, but a very influential one. I’ve actually reached out to Gabe Rivera a few times to sponsor the leaderboard page, putting a W logo next to the ones that run WordPress in the table, but nothing has come of it yet.
Popups
There’s been a lot of talk about pop-unders that get by Firefox and Safari and I’ve seen them myself. The ones I’ve seen are using the technique I first saw on SitePoint, did the ad makers get some “fresh thinking for web developers and designers”?
As you may have seen, the WordPress community released version 3.2 “Gershwin” yesterday. Here’s the announcement video with some of the new features:
When you get a chance also check out MT’s post about the Design of 3.2.
All About that Bass
This catchy song has been making the rounds with my friends, see if you can listen and not move just a little bit:
Tons of Plugins
The WP-Plugins.org developer plugin repository now has over 300 registered plugins. Time to get that directory going!
30 Boxes
I’ve been really digging 30 Boxes, as reviewed by Mr Hawk here and Mr Malik here, I’m moving all of my calendaring (online and off) into it. They’re doing some neat stuff with profiles and sharing that I think will take people a while to fully grok. The only thing I think it needs is better timezone handling (I travel a lot). Check out their blog. (Powered by WP.) Update: I keep finding cool features like it automatically detects when you enter a birthday and offers to repeat it every year. The whole site is like a giant easter egg.
Imposter
There is some joker wannabe hacker pretending to me and asking others for sensitive information. Here are some tell-tale signs: IMing from a misspelled version of my IM addresses, like “saxmat02”; emailing from a gmail account with my name; using bad English (more than I normally do); asking for passwords, etc. These are all things I’d never do. If you ever have any doubt that the person you’re talking to might not be me, just call me on my cell or use one of the other contact methods here.
PHP Caching
Just a shared memory PHP caching link to check out later. Has anyone used something like this? Is the Turck shm stuff better? Something from Zend? We shall see.
It’s Only Right
Friends don’t let friends do Livejournal. If you or anyone you know wants help setting up a blog, let me know. I’m trying to help as many people I know as possible get online and blogging. It’s the Right Thing to Do. Plus I have this big ’ol dedicated server running at less than 10% capacity.
El Pais Interview
There has been a ton of media attention here at the blog conference in Spain. Friday and Saturday were a whirlwind of TV and newspaper interviews. The most in-depth, I believe, was from Pablo Fenandez in El Pais and is now available online in Spanish. There is something really special going on here in Spain with blogs, the people are full of such energy and passion that it’s definitely going to be a space to watch over the coming years.
Athens with Social
I met up with Team Social from Automattic in Athens, Greece where they were having their meetup. This day included some injuries, the Acropolis, and a night out on the town.
SxSW Meetup
Reminder: WordPress meetup at SxSW. 78 signups so far, I’ll try to bring shirts. 🙂
WordPress Wii Plugin
WordPress Wii Edition Plugin, so you can browse your blog from the Wii browser. I’ve gotten a Wii and it’s definitely the device of the season, it doesn’t do as much as the PS3 or Xbox, but it’s way more fun.
After the Deadline now Open Source
After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.
Old Dubai
Around Old Dubai, Jumeirah Beach, Al Qasr Madinat, Burj Al Arab…
Should poetry be open-source?
WP20 & Audrey Scholars
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.
Twenty years later, I am proud and humbled by what the community around WordPress has created, and jazzed about what we will create in the coming decades.
I’m also excited to mark this milestone by publicly launching the Audrey Scholars program. It is, like all things, an experiment, but I’m curious to see how it unfolds and perhaps one day an Audrey Scholar could even take the responsibility of leading WordPress, when my capacity to do so has passed.