Gmail Features Not For The British!

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Here’s an interesting Gmail problem I found the other day. One that is a little worrying on two counts. The first: It seems gmail are slow to roll out new features to non-US accounts, And the second: It appears that the code architecture behind gmail is quite poor. Or at least the internationalization of it is badly designed and doesn’t use common code.

I recently spotted this post by Aaron Swartz on the Google Weblog:

Gmail: New From Address

Without apparent fanfare, Google now lets you change your From address to any email address you can verify. Click on Settings, then Accounts. Once you’ve verified the email you can go back there to make the new address the default. (Thanks, Noah!)

Great! This is a feature I have been waiting for for quite a while. Multiple easily selectable from addresses. When I sign up to mailing lists and forums or when I register on a web site, I always give a new email address based on the name of the list, forum, or site. That way I can identify where mail comes from, can filter it more easily (it all get forwarded to the same address), and can trace spam if anyone sells my email address. But posting to mailing lists usually requires the from address to be the same as the one you signed up with. Using Gmail with its single from address makes this a problem. Thus I was really pleased to see this new feature announced.
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Another WordPress MU Site

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I noticed a few people are reporting the new WordPress MU site webloog.com. I’d be interested to know which version of WordPress MU they are running, there is no version string in the normal output.

I also notice that the feature list from wordpress.org is included verbatim. Thus it mentions, Full standards compliance. Unfortunately none of the pages that I’ve tried to validate manage to be standards compliant! In their eagerness to include Google adsense adverts, they didn’t bother to insert them in a compliant way! There are other issues too.

It seems to be run by the same people who are behind Free.TV. You know, the free-set-top-box-but-you-have-to-buy-it-first-and-you-might-get-a-refund people! Hmmm… Proceed with caution.

Update:It turns out the domain owner is Ric Johnson the guy behind OpenDomain.org, and also connected with free.tv, however webloog.com is run by Scott Sykes who really needs to add some contact information to make things clear. Scott is behind some other community sites, including blogsforjesus.com and nationofchrist.com. He also runs a blog at vivablog.com

Technorati Number One

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When checking my stats for the last week, I noticed a spike in the number of visitors on Friday. My daily unique visits has been slowly growing to an average of 800 to 1000 per day. But Friday saw a record breaking (for me) 1556 visitors!

I looked through the logs to see if I could see a pattern and noticed lots of referrals from this story at Google Blogoscoped.

According to Technorati, this [zed1.com] is currently the world’s most popular blog.

Rather strangely, Philipp Lenssen there pointed his link at my terribly dull main site index, rather than this blog which Technorati indexes.

Being one of the links on a default WordPress installation means that there are automatically thousands of links into my blog. But Technorati removed the WordPress sidebar folks back in October 2004. I can only think that they must have been making some kind of adjustment and accidentally enabled the WP sidebar folks for a short while.

I remember that someone had mentioned it Wow, you’re actually the Technorati #1 blog on Friday. But at the time I only looked at my Technorati profile. I saw I was indeed ‘Technorati Rank: 1’, but within a short time that had changed to ‘Technorati Rank: 0’. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to look at the top 100 list, otherwise I might have got a screenshot.

With any luck some of those extra visitors might come back. I know I’ve had a fair bit of activity on my theme pages this weekend. Maybe it’s related.

WordPress Version 1.5.2

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A new version of WordPress ‘Strayhorn’ is available for download. This is a bug fix release that includes a security fix for users hosted on a server with PHP’s ‘register_globals’ setting turned on (a potentially dangerous configuration).

There are several other bug fixes and minor changes too. Owen has put together a plain English version of the changes.

As an aside I noticed that WordPress Strayhorn’s download counter is rapidly approaching the half-a-million mark.

Poorly Jamie

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Poor Jamie, my soon-to-be-11-year-old daughter, has developed Chicken Pox! She’s not very happy about it — she’s had to miss out on a sleepover. The spots started breaking out yesterday, which means she probably got infected in the last few days at school.
She’s not too ill with it, thankfully, though off her food somewhat. She’s currently lying on the sofa watching CBBC and checking for new spots in a mirror. As each one erupts, she’s been giving it a name! I think Trevor was the first one, and we’ve had a Bob and a Tessie. Sadly Trevor has now expired and gone crusty!

We are all hoping she’ll be OK in time for her birthday on the 21st!