WordPress 2.2 is out and available for download now!
I’m excited because this version includes widgets (by default), some XML-RPC hooks to edit pages (so you don’t need my hacks), a switch to jQuery from Scriptaculous (Matty got me excited about this), full Atom support (enough of the different versions of RSS!), and the ability to set your MySQL character encoding (go UTF-8!).
If that isn’t enough, 2.3 is planned for release in September.
Plastic Logic is a developer of plastic electronics – a new technology for manufacturing (or printing) electronics. The Plastic Logic approach solves the critical issues in manufacturing high resolution transistor arrays on flexible plastic substrates by using a low temperature process without mask alignment that is scaleable for large area, high volume and low cost. […] » about 200 words
The question:
What’s a good user-friendly Macintosh web development program? A friend called. She’s thinking of buying Dreamweaver, but is afraid it will be overkill. She found Frontpage to be easy and needs something similar.
My answer:
If the intent is to design individual pages on an unknown number of sites, then I don’t have a recommendation.
If the intent is to build a site (or any number of sites), then I’d suggest looking at WordPress. It’s an open source CMS, and there’s a hosted version that makes it easy to try out at WordPress.com.
What I didn’t say, well, it was buried in my answer, was that I see a big difference between designing a page and building a site. The tools are very different.
WordPress 2.0 introduced some sophisticated HTML inspecting and de-linting courtesy of kses. kses is an HTML/XHTML filter written in PHP. It removes all unwanted HTML elements and attributes, and it also does several checks on attribute values. kses can be used to avoid Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Buffer Overflows and Denial of Service attacks. It’s a […] » about 300 words
Inside Higher Ed asks Are College Students Techno Idiots? Slashdot summarized it this way: Are college students techno idiots? Despite the inflammatory headline, Inside Higher Ed asks an interesting question. The article refers to a recent study by ETS, which analyzed results from 6,300 students who took its ICT Literacy Assessment. The findings show that […] » about 300 words
My favorite place to eat in all of New Hampshire is LA Burdick’s in Walpole. It’s a chocolate shop and cafe and I’ve never had anything there that isn’t sinfully delicious. We took my mother-in-law there for Mother’s Day this year. We started the meal with their delightful cheese plate. This featured four cheeses in […] » about 300 words
The photo is from Jessamyn, who declared it Groan-worthy. I’m still grinning about it. Reminds me of the time Homer said “Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.” pork, sausage, hog, sign, funny, photo » about 100 words
First it was meat hats, then SuperModelMeat. Now it’s meat cakes. Yes. Three layers of meat, with ketchup and potato frosting. It all happened when the groom announced that a man’s cake should be made of meat, ’cause “wedding cackes are all girly.” Apparently a red velvet armadillo groom’s cake isn’t manly enough. Funny thing, […] » about 100 words
Middlebury College banned it, but 46% of college students and 50% of college grads use it.
Twelve year olds point out errors in its competition, while those over 50 are among its smallest demographic — just 29% (Just! 29%!) say they’ve used it.
It’s Wikipedia, of course, and the numbers come from a recent Pew Internet Project memo reporting that Wikipedia is used by 36% of the online population and is one of the top ten destinations on the web.
(It’s old, but I just stumbled into it again…) Karen Calhoun’s report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, included a lot of things I agree with, but it also touched something I’m a bit skeptical about: automated metadata production. Some interviewees noted that today’s catalogs are put together […] » about 300 words
At work I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but my personal stuff is served from machines running CentOS. Both distros were just bumped to version 5, bringing with them support for current components of the LAMP stack. I care because I want Apache 2.2.4, and while it’s pretty easy to get MySQL & PHP 5 […] » about 300 words
Those of us hoping for an early release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard might be disappointed to learn that Apple will just be getting around to giving out a “feature complete” beta at WWDC in mid-June. If you really must have it, conference badges are $1,295. The Leopard beta. Available first at WWDC. At […] » about 200 words
Tabasco thinks their peppers and eponymous sauce are hot. Anybody who’s just ate a habanero thinks that’s a hot pepper. But earlier this year, Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University said “Damn, I’ve got a hot pepper.” And the Guiness World Records folks agreed. Bosland had identified the Naga Jolokia pepper and measured it […] » about 300 words
OpenSearch is a common way of querying a database for content and returning the results. The idea is that it brings sanity to the proliferation of search APIs, but a realistic view would have to admit that we’ve been trying to do that since before the development of z39.50 in libraries decades ago, and the […] » about 900 words
We all know social networking may be a feature, not an application, but one person’s feature can become another’s bane. So when Netflix offers a handy Friends feature that makes it easy to share your viewing history and recommendations, it opens itself up not only to the value of social interaction, but also the awkwardness […] » about 300 words
Speaking at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism last month, David Halberstam struck the chord of competition journalists must struggle with. As a newspaper man who started at the smallest newspaper in Mississippi and worked his way up to the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he […] » about 300 words
Bam: MySQL error 28, and suddenly my queries came to a stop. Error 28 is about disk space, usually the disk space for temp tables. The first thing to do is figure out what filesystem(s) the tables are on. SHOW VARIABLES LIKE “%dir%” will return a number of results, but the ones that matter are […] » about 300 words
I learned of it last night on The CBC’s As It Happens: Miles Hilton-Barber, blind since age 30, has flown from Biggen Hill, south of London, to Gosford, outside Sydney, by ultralight in a journey that took almost two months. Aviation regulations required he take a sighted co-pilot, but in the As It Happens story […] » about 300 words
Daniel Lemire and Sean McGrath note that “User personalization and profiling is key to many succesful Web sites. Consider that there is considerable free content on the Web, but comparatively few tools to help us organize or mine such content for specific purposes.” And they’ve written a paper and released prototype code on collaborative filtering.
Vogoo claims to be a “a powerful collaborative filtering engine that allows Webmasters to easily add personalization features to their Web Sites.”
I’ve been talking a lot about remixability lately, but Nat Torkington just pointed out that the web services and APIs from commercial organizations aren’t as infrastructural as we might think. Offering the example of Amazon suing Alexaholic (for remixing Alexa’s data), he tells us that APIs are not “a commons of goodies to be built […] » about 400 words
Sure, Clinton played his sax on TV, Bush groped Angela Merkel, but Boris Yeltsin gave speeches drunk, tossed women into the water, danced on stage, and generally did all manner of laughable things. But he also turned back a hardline coup by jumping atop a tank and dragged Russia kicking and screaming toward democracy. Not […] » about 300 words
This renewed talk of building nuclear weapons here in the US reminded me of an old report of photos of the sky glow from nuclear tests done in Nevada seen over Los Angeles. This one includes the following description: Atomic explosion, the largest yet set off on the Nevada test range, was clearly visible in […] » about 200 words
Will, Cliff (both above), and I recorded this song in one take in late 1999. Though, calling it a “take” is overstating it. We were beyond silly drunk and lacked any talent for the task, but we had a mic in front of us, a guitar, and a willingness to open our mouths and let […] » about 800 words
I’m a newcomer CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I started watching it with season six while suffering a flu that immobilized me for what seemed like a week or more. Dumb with illness, I went searching for a diversion at the iTunes store and stumbled into the series. I had the entire season downloaded quickly; it […] » about 300 words
It couldn’t be much easier. I’d previously posted command line instructions, but it turns out that there’s a huge number of people who don’t know the easy way: just CTRL-click on the file and select “Create Archive…” You’ll also find the option in the File menu. Either way, you’ll end up with both the original […] » about 100 words