Last night I saw the One Man Star Wars Trilogy performed by Charles Ross. The Force is strong with this one. Last night I was there as “press,” but I had independently bought tickets for Thursday night and I’m thinking about going again, it was pretty entertaining. Afterward I was able to interview Charles for a few minutes, and Glenda has uploaded a video of the interview to Youtube. (Warning: Low light.)
News.com Leads Blog Communication
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all year. Check out the HTML of this article I linked a few days ago. Notice anything at the top?
<link rel="pingback" href="http://tb.news.com/p2t.cgi/2100-1032-5368454" />
Houston, we have Pingback support! Let’s dig deeper:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5368454.html"
dc:title="Microsoft flip-flop may signal blog clog"
dc:identifier="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5368454.html" />
trackback:ping="http://tb.news.com/tb.cgi/2100-1032-5368454"
</rdf:RDF>
Ugly as sin, but that’s trackback. It gets better…
A little URI hacking takes us to this page which lists all trackbacks and pingbacks the article recieved. How cool is that?
It’s my understanding that even though they’ve had the trackback autodiscovery code for a while they’ve been recieving mostly pingbacks, which makes sense given that it’s more fully and elegantly automatic. It would be cool if they could add support for the nascent rel="trackback" discovery method and save themselves the trouble of the RDF hack. Hopefully spammers won’t exploit their trackback server too soon and they can support legacy systems that don’t implement Pingback yet.
The implications of this are fairly large. News.com is obviously bootstrapping code that will involve their readers with the blog conversation surrounding their articles. How long for other sites to catch up? Will they plug into Technorati or Pubsub next? As far as I know this is the first major media organization to implement Trackback and Pingback. The team at News.com should be commended for their effort and leadership in this area.
Blogger Endorses Firefox
Just got this in my forgot-my-username-and-password email from Blogger, “You could also try logging in/recovering your password from a different web browser – we recommend Mozilla Firefox: http://mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Sincerely, The Blogger Team.” Very nice, but if they had recommended “gbrowser” then I would’ve had a real scoop. Also, they have a really great website. I don’t know how much is Adaptive Path magic and how much is in-house, but the result is a pleasure to use.
The FCC just released their first plugin for WordPress (a faceted search widget) and writes about why. Does your organization have a cool plugin you’ve written but not released yet? I know we do. Hopefully they will get the plugin in the repo soon.
Flickr and WP
Son writes in that WordPress is listed on the front page of Flickr. Though I don’t use it myself for a few reasons, Flickr constantly wows me with its features, architecture, and innovation. I’m watching the service as it evolves out of beta with interest. Also one of their developers, Cal, has been helping out with WP a bit lately.
Flying to Camp in Alaska
First day in Alaska, flying toward start point on the Canning River in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.
Expo Keynote
Here’s a video of my “high order bit” keynote talk at Web 2.0 Expo. It’s succinct — 10 minutes — and covers WordPress.com and Automattic growth, the possibly related posts launch, and Monotone.
Sims 2
I am now a character in a Sims game. Update: Here’s the entire category, which includes pictures.
Download Stats
WordPress 1.2 was downloaded over a hundred thousand times. About two-thirds of that was through the new download system where we can track stats better. It’ll be interesting to see the download rate of 1.2.1 (and subsequently 1.3).
Copy and Paste
Copy and Paste: the universal API. Please don’t break it!
Archives Page Tip
I’m finally fixing all the bugs on photomatt.net, converting a lot of old stuff into WordPress Pages and generally tidying a few things. For my archives I wanted to display a list of recent entry titles like Hemingway does, but I ran into the problem that it would only show 10 at a time (or whatever you have set in your options) and then makes you page through the rest, which sucks. But, thanks to WP, the fix is easy! I added query_posts($query_string . '&showposts=1000&order=asc'); to the archive.php template right under the header call. Basically what this says is to take the current page query and add the part that shows a bunch of posts, in this case 1000, and also to sort it chronologically instead of newest to oldest. (Eric would be happy.) Since it’s in my archive template it doesn’t mess with any other pages. That’s all!
Command Line Tricks
ReadWriteWeb covers the WordPress.com / Federated Media deal which will give high-end bloggers access to run advertising from FM, which is significantly higher quality than alternatives like Google Adsense, which has been declining in quality and is no longer a great choice for bloggers. Proud to be part of the empowerment of the Independent Web, which is the dark matter of the internet.
The other week in my hometown of Houston, Texas I ended up on stage in a joint conversation with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. The video of our chat is now on WordPress.tv, and worth checking out particularly if you’re curious about the early history of both projects. We’re more alike than different, and Dries is someone I respect a lot.
Typekit has announced that they’ve been acquired by Adobe, I’m excited for Bryan, Jeff, and the whole team and can’t wait to see what they launch next. Had the pleasure of working with Typekit as an investor and as a partner in WordPress.com’s Custom Design feature.
Old and New Apple
Tantek put an old Apple sticker (as old as me) on his iBook lit logo and you can see how they’ve changed the shape. It also just looks cool.
Si vous parlez français, vous pourriez profiter de cette interview avec moi sur Journal Du Net.
Exploring Milos
Around the various beaches of Milos, Greece. Packed in the back of a Smart car.
Blue Skies
Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see. From the amazing Robert Glasper, a fellow HSPVA alumni. (Dig the enclosure action.)
Jane Kim for School Board
One of the people I had the pleasure of meeting while in San Francisco was Jane Kim, who’s running for school board there. If you’re voting in that area in this upcoming election I would highly recommend checking out where she stands on the issues and keep Jane Kim in mind when you visit the polls. If you get a chance to meet her before the election you’ll also get to see what a neat person she is, if not you’ll just have to take my word for it.