WordPress

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.

ShareWP: A Digg Like Site For All Things WordPress

Early days — but an interesting concept (via planetozh):

ShareWP is a digg-like site (using Pligg I think) dedicated solely to, obviously, WordPress. It seems fairly new (domain registered a few months ago, only a handful or registered users) and I think it has some potential: overall it’s nicely done, and well focused on WordPress, a topic that other socialish sites such as Reddit or Digg seem to neglect

[visit sharewp.info]

Search WordPress.com

A new feature on WordPress.com today: Search !

WordPress.com is fast approaching 3 million blogs, with hundreds of thousands of posts and pages being created by our brilliant and attractive users every day. Tags and categories help group the content, but finding exactly what you are looking for can still be tricky. We also feel like you guys are creating some of the best stuff on the web, there’s a natural selection of people tasteful enough to end up on WordPress in the first place. ;) That’s where our new search feature comes in.

Joseph Scott and the team did lots of interesting work – go check it out: http://en.search.wordpress.com/

Mike Davidson of Newsvine Moves Personal Blog to WordPress

Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, recently moved his blog from Movable Type to WordPress. He shares his thoughts:

A few months ago, I silently moved Mike Industries from the aging Movable Type platform to the quicker-developing WordPress platform. I didn’t even plan to change platforms, but after more than a week of trying unsuccessfully to move from Movable Type 3.0 to Movable Type 4.0, this blog was in such a state of disarray under the covers that I began to wonder if switching to WordPress would be quicker altogether.

You see, Movable Type is a platform designed to be static, and only through hackerations with .htaccess files and “bootstrap loaders” can you simulate a truly dynamic publishing system. Part of my move to version 4.0 was designed to use these new dynamic abilities, but in the end, it mucked up so much of my (admittedly custom) setup that I just wanted out completely.

WordPress, in contrast to Movable Type, is designed from the ground up to be dynamic, and through smart caching, it can be made to scale like a static site. This is much the same as how we designed Newsvine to be. As a designer and developer, it just feels a lot cleaner.

Mike was also inspired to write a plugin to improve the WordPress email notifications and 30 minutes of coding later did just that:

What could possibly tighten WordPress’ email notifications into more aesthetically pleasing hyperlinked missives? A plug-in which sends out better formatted mail!

Enter “Clean Notifications”. A plug-in that took only 30 minutes to write but is capable of providing digital pleasure to people all around the world.

very cool !

WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 was released over the weekend ! Super exciting and the feedback has been really positive. Check out the coverage on techmeme, and also be sure to visit WordPress.org which has also undergone a redesign thanks to Matt Thomas.

WordPress 2.5 has many new features including a one-click gallery function that is sure to be a big hit. Matt Mullenweg did a quick screencast showing this feature:
Vodpod videos no longer available.

For full details head over to the announcement post on WordPress.org.

Stuff White People Like #91: San Francisco

One of the fastest growing, and funniest, blogs on WordPress.com is Stuff White People Like.

I cracked up this morning when I read this latest post on “San Francisco“:

Though it is exceptionally easy to put someone from San Francisco in a good mood, there are some caveats. When talking to a white person who lives in San Francisco, it is best not to bring up New York City. Though they live in a world class city, San Franciscans have a crippling inferiority complex about New York and even hinting at that will make them very sad or very defensive.

🙂

Read the whole post here

BuddyPress News

One of my favorite WordPress projects out there has been the BuddyPress project – focused on turning WordPress MU into a full fledged social network platform ( more info here ).

Today we announced that Andy Peatling, who created BuddyPress, has joined our Automattic team. In addition, the BuddyPress project will become an Automattic project, much as we’ve done with WordPress, bbPress, Gravatar, and Akismet.

Lots of coverage tracked on techmeme.

Spolgs: Just How Many Are There ?

Interesting post on mashable.com re: splogs ( spam blogs ) and how big a percentage they are of the overall blogosphere. The discussion stems from a speech our Matt Mullenweg recently gave where he mentioned that on WordPress.com we have zapped around 800K splogs so far and as of March 4th, 2008 we are hosting 2,556,082 legit blogs.

[ Ma.tt: Percentage of Splogs ]