automattic

WordCamp SF 2008 Coverage

We had a great WordCamp in San Francisco this past Saturday.  For those of you who couldn’t make it, here are a few sources to browse through:

– The multi-talented Adam Tow captured some great pics including a panorama of the main room: tow.smugmug.com
– Andrew Mager from ZDNet.com live blogged the event and even found a good spot for the WordPress tattoo: blogs.zdnet.com/weblife
– TechCrunch coverage: techcrunch.com
– los of tweets: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wordcamp+sf
– presentations are beginning to appear on slideshare.net

WordPress.com Gears

It’s been live for a few days, but now we have officially announced Gears support for WordPress.com.

WordPress version 2.6 ( currently in beta ) also has Gears support.

So what is Gears ?

Gears? It is a browser extension like Flash or QuickTime/Media Player. However Gears works with the browser to enhance web based applications. It can create local database and file storage, and run JavaScript in the background to update them without slowing down the browser.

Gears has been in the making for over a year and is well known among the web developers. Currently it supports Firefox versions 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7. Safari 3 support is coming soon.

On WordPress.com it is used to store all images and other web page components from the admin area to the user’s PC, speeding up access and reducing unnecessary web traffic.

The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody’s blogging experience more enjoyable.

How do you turn it on for your blog ?

To enable this new feature, click on the “Turbo” link and follow it to Gears’ site to install it in your browser (if not already installed). Then the browser will have to be restarted and after logging back in WordPress, click the “Turbo” link again to give permission to Gears to work on WordPress.com.

After that Gears will download around 200 files and store them on your PC. It will also update them when needed automatically in the background, no other actions are required.

Update: you can follow the coverage over on techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080702/p72#a080702p72

Raanan.com Now With Identicons !

On WordPress.com right now, and in the next release of self hosted WordPress – version 2.6 –  you have a few extra settings that relate to avatars:

What’s cool is that for people who haven’t yet added an avatar, like my friend Rama, instead of the “mystery man” icon, I am now showing an Identicon.

What’s an Identicon you ask ? “An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of the IP address, serving to identify a user of a computer system” ( source Wikipedia ).  In addition, the Identicon will show the same generated avatar each time for that person without an avatar.

I’ve turned it on on my blog, and you can see it in action in this post.  If you blog on WordPress.com, you can access these new option in Dashboard > Settings > Discussion.

More info posted by Matt over on the WordPress.com blog.