Dispatches

Lorelle and Samir both point to a number of plugins to do surveys within WordPress, but neither of them say any of them are that good. And Samir is pretty disapointed: “at the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool.”

Survey Fly is the best recommendation from both of Lorelle and Samir, but it isn’t WP2.5 compatible and was las updated in summer 2006. It’s also limited to tracking only one survey at a time. Ugh.

GIS data seems to come in .shp (shape?) files, but it’s not like MySQL knows what to do with those. this MySQL forum post points to a PHP tool and Windows executable that promise to convert the .shp data into something more useful to MySQL.

Superfluo explains a little more, and there’s lots of .shp data to be had here.

Found in the MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual:

• Related(g1,g2,pattern_matrix)

  Returns 1 or 0 to indicate whether the spatial relationship specified by pattern_matrix exists between g1 and g2. Returns –1 if the arguments are NULL. The pattern matrix is a string. Its specification will be noted here if this function is implemented.

(emphasis mine.)

WordPress was released to the world five years ago today. Celebrate in SFO, Sydney, or with me at whatever bar I find myself at in New Hampshire tonight. DM me with any ideas.

“Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.” via

Sure you played Asteroids and Defender, but did you play these?

Some whine about movies on Flickr, others about the switch to Yahoo IDs, I simply want better rendering of transparent PNGs as JPGs.

I asked for it in 2004, before YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Revver appeared on the scene, and before MySpace and Facebook added video sharing as a feature. Four years later they finally added it. Neil Rickards should get credit for creating the theme of “long photos” (Neil called them “moving photos”). And anybody who was around then isn’t the least surprised at how angry some are now about the new feature (see sarcastic response to that).

Atlassian’s Crowd SSO and IdM solution has the kind of online pricing you’d expect for word processing software. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s a sign that identity management getting boring.

I had fun with the signs in Taiwan (jet powered baby stroller and men’s bathroom signs, for example), but why travel around the world for these things when you can make them at home?

Create warning signs, protest signs, church signs, library catalog cards, or whatever.

All Things Digital is interesting. Parents would say My Baby Our Baby.com is a little more important. But Tibet Open Letter is as real as the violence.

Two things to note: all of them are based on WordPress, and those who discuss Tibet probably risk being listed by the Chinese government as a trouble maker.

Aaron Swartz‘s Bubble City, Chapter 8:

He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came across that person on the street, he would know every detail of his life, his household budget, the secrets he confided over IM, even what he looked like naked.

WP Contact Manager turns WordPress into a contact manager. It’s a combination of theme and plugins (including Custom Write Panel) that allows you to enter and manage contacts as blog posts (familiar, eh?). Use Members Only to secure access.

TDO Mini Forms “allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts. The posts are kept in ”draft“ until an admin can publish them (also configurable).”

I ate here. It’s every bit as good as the review suggests. Seb’s description and photos tell more, I’ll post my own photos soon. Update: posted.

Short story: there’s a restaurant in Australia with a three month waiting list, but a Sydney Morning Herald reporter says the restaurant I ate at is its equal or better, but without the waiting list and at US$33 per meal.

Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.

“Spork” is a great name for a restaurant, but is it any good? Yelp says it is, but most of the reviews mention the burger, putting me in the position of having to review the reviewers and wonder if a hamburger person can recommend a restaurant to a vegetarian. Not that I am a vegetarian or not a hamburger person, but please tell me there’s more to the retrofabulous-looking place than a cool name and a hamburger. Something that actually requires sporks?

twittervision and twittermap show new tweets wherever they appear on the map, TwitterWhere let’s you follow tweets at a specific location, and Ask500People has nothing to do with Twitter but does show you global opinion. Live. While you watch (so they say, anyway).

If this doesn’t warm your heart, check to see that it’s not made of stone.

Netflix for audio books: Simply Audiobooks. Though it makes me wonder why we don’t say “like a library for audiobooks where they send you the stuff you want.”

Nobody doubted that full Gravatar support would make it into WordPress eventually. Weblog Tools Collection shows what they look like, how they’re managed, and how theme designers can implement them.

I love how easily I can traverse an HTML document with jQuery, and I’d love to be able to do it in PHP. There are a few classes, but the PHP binding for Tidy seems to be where it’s at. The Zend dev pages make it look that way, anyway.

Scot Hacker (yes, that’s really his name) posted a story about migrating China Digital Times (published by Berkeley School of Journalism) from Movable Type to WordPress:

We’ve launched with a lovely new design, reduced story publishing times from by orders of magnitude, been able to re-enable a bunch of features we’d previously had to disable for load reasons, and added new features that were never possible before. The team of authors and editors is in heaven, and I’m considering bringing the site back onto the main J-School server. It’s been a good week.