Posts

good news for WordPress users

The news is out. Yahoo! will be offering WordPress hosted blogs for small businesses and charging a monthly fee for the service.

I think this is good news for all WordPress users (.com and .org) as it provides a revenue stream for future development.

what's the (blogging) frequency, Kenneth ?

Some professional (but impecunious) bloggers feel it is very important that there should be a regular, repeating cycle to the frequency of your blog articles to capture the hearts and minds of your tens of readers.

Thankfully, I am a mere amateur so I will post when I feel like it and have prolonged periods of radio silence when I feel like it.

The Killers at Live 8

Bob Geldof wanted The Killers to appear at Live 8 at Hyde Park in London.

The Killers themselves desperately wanted to take part.

Harvey Goldsmith couldn’t find room to accommodate The Killers in the running order because of problems about the closing time and the provision of police/ambulance/London transport cover for a late ending at Hyde Park.

Eventually, The Killers played one song on another band’s kit at Live 8 in sharp suits to save time on the changeover.

probably the best comment spam in the world

The Akismet spam filter included with WordPress.com means I am not troubled by comment spam on my blog at all, ever.

However, I recently reviewed the spam sitting there all alone in quarantine. Most was inviting me to sample all sorts of delights describing all manner of different and very imaginative ways that a man and (wo)man can be joined together.

One spam comment stood out head and shoulders above all others though with a blissfully simple but effective, marketing message.

high availability, resilient, non-stop, 7×24 computing

So Typepad had plans to implement resilient disk storage but had an outage before the work was complete, which meant that users lost access to their treasured blogs as a consequence.

Elsewhere del.ico.us celebrated the Yahoo! takeover by having an outage that also meant that users lost access to their bookmarks.

I also noticed that the transaction log on the database used by Newsgator filled up over the weekend and the forums were also unavailable this morning.

bitten by Newsgator

I wanted to export my Newsgator feeds into OPML and experiment with SearchFox, who kindly gave me an account, to take part in the beta program.

Only one slight problem, Newsgator doesn’t support OPML export. Strange but true.

a brush with West Midlands constabulary

I am fortunate that my job takes me to lots of exotic locations (Prague, Bergen, Amsterdam, Munich, Oslo, Nice, Paris) and now, err, West Bromwich.

The last time I was here was in October 1981 when I attended a game at The Hawthorns between West Bromwich Albion and Manchester United. The game got underway and the United fans started a chant:

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside Oh I do like to be beside the sea

Read more

Tom Raftery podcast with WordPress

I just downloaded an interesting, wide ranging interview (sorry podcast) by Tom Raftery with Matt Mullenweg and Donncha O’Caoimh, the two leading developers behind WordPress. Matt and Donncha talk about their backgrounds, hosted WordPress.com, features in 2.0, blogging, spam, plugins and future WordPress developments.

Tom also happened to ask a specific question about my concerns for the WordPress business model and Matt provided some reassurance that there is a revenue stream through partnerships (hosting companies) so both guys do have enough money to eat, drink Murphys and wear clothes.

another RSS reader for consideration

I am using the Newsgator Online RSS reader and simply want to order my most important, must-read blogs (i.e mine) at the top. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable requirement. From a cursory glance at the documentation, it is not immediately clear if I can even do this in Newsgator. This is a little irritating as I now have to do some work to scroll down to ‘Oracle’ or rename the folder as ‘AAAOracle’. And, yes, you’re right, I am very lazy.

Xmas present for bloglines users

Those nice people at bloglines have responded to my recent review of RSS readers and my scathing comments about the sluggish performance. > We feel your pain

Or maybe it is just coincidence.