Surprise: Traditional Blogging Platforms Still Reign Supreme, comparative activity metrics across blogging platforms using some data from Postrank. I think if they included WP.com users with custom domains we would be double or trip where listed — even more if they included self-hosted.
TextDrive
Dean offers hosting, and pledges 10% of the fee to anyone who uses WordPress on it. Available for a limited time only. Those specs sound killer. You can’t deny that man’s flair.
MT Licensing
Six Apart announces more changes to Movable Type license. That sounds like a good model for WordPress.
EOS Digital Rebel XT
Le Monde
The French newspaper Le Monde has moved all their blogs from Typepad to WordPress, if only I could read French.
Don’t Mess With Jay
Jay Allen, From Troll to Doppelganger. For what it’s worth, I ran the IP on the forums and no posts have been made to the WP support forums from that IP.
Berlin Day 5
Final day in Berlin.
There’s a new “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list out! I follow the list and try to check out restaurants on it when I’m in the area, and as of last month had made it to 28 out of 50 of last year’s list. It’s a goal but in a rolling, gentle fashion: as the list changes every year I’ll probably never make it to 100%, but I enjoy exploring the highlighted folks and I’ve never had a bad meal at one. I was able to make it to Eleven Madison last month and predicted they might take the top spot, which they did in a well-deserved win. As with any award, there are lots of detractors, but Scott Vogel at Houstonia has a great essay on Why the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List Matters, which encapsulates nicely what the list represents to me.
WordPress.Feedster
I was at Feedster earlier today and they very non-chalantly mentioned wordpress.feedster.com, which basically Feedster blog search restricted to WordPress.com blogs, which is pretty cool and I’ll definitely find handy. Update: It searches all WP blogs, not just WP.com.
qTranslate
I recommended a translation plugin the other day at WordCamp Montreal but couldn’t remember the name. It was qTranslate.
Moleskine Blog
Jeremy Boggs wrote in to point me to this very neat blog where each entry is a scanned page from a Moleskine notebook.
A New Mezzoblue
Dave redesigned Mezzoblue again, I dig.
New User Pages
New user pages on the WP forums, shorter but with more useful information. (And better code to boot.) Not sure if recent topics and posts by the person is the best way to provide a personal forum aggregator, but I’m open to suggestions.
Balloon Ride
Went for Napa / Vacaville hot air balloon ride with Janitorial team at Automattic, had dinner at 54 Mint, and caught the end of the symphony masquerade ball in San Francisco. Here are Nick’s pictures from the same day.
Web2 Spam
Nick Bradbury says “Any new Web 2.0 company that hasn’t considered the spam problem automatically isn’t worth my time.” I forget who said it, but my favorite definition of social software is “things that get spammed.”
Search Engine Markshowdown
I decided to run the web page analyzer (excellent tool) against the front pages of a few of the latest and greatest search engines and also do a little analysis of my own. Here are some of the results in one of the only tables you’ll ever see on this site:
| Feedster | Technorati | Yahoo Search | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTML | 6.11 | 3.72 | 1.18 | 7.82 |
| Ext. CSS | 11.47 | 11.63 | 0 | 1.45 |
| Other | 9.10 | 6.70 | 15.10 | 1.72 |
| Total | 26.70 | 22.05 | 16.27 | 11.00 |
| Compressed | No | No | Yes | No |
Numbers are kilobytes, and may not add up exactly due to rounding. CSS is external, linked files. “Other” includes images and javascript.
Yahoo was the surprise winner here. Their HTML was alright but I think could be reduced quite a bit without losing anything. You’ll note they have the heaviest HTML of the bunch, heavier than other sites showing quite a bit more on their front page. They should probably talk to Doug. Overall though I think Yahoo has consistently been doing great nearly-standards-compliant work in their new designs. Yahoo could save about 67% of their HTML size with compression. Interestingly, Yahoo was the only site to specify ISO-8859-1 encoding, all the others claimed UTF-8.
Google was optimized to the hilt, but it’s kind of silly that they put so much effort into their markup but couldn’t go the last inch and make it valid HTML 4. They could probably make it a bit smaller with some more intelligent CSS usage. At least they don’t have font tags anymore. I think under normal circumstances they would have won but they have an olympic logo right now that’s pretty heavy. Google was the only site that used gzip compression for their HTML, but even uncompressed they only weighed in at about 2.4 kilobytes, still the lightest of the group.
Technorati clearly had the smartest markup of the group, and was the only one that validated. (An impressive feat for any website in this day and age.) Their markup is clean as a whistle with excellent structure and logic, and their numbers aren’t bad when you consider that they have a lot of stuff on their front page. This isn’t too surprising since Tantek did it. Their CSS, however, is pretty heavy. It’s strange because it’s very optimized in some ways but bloated in others, I think they could cut a few K from it pretty easily. One smart thing they did is have the CSS named with the date, so it’s name versioned and they can update it monthly without caching issues. All that said, they’re so far ahead of everything else they don’t need to worry about much. Technorati could save about 53% of their XHTML size with compression.
Feedster has its heart in the right place, but the implementation falls far short. For example it has a XHTML 1.1 doctype but then has the needless XML declaration at the top throwing IE into quirks mode. They use CSS in places, but then they have a table with 75 non-breaking spaces in it for positioning. There’s a ton needless markup, including a full kilobyte of HTML comments. On the bright side, they have the most room to improve. Feedster could save about 61% of their XHTML size with compression.
Hero
Hero binary review: 1. Go see this movie.
But one day, the company could “open source” the code that underpins the OS—giving it away for free. So says Mark Russinovich, one of the company’s top engineers.
“It’s definitely possible,” Russinovich says. “It’s a new Microsoft.”
From Wired’s An Open Source Windows Is ‘Definitely Possible’. In 2007 I predicted Windows will be Open Source by 2017, we’ll see if I end up being right on that one.
SlimServer
Slim Server is “powerful and free Open Source software. Not only will it power Squeezebox, but it also serves the SLIMP3 network music player or any software MP3 player on your network. SlimServer runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Solaris.” I’m going to set up the software a little later, and the Squeezebox looks pretty sweet too. Something for the wishlist. Might be the answer to my multi-room audio problems.
Mark Cuban on HD
Mark Cuban on HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Great read, I didn’t know that the HD content they film is higher quality than what they broadcast. I’ve gotten the full HD experience once at a friend’s house who had one of those giant 6 foot TVs and it was amazing, we watched golf and the nature channel or something. The junk they show on the TVs at the stores does not do HD justice at all. Cuban also thinks HD is the answer to piracy, contrast to this interview with Jack Valentini on Engadget.