nonsmokingarea.com

as of today, WordPress.com (the hosted blog-service, not to be confused with the self-installed offering on WordPress.org) is supporting OpenID in both one direction. for now this means that users may login using existing OpenID-credentials as well as use their WordPress-URL as identity token for logging into other services (check the OpenID Directory for an extensive list) of OpenID-supporters). using existing OpenID-credentials on WordPress.com isn’t supporeted yet, but will most likely follow soon. OpenID really is taking off since the beginning of 2007, with major sites like Digg and Netvibes joining the party. seems like a good idea to check out the existing OpenID-implementations which are begging to be integrated with your next web-app …

Arne Brachhold as a nice round-up on tuning your (self-hosted) WordPress-blog, mainly by tweaking caching on mysql-, php- & application-levels. nothing ground-breaking, but a good check-list for sure. since Arne isn’t too specific about mysql-tuning, I’ld like to recommend (for dedicated servers with lots of memory, >256mb) setting higher values for mysql-parameters query_cache_size, table_cache & key_buffer_size to keep those blogs rolling in times of high traffic (here’s a useful summary on basic mysql-tuning).

“First Life is a 3D analog world where server-lag doesn’t exist” - join 6 billion users and register at getafirstlife.com! …according to the comments on creator Darren Barefoot’s blog, Linden Labs takes the joke with a wink and grants Darren all rights to proceed the parody…big up!

The Ad Generator produces fake advertising by mashing up real-life corporate slogans with (tag-)related flickr-images.

10 things you should know about wordpress 2.1, which should be released later today. the feature I’m mostly looking forward to? AJAX-ified auto-saving of post-drafts (good bye lost posts due to browser-crashes).

Wikipedia - in an attempt to fight spam - adding the nofollow-attribute to all external links has been the major topic of today. Google Blogoscoped introduced (me to) an interesting strategy handling the attribute, which seems way more reasonable: as done before, external links within user-generated comment (comments, wiki-pages…) are initially set to nofollow. however, the attribute is automatically removed after a few days, assuming that the link, since it hasn’t been removed by the moderator (or, in case of Wikipedia, the editing community) is valid and therefor accountable for page-ranking. sounds smart to me…

only a week after Linden Labs released the sources of their SecondLife client, hackers start releasing some inspiring modifications. like Matt Biddulph, who is manipulating virtual objects by feeding data from an external, analouge potentiometer into SL.

Wordpress receives another security-related upgrade - everybody upgrade to 2.0.7!

a major security-vulnerability in popular open-source blogging-tool Wordpress has been disclosed. Automattic responded immediatelly by releasing version 2.0.6, which takes care of the issues. might be a good hint for all users to subscribe to their developer-blog (I wonder if the hosted software at wordpress.com uses the same codebase and is/was therefor prone to the same exploits?).

TechCrunch.com added oldschool forum-functionality today. very minimalistic. I wonder how they’ll avoid cannibalization of their very own, charged-for, job-board?

btw., another tech job-board launched this week, can be found at Read/WriteWeb.

video-feed of Lawrence Lessig’s talk at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3), December 2006 in Berlin. quoting BoingBoing:

If you want to understand what computers do to culture and why the law is totally out of synch with that, watch this. I especially love that Larry describes why neither hacking nor lobbying will solve the problem — but sets out a strategy that will win, a real path to victory.”

since yesterday, podcast-indexing & speech-recognition service Podzinger allows users to search for keywords within YouTube-videos.

MobVendor is a SecondLife vending-machine, that adjusts product-prizes to the number of people avatars near the point-of-sale - the more avatars, the lower the price. 3pointD has the lowdown on crowdpricing in SecondLife.

if you’re bored by the never-changing look of Wordpress’ backend-interface, you might want to try out Steve Smith’ Tiger Administration plugin. don’t expect changes in functionality, since the plugin is purely based on CSS modifications. still, a welcome refurbishment… (found on Christian Spanring’s blog)

Google Sitemaps is a relatively unkown feature allowing webmasters to control exactly how the search engine crawls their site. by setting up an XML-file in the root-directory of the website, siteowners tell Google’s bots which pages to avoid/index and how frequently to do so. Google Sitemap Generator automatically generates & refreshes the sitemap-file each time a post is added or edited on your Wordpress 2.x-blog. furthermore, the plugin allows tweaking of intervals between indexing and pings Google as soon as content on your blog is changing.

(found on John Chows top 10 of Wordpress plugins)

until recently, integrating video into Wordpress was quite messy. Viper’s Video Quicktags is a neat Wordpress-plugin embedding video-content into the richtext-editor by a single click. Video Quicktags syndicates streaming video from YouTube, Google Video and iFilm as well as static quicktime-,avi-, mpeg-, wmv- and flv-files.

I’m a big fan of hugh macleod’s daily sketches at gapingvoid.com… and since hugh has shown interest in the idea of offering a “gapingvoid-widget” in a recent episode of the gillmore gang, I set down yesterday night and cobbled together a little wordpress-plugin which displays the latest of hugh’s sketches. you can see it in action right next to this post in the sidebar
the plugin is very minimalistic (doesn’t even use an RSS-parser), but it’s a start. your welcome to integrate it into your blog or to modify the code to your needs (it’S GPL’ed)! if you like it, please drop me a line in the comments…

unix: gapingvoid.tar.gz

windows: gapingvoid.zip

installation notes: just unpack the archive into the ./wp-content/plugins directory of your wordpress installation. in the source (gapingvoid.php) you find the line:

var $imgWidth = 197;

this can be used to adjust the widgets width, everything else should work out of the box. since the script caches the gapingvoid-feed and the image for 60 minutes, your webserver needs write-permissions in ./wp-content/plugins/gapingvoid .

to display the widget in the sidebar, add this code in the theme-editor:

<?php $gp = new gapingvoid(); $gp->gapingvoidSidebarWidget() ?>

I also want to mention kosso’s widget, which was released before mine… it’s implemented in javascript does a nice fading slideshows of recent sketches

most of all: bigup hugh for making us smile every day!

just found a very cool wordpress-plugin:

Scrobbler is a Plugin for WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 that displays your Last.fm-account’s recently played songs, or whatever AudioScrobbler web service you like, in your desired location on your WordPress blog, in your desired format using AJAXrefreshingâ„¢.

so in the sidebar of this page you can now see which music I’m listening to at the very moment…nice!

the plugin can be found here:

http://leflo.de/projekte/wordpress/scrobbler