Akismet Jubilee Monday 2006-09-11
Hurrah!!
My Akismet has just cought it’s 500:th spam, and not one slipped through.
Time to celebrate.
Promote Your WordPress Plugins Tuesday 2006-09-05
A new and promising site, for presenting and getting WordPress plugins, has just been launched. Sean Hickey, aka Headzoo, author of such efficient WordPress plugins as aLinks, Edit N Place and Create N Place, has just launched WP Plugins, a friendly place for plugin authors and bloggers to meet.
WordPress plugins abound. Due to the relative ease, with which you can create plugins for the popular blogging tool, and the flexible framework WordPress offers, a lot of functionality can be added through plugins.
There are plugins that make the administration easier, or present all kinds of statistical information. And there are plugins to include any imaginable Multimedia, and plugins to build social networks, to include other bloggers’ feeds or to earn a buck on ads.
You name it, and there is a plugin. And if there isn’t, you can write one, or just wait a while, and someone else will.
The mere amount of plugins spread out on their authors sites, makes it difficult to find that very gadget, that gives you the functionality you dream of. There are a few repositories for plugins, as Lorelle on WordPress mentions in her latest excellent article on plugins.
Sean’s idea seems to be, that they lack some functionality, be peer reviews, a voting system or the possibility to search by tag. Or maybe just too dull. I don’t know, but this new repository has all this features, a friendly look and easy navigation.
So if you are a plugins author, head over and present your plugin at WP Plugins. You’ll be on the front page immediately. It’s very simple, you just register for an account, log in and fill in a form with a description of your plugin, and a link to the install package on your site.
That’s all there is to it.
If you are a blogger in pursuit of the ultimate plugin for your needs, you may already find what you want. The site is new however, so it will take a while to get the great variety, we all want to find in the grocery 
Graffiti for the Web
Among all wonderful things, that pops up on the web, as a result of new standards and standards compliance, my latest stumble find is amazing. Virtual Street Art - Graffiti for the Web presented by Draw Here, is an application, that allows you to draw images on top of any web page and save it in the Draw Here repository. Anyone can go to the Draw Here site to look at the graffiti comments of others. Look at my first attempt to draw on my own site, to get an idea of how it looks.[Edit: Someone killed my image :/]
The application, using javascript and the canvas has all you need to make beautiful graffiti. You can vary the pen size and chose and tune colors from a palette, and set color transparency. You can create and draw on stacked layer and even set the overall transparency of any layer. To easily work on one layer at a time, you can hide and show any layer.
You launch the Draw Here application directly from their site or using a bookmarklet sitting on bookmarks toolbar. You can even include a launch button on you web page, to let visitors draw on any page you want.
If you want to save your work at the Draw Here web site and get it rated, you have to sign up for an account. They have the fastest sign up form I’ve seen. Just type in the user name and password you want in a slick little login form. If accepted, you are already logged in and ready to paint and save your first graffiti comment on any web page on the Net. Ajaxian wise, the page doesn’t even reload.
Sign up/log in and paint my world!
A Million WordPress 2.0 Wednesday 2006-08-23
What makes you happy ? »
Podz, well known WordPress guru, wrote in Mars, 100000, “That’s a big number !”
WordPress 2.0 download counter has now passed a million - that’s one more of zeros.
Congratulations! The counter now shows a blinking instead of that big number. Maybe the counter register can’t take such a big number - like the millennium bug mistake - or the Adriane II elevation control disaster 
A Flash Browser On the Horizon? Monday 2006-08-21
Is the next browser generation based on on a Flash platform. This article by Matthew David at InformIT, may lead you to think so.
Here is a slightly modified version of his “Lorem Ipsum” demo case for presenting HTML or rather any XML content markup, styled by CSS. Both the XML and CSS are external files, brought together by a short Actionscript in the Flash movie. Both can easily be changed, wihtout touching the SWF. Read the article and draw your own conclusions!
Tags Saturday 2006-08-12
Here are the tagging results produced by Lorelles Technorati tags bookmarklet, modified by Bavra Mann.
Technorati: tags, bookmarklet, blog
Get it, install it and tag along!
A Decade with Flash Friday 2006-08-11
Flash celebrates its ten year anniversary inside Adobe, its new owner.
Turned down by the same company at its infancy, when its name was FutureSplash, Adobe now has great plans for Flash. It is to become more than just a platform for animations on the web, an application for desktops and mobile devices alike, according to Flash product manager Mike Downey.
In my opinion, Macromedia did a great job over the last years to lay the foundation for these new adventures. Most importantly they made Flash a platform for animations and video delivery, so popular that more than 90% of the browsers carries the Flash plugin.
They changed their obscure scripting language to a really powerful programming language with the introduction and development of Actionscript, an ECMA standard language, which make it possible to do some real programming on the Flash platform. After some strange behavior, mainly due to backward compatibility issues, they managed to turn Actionscript into a truly object oriented language.
Another important boast for Flash as a media platform came with Macromedia’s streaming video format, which makes it possible to serve video in either true streaming mode form a vido server or in what they call progressive download, where video can be streamed from an ordinary web server. If I cannot afford the rather expensive Video server, or I cannot run it with my service provider, I can settle for using just the web server. The user experience is almost the same in both cases.
All this builds a firm foundation for Flash as a media client on all kinds of devices. If you like to hear about the future of Flash from the horse’s mouth, CNet news.com has an interview with Mike Downey. Of course it is streaming video presented in your Flash player plugin.
Flickr Spinnr Now Stand Alone Thursday 2006-08-10
Headzoo and yours truly have released a new version of the Flickr Spinnr. The WordPress plugin has gotten a few bug fixes, to solve problems some users had. If you use a widget aware theme, you’ll be happy to know that the Spinnr is widgetized.
The real news is that the 0.4 version has a stand alone variant. This makes it possible for you, to include the rotating cube in any web site. The requirement is, of course, that you can run PHP on your server.
If you already installed the 0.3 version of the WP plugin, it doesn’t hurt to upgrade to 0.4.
Download it from Headzoo, unzip and upload to your server - simple as 1-2-3. Set options if you like.
Documentation is included in the distribution ( PDF ).
Have a look at the stand alone version here.
WordPress 2 and Counting Sunday 2006-08-06
Just a short note for the habitual WP blogger. You’re not alone, if that’s what you thought.
The download counter is approaching one miljon. Time for celebration!
WordCamp 2006 Saturday 2006-08-05
Being a bit Swedish, I’m proud to discover that the 2006 WordCamp is run at the Swedish American Hall in San Fransisco in cooperation with Café Du Nord. The Hall was designed Swedish architect August Nordin, father of lots of buildings in that besung city.
You may want the tentative architecture of the Camp, just to know what to ( possibly ) expect. The meaning of “tentative” can be easily smelled at Podz place. The AfterParty was to be held, or is still going on at the time of writing, at Pier 38. We may be hearing from that too, as some few of the participants will probably throw some pixels at Flickr.
Matt at the event, credit: Scott Beale Laughing Squid. It’s a one day show, so I’m a bit late here - sorry about that.
Now, will the version 2.1 of the best blogging software on the planet be annonced at this WordCamp? The “What’s New in 2.1” feature list from Ryan Boren suggests something, don’t you think?
The near future will provide evidence from Matt and or Ryan, I’m sure. Just you wait and see, and may the blog be with you!
( Not to mention your plugins
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