News

My First Day Back On Twitter Results in a Shitstorm and Being Called a Dumbass

So today I reactivated my Twitter account after two weeks and right now I wish I hadn’t. Things started off ok as I participated in some dialogue about GoDaddy acquiring ManageWP.

After I published my article on the Tavern about the news, I received the following tweet.

The first thing that goes through my head is great, here we go again. PostStatus broke the story on September 3rd but I didn’t write about it until today. Since that post was published, both GoDaddy and ManageWP published posts of their own, sources I deem more official than PostStatus. I linked to ManageWP’s post and I linked to the Advanced WordPress Facebook Post that links to the article on PostStatus.

In writing the story, I felt like I didn’t need to link to PostStatus because it was a few days after the fact and it would be better or more accurate to link to the official sources of the news. Apparently, it’s known throughout the universe except by me that providing a hat tip to the first source of the story even days after it broke is not only a courtesy, but seen as good practice according to the AP.

So here I am in a shitstorm for not linking to a site. It could be worse, I could be dead. Had I written the article on the day of or over the weekend when PostStatus was the only source, I certainly would have linked to the site. The editorials I have to write that explain why I did or did not do something is getting fucking ridiculous.

I apologize for not linking to PostStatus in the post and crediting sites that break a story days after it happened is something I’m going to discuss with my fellow editor. Oh, and the cherry on top is that I was called a dumbass but I blocked the individual who said it so I can’t link to it here.

Two New Ways To Get WP News

I got word of two projects today which may be valuable sources of information dealing with WordPress within the near future. The first is called WPSource.com. WPSource.com is an aggregation website that displays the 5 most recent headlines from major players within the WordPress community. The site features a fancy drop down animation once a headline is clicked.

WPSource Screenshot

A small excerpt from the post is displayed with a read more link at the bottom of the excerpt. When you browse to WPSource for the first time, it takes a little while for the page to load which can’t be blamed fully on the domain itself as it’s pulling the 5 headlines from outside sources. Even though this is a work in progress, I would like to see either fav icons of the site listed along side the headlines or some other images to really give the site some spice.

Our second contestant is adii who is building a community oriented project which will be a WordPress magazine which will highlight content from the thought leaders within the community of WordPress. The types of content that will be aggregated include: general and misc WordPress news, themes, designs and designers, plugins and development.

WordPRessMagazine Project

As you can already tell at a glance, both projects are circling around to the same conclusion but displaying the results in two different ways. Even though adii does not have a public demo, I can already tell you that I enjoy seeing the aggregated content displayed in this fashion versus WPSource. If the ability to subscribe to the specific categories will be possible in this iteration, I’ll have it give this design bonus points as it will help me condense these feeds into my Feed Reader.

When I look at this design mockup, I sometimes feel confused by where the post is being aggregated from. However, I enjoy the fact that this design will place more importance to the favicon as it’s use and importance has gone through the floor.

As it stands, WPSource is farther ahead in development as they at least have a working demo/project online that works. However, once the Magazine project comes online, it will definitely give WPSource a run for it’s money. One nice thing about both of these projects is that they are aggregating content from a wider variety of members within the WP Community instead of aggregating the usual suspects which Planet WordPress already does. May the best project win!

Tumblr Makes Some Changes

Tumblr.com Logo

Looks like someone at Tumblr was home after all. Today is November 1st which is the date Tumblr promised would show off some new goodies while also making a few announcements. They have delivered on this promise in more than one way.

Tumblr now sports a brand new Dashboard design. Looky there! Tumblr now supports audio. Audio files can only be posted to your Tumblr account through the dashboard. The Tumblr bookmarklet currently doesn’t support the Audio feature. Tumblrs can only post one audio file per day and the file has to be under 5 MB in size.

New Tumblr Dashboard

The addition of channels. Taking a page out of Jaiku’s book, Tumblrs can now create private channels. The channels allow you to create mini cliqs within the Tumblr network. Once you invite someone into your channel, they can then invite someone else into your channel. Not exactly what I call great control, but a nifty feature none the less.

Tumblr Channels

Tumblr has also teamed up with Vimeo. Vimeo users can now connect Tumblr to their account which allows them to upload videos via their phone. The theme designer has become more user friendly, there is now an archive link at the bottom of Tumblelogs that makes browsing previous posts much easer than clicking the PREVIOUS link 500 times and last but not least, Tumblr has yet to add support for Podcasting feeds.

All in all, it looks like things are starting to look up for the service. I don’t use Tumblr as much as I used to but I’m sure this update and redesign puts them back on the radar. I hope that at some point, they add a stats feature which shows me who is reblogging my Tumblr content. When the reblogging feature was implemented, it was suppose to allow Tumblrs to see how their content would spread across the network. So far, this hasn’t been the case and in this latest incarnation of Tumblr, those features are still missing.

Do you use Tumblr? If so, how do you use it? Lifestreaming? Linkblog? Your one and only blog? Let us know in the comment section.

Schwag Is Almost Here

StartupSchwag Logo

StartupSchag the successor to Valleyschwag that I wrote about here, ( From ValleySchwag To StartupSchwag ) will be shipping their first batch of schwag starting on Thursday/Friday. This means that the schwag should start arriving on your doorstep starting on October 16th.

Thanks to the guys at StartupSchwag as they have sent me a care package for review. I’ll be taking photos of the entire process from obtaining the package all the way to wearing the product. Stay tuned for that.

