Ars Technica forumgoers have voted for WordPress as the Web Application of the year!
WordPress is the most prominent rising star of weblog software, completely free and with a large and active community. Styles, plugins and hacks are readily available, with problems such as comment spamming being addressed far more rapidly than competing applications.
Founding member Larry Sanger has written a well considered article: Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism over at Kuro5hin. In it he explains why, as Wikipedia hits the big time, it has to address its perceived lack of credibility, and the dominance of difficult people and trolls. A couple of prominent articles last year brought the former problem into sharp relief.
He points to anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise
as the root cause of the problems. I have to agree with his reasoning, and also his prediction that unless it is addressed that there will be a ‘fork’ of the project with the express purpose of producing a vetted version of the work with a tangible level of credibility.
Hat tip to Matt
That’s another year nearly over. One in which I’ve had some major changes in my life. One which seemed to have flown by in retrospect (don’t they all?).
Next year will be another year of changes, with any luck the big changes will be the ones anticipated and planned for, like Jamie going to high school.
Of course, if everything that happened was expected and planned-for, life would be terribly boring. I just wouldn’t want to repeat some of the things that have happened this year.
I’m hoping to be a little more visible on line next year. I’m hoping to be much more organized and achieve some personal goals. I’m hoping that David Allen’s Getting Things Done will help. I must lose the weight I’ve gained since stopping cycling. I really want to swim more and get better at it. I want to do something more active with music. I don’t know what yet, but I have recently missed being a (very small) part of the music industry. There are a million software things I want to do! There are skills I want to gain, and experiences I want to… experience!
I don’t really expect to achieve a tenth of what I would like, but next year I am determined to do some of them.
It’s been a while…
I see that Amazon UK have started their DVD Rental scheme (like Netflix et al) [Link in top left corner of the page]. I also received an offer from WH Smith with a similar scheme. The WHSmith’s offer seems a little better if you watch a lot of movies. £13.99 per month for unlimited quantity, three at a time. Whereas Amazon’s offer is £9.99 per month but a maximum of 6 per month, three at a time. Other deals are Amazon £7.99 per month, four per month, two at a time, and WHSmith £9.99 unlimited, one at a time. Both offer free postage both ways; WHSmith says first class both ways, Amazon doesn’t specify. For my viewing pattterns, neither of them represent good value! I seem to watch less than one movie a month. But then if I has something as convenient as this, I would probably watch more. I’m sure Jan and Jamie would.
I’m pleased to report that Kitten’s Spaminator is handling about 90% of my comment spam (up to 300 a day). A rename of wp-comment-post.php has eliminated a couple of brain dead script kiddies. WordPress’ own spam blocking comment moderation currently catches 99% of the rest, but I have to manually moderate those. I just need to eliminate the rest of those. I’ll investigate some more of the WordPress Plugins to stop the spammers.
I’m this close to implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’m thoroughly convinced, I just need to get over the hump of that initial process. Actually I have started and managed to throw away two bin bags full of old paperwork and magazines.
Gmail continues to impress me. I use it everyday and it is currently my main email system. Though now that Thunderbird has reached 1.0, I’ve installed that and I’m testing it too. I need to be careful though: I have (almost) all my email either redirected or copied to my Gmail account. But I can still pickup up some of it via POP3 with Thunderbird. I don’t think I want to then have Thunderbird also retrieve some of the same mail from Gmail via POP3 (now that is supported). I guess I really want an IMAP interface to GMail (I think it will come eventually) with Thunderbird as another way to access that and acting as a local backup by making an offline copy.
Now that Googles index has nearly doubled in size to over 8 billion pages, I’m now number one mike out of 141 million!
That means I’m even more important doesn’t it? 😉
Firefox 1.0 is now released!
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – November 9, 2004 – The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced the worldwide availability of the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.
See press release for more.
Download it from Mozilla’s homepage. Full details are available on the Firefox homepage.
I’m using it now and it’s great. There were couple of annoying issues with the last pre release version but they are now fixed.
I may back it out later as a couple of extensions I use haven’t yet been updated. But then I’m not doing anything that requires them at this moment.
Update: In the end I didn’t back this version out, and by the end of the day had updated my extensions to 1.0 compatible versions. Verdict: Get it now you won’t regret it.
Although it is not yet mentioned on the ‘New features’ page, Google have added a ‘report phishing’ link to gmail. It’s under the more options link when viewing an email.
I forgot to mention a while ago that they started marking emails with from addresses at gmail.com, but which were not sent through gmail with the following.
Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information.
And then they don’t make all the links in the email clickable anyway!
Unfortunately, this one is applied too rigorously for me, or at least the rules are too simple minded. For exampe, anything on a mailing list from someone with a gmail account gets flagged thus.
I’ve just noticed that Technorati have tweaked their top 100 list to remove the WordPress sidebar folks.
The current number 2 has just over 7,400 inbound links, yet Matt has over 9,600 and I have over 8,800 inbound links.
I guess I can’t complain… not really. After all, being linked on the default installation of WordPress has other advantages! 😉
