Dispatches

Documentarians spend most of their time digging up materials that few people know exist. They frequent basements and dark storage rooms, endure conversations with crazy collectors, and typically develop vitamin-d deficiency and light sensitivity in search of what they need.

Their reward for finding the material? A bill from the original creators (the ones who lost and forgot about the work in the first place) for the privilege of using it.

Ars Technica reports a story about filmmaker David Hoffman who had to pay $320,000 for materials used in a film about Sputnik hysteria that swept the US in the 1950s. Unfortunately, the best The History Channel would pay for the entire film is $200,000.

A NH House Judiciary Committee hearing recently made New Hampshire famous in BoingBoing and The Huffington Post. Watch the hearing where the speaker describes sex acts, and take special note of the amazing poker face of the others during the talk.

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.

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.

MySQL 5.1 hasn’t gotten a lot of love, but it does introduce support for pluggable storage engines. And that’s required to use SphinxSE. Sphinx is a fast full text search engine. It doesn’t need to run as a MySQL storage engine to work, but doing that allows joining against other MySQL tables. So while I’m watching the future of MySQL alternatives, I’m also watching 5.1 bug fixes and playing with the CoolStack-packaged 5.1 on a friend’s box.

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.

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

Correlated Subqueries are said to be “inefficient and likely to be slow,” but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad to have learned of them.

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

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.

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.