LocateTV Opens To The Public

LocateTV.com Logo

LocateTV, the TV Guide like service that I reviewed here, LocateTV – TV Guide On Steroids has announced that they will be opening to the public on Monday, October 1st. The closed beta will be disabled and users from all over the world will now be able to give this service a try. Considering LocateTV Redesigned Their Embeddable Widgets, it will be interesting to see how many of them appear on various blogs within the blogosphere once LocateTV goes public.

WordPress 2.3 Released Codenamed Dexter

Wordpress.org LogoWordPress 2.3 has finally been released to the public. This is a major release and users of WordPress are encouraged to update as soon as possible. Before you do anything, make sure you create a full backup in case things go bad. I’ll be updating this blog throughout the night and hopefully, I’ll still be around when you wake up. If not, you know what happened to this site.

Time to review the change log to find out why we should upgrade.

  • Native Tagging Support: You can now user tags in addition to categories. 2.3 includes a set of tag importers for tag plugins that existed prior to 2.3 These importers include Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins. Matt states that the new tagging system is pretty fast which should please a number of webhosting companies.
  • Update Notifications: WordPress 2.3 introduces a way for users to be notified when a new release of WordPress is available or when an update to a plugin has been released. This feature works by sending your sites URL, plugins, and version information to the wordpress API.ORG service which compares the information to their internal database.
  • Canonical URLs: Canonical URLs enforce no www-preferences, redirect posts with changed slugs, redirect URLS that get cut off in emails similar to the correct post. According to WordPress these new URLs should help users as well as providing more SEO options.
  • Pending Previews: Those who use multi-user blogs or WordPressMU will appreciate this feature. Authors can submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before, they would have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
  • Advanced WYSIWYG: WordPress has somehow manage to stuff more features into the Visual Text editor. This update now shows off more features that in TinyMCE that were previously hidden. Dave, looks like your secret is no longer a secret.

In addition to these new features, developers will have a host of new things to deal with such as Atom 1.0 support, jQuery, a new taxonomy system, new importers, hooks and filters and much more. The WordPress community has also helped contribute to over 351 trouble tickets that were closed in the Trac.

You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same. Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post.

Matt is hosting an upgrade party within the San Francisco area but I figured I would host one of my own on Skype. If you are awake and care to upgrade your WordPress installation along with me and a few other people, be sure to add me jeffr0e to your Skype contact list and let’s get this party started.

Google Powered 404 Page Update

Askapache.com LogoI was curious as to who was making the money via the sponsored ads that are displayed on the first tab and the web tab of this plugin.

As it turns out, the sponsored ads are for Google because the Ajax powered API is so new. Here is the 411 on the issue.

That is a really great question that I had to search awhile to find. The answer is because this Search API is still so cutting-edge new, Google is the only one making any money from these Ads. It is still pretty beta now, but in the future it will very likely have the features we want. It is against the TOS to remove the ads, and currently you cannot hook your own AdSense account into the Search API. You can however use css to re-position the sponsored links.. like:

.gsc-control .gsc-ad-box {padding-top:100px;}

Does the AJAX Search API contain advertising?

Yes. The Web Search results may include up to 2-4 clearly marked sponsored links. There are currently no ads displayed among the News, Video, Maps, or Blog Search results. If you’re interested in earning money for displaying relevant Google ads on your site, you can do so with Google AdSense.

Thanks to AskApache for clearing this up.

Rock Me Rock You

Did you get a chance to check out the RockMe music festival playing live at www.rockme.dium.com yet? The first three days were a huge success. We jammed out with…

  • Rose Hill Drive’s Jake Sproul, chatting live with fans
  • The premier of a Rose Hill Drive performance filmed during a tour with The Who
  • Pandora.com CTO, Tom Conrad
  • Rose Hill Drive manager Brian Schwartz
  • Jambase’s Dean Herman
  • The New Pornographers’s Todd Fancey
  • Rotary Downs’s Zack
  • Daily activities with The Fiery Furnaces, The Jeffrey Lewis Band, Gosling and The Willowz…

Want to help us rock the final day of the festival? Scalp your concert tickets on eBay because all you need is your computer and this code (your specific code I provided) to catch all of the action. Insert the code directly into a post or the sidebar of your blog, try it out and let us know what you think.

Today, the festival ends with a live webcast of Rose Hill Drive’s performance at the Fox Theatre, a surf through Me.dium with rock music legend, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.

BloggerTalk The Bloggers Podcast

BloggerTalk.TV Logo

Each Tuesday at 8pm Eastern time, join a panel of expert bloggers as they discuss the latest and greatest blogging related news. Each show is performed live on Talkshoe where listeners can call in with their questions or stories related to the blogosphere. Whether it deals with monetizing your blog, RSS, generating traffic, or blogging news, rest assured, this 60 minute show will be packed with content.

After my successful stint on episode 3, the lost episode Anthony Feint was kind enough to bring me back on the show for a full hour with David Peralty where we discussed a number of topics. Ironically, BACN was not one of them, although that was the name of the episode. At any rate, here is what we covered.

Davids Pick for this episode was the news related to WordPress 2.3 which will be a major release. My pick dealt with the blog, Readers Appreciation Project and all three of us actually go into a little more detail in regards to reader appreciation. Anthony actually didn’t have a pick this week, or perhaps David and I took up all of the free time left in the show. At any rate, please give this show a listen and I would love to hear your feedback in regards to my performance or anything related to the show.

To listen to this show without leaving the page, click the PLAY button.