The flight was good, the iPod rocked, weather is beautiful, the hotel has internet, life is good.
Crash Internet Explorer
Eric Meyer discovers how to lock up a Windows computer using only CSS. On IM the other night he blamed it on WordPress. I’m not crazy about IE, but I wouldn’t go that far. (Opera people hush.)
Day Zero
Yesterday was fun, got settled in and indulged myself a bit. Had some Korean BBQ, drove all over the city, walked on the beach and watched the waves and stars, geeked out for a little, and finally looped by Tantek’s. Another good but tiring day.
The World is on Fire
72 hours later: The world is on fire, from Blake Ross. It mentions WordPress, the number of referrals we send should go up when 1.3 comes out with the Firefox button in the footer. People have asked why we’re supporting Firefox like we do, but it’s just one underdog open-source project helping another.
Teach when you are filled with wonder, before you become a boring expert.
— Mark Pilgrim
Steal From the Best
When Blogger ditched the banner ads for that small tasteful bar at the top that was both attractive and functional, I loved it. Now I’m going down my blogroll and I noticed Hanni has created a version of the blogger nav bar for WordPress. It’s got the WP logo, a search box, a Press It link, et cetera. I haven’t even looked at how she’s doing it yet, but very cool!
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.
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.
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.
A great piece in the New York Times today: How do you parent without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by bit?
Copy and Paste
Copy and Paste: the universal API. Please don’t break it!
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).
Command Line Tricks
Calypso, 24 Hours Later
The reaction to yesterday’s Calypso announcement has really blown me away.Here’s a tiny selection of of the coverage, analysis, and reactions to Calypso and the new WordPress.com:
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.
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.