Matt demanded accent-aware spell checking for the WordPress spell checking plugin his company acquired earlier this year. And just a little more than a month later, After the Deadline delivered. Now Beyoncé, café, coöperate, and even my resumé look prettier.

Separately, Wordnik offers a new take on online dictionaries, and they just launched an API.

Search Engine Land.com:

Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.

There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?

A quick Google search of klaomta.com reveals more than a few people wondering why it’s iframed on their websites. The answer is that the site has been compromised.

Unfortunately for the fellow who asked me the question at WordCamp, solving the problem can be a bit of a chore. Keeping your WordPress installation up to date is important, as there are some known security flaws in older versions, but most of the attacks that crackers use are targeted elsewhere. Your passwords, all your server apps, the PHP config, your hosting control panel, and other users all must go under the microscope when trying to find security holes.

Plugin Development

Will Norris‘ talk at WordCamp PDX introduces WordPress coding standards, common functions, and constants to would be plugin developers (and smacks those who’ve already done it wrong). Also notable: functions, classes, variables, and constants in the WordPress trunk.

Custom Installations

Just as WordPress has a number of hooks and filters that plugins can use to modify and extend behavior, it also has a cool way to customize the installation process.

Extending The WYSIWYG Editor

TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress has a rich API to allow adding buttons and stuff, but the docs are hard to get into. We can get a jump on that by looking at how it’s implemented in other WP plugins. This code creates the buttons, while the function that responds to the button click and does the work is defined within the plugin. The TinyMCE plugins in core are also informative.

Ben Fisherman’s JSNES runs entirely in the browser using nothing more intrusive than JavaScript. It apparently manages real-time performance within Chrome, but it works (if not playably) on an iPhone.

I wish the screen was resizable and that it supported iPhone compatible controls, but both of those assume that browser performance will improve enough to make it playable. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, the Safari JS engine is limited to consuming a single CPU (which it quickly does while playing JSNES).

Will Norris has discovered that iTunes 9’s interactions with the Store are more web-happy. I’ve been asking where the iTunes Store API was for some time, now I think I’ve got what I need to build one.

I don’t know if it’s just the Mother’s day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he’s lowered his bounce rate to just 10%.

All Facebook is happy to share the ten laws of Facebook advertising, but will those rules lead to better results than the .02% CTR Bob Gilbreath got a year ago?

Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.

It can be difficult to get the Zimbra iSync connector, as the company doesn’t offer a simple download from their site. Fortunately, the license allows us to freely redistribute their software.

Download the Zimbra iSync Connector here.

What happens when one of Google’s street view camera vehicles encounters a low bridge or a muddy Australian road?

MySQL answer: utf8_unicode_ci vs. utf8_general_ci.

Collation controls sorting behavior. Unicode rationalizes the character set, but doesn’t, on it’s own, rationalize sorting behavior for all the various languages it supports. utf8_general_ci (ci = case insensitive) is apparently a bit faster, but sloppier, and only appropriate for English language data sets.

Who doesn’t want to be an anarchist librarian? Or a bibliophian?

Compare the retouching portfolio here against the regular posts at Photoshop Disasters.

Jessamyn pointed out the dust up over the dissapearing of PaperOfRecord.com, a historical newspaper archive.

One of the many odd questions this prank job application asks is: What Are You Willing To Wear At Work? (Check All That Apply)

• Paper Hat
• Tie
• Hairnet
• Spandex
• Singing Omelet Costume

A caller to Clark Howard’s CNN show complains of being billed $62,000 by his cell phone provider for data usage. And Oklahoman Billie Parks has filed suit over a $5,000 bill.

There’s a hole in the wall at about head level next to my desk.

I’ve spent most of the day trying to track down a bug with some code I’ve been working on to add fields to a user’s profile in WordPress. The problem is that upon trying to save the profile I’d get an error like the following:

Catchable fatal error: Object of class stdClass could not be converted to string in /wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 472

Line 472 in my install is in the wpdb::escape() function. After poking around the wrong side of the problem, I finally broke down and rewrote the function along these lines:

function escape($string) {
 if( !is_object( $string ))
 return( $string );

 echo '<h2>'. $this->get_caller() .'</h2><pre>';
 print_r( $string );
 echo '</pre>';
 die();
}

That’s how I finally learned that wp_update_user() was at fault. I also opened a ticket for add_magic_quotes(), as both probably need independent fixes.

For now, however, I'm just converting the object to an array and avoiding the mess.

ExpanDrive makes FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 connectivity dead easy.

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

I’ve been using __FILE__ for years, but I never thought to look for its siblings.

echo ' line:'. __LINE__ .' file:'. __FILE__ .' directory:'. __DIR__ .' function:'. __FUNCTION__ .' class:'. __CLASS__ .' method:'. __METHOD__ .' namespace:'. __NAMESPACE__;

I feel as though I should have noticed these earlier; they’re clearly referenced in the docs for debug_backtrace(), after all.

Yahoo! has divested itself of Blo.gs and is shuttering GeoCities. Would this have happened in a good economy? No. Did it need to happen anyway? Yes. Yes. Yes. And for the love of god, yes.

It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of them:

• In order for our crawler to correctly gather your content, each article needs to link to a page dedicated solely to that article. We’re unable to index articles from news sections which consist of one long page rather than a series of links that lead to articles on individual pages.
• If your articles are located in a drop down box, we won’t be able to crawl them. Google News is unable to crawl articles only accessible through a drop down menu.
• Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Our automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.
• Google News doesn’t crawl articles in PDF format, although this content is included on Google Web Search. Our automated crawler is currently best able to crawl plain text HTML sites.

I spent some time looking for panorama-related apps for the iPhone and came up with the following:

• Panorama by Airshed
• Panoramas by Helix Interactive
• TripStitch by Byteslice Software
• Pano by Debacle Software
• Panoramascope by Phil Endicott
• PanoLab and PanoLab Pro by Originate Lab

I’ve actually played with PanoLab a bit (landscape, portrait) after seeing p0ps Harlow using it.

New releases from Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline. I count it as a failure for Google that the news timeline doesn’t show future events.

VoIP Now offers a few tips, Hackszine discusses VoIPong, and Mac VoIP mentions Cain & Abel and describes ARP poisoning to make a man-in-the-middle intercept.