Wordpress admin panel: why is Akismet not under Comments?
I guess the title says it all … Akismet, which is a comment spam identification and deletion tool, is under the active menu, Manage, not under Comments.Odd.On a related note, I’m getting something like 5000 comment spam attempts a week, of which about 1 makes it through onto the site.Two things that implies:
- Akismet is stunningly amazingly incredibly good. There are no words.
- A huge amount of web traffic is spambots looking for places to implant their evil input. I wonder what percentage? 1%? 3%?
- Bonus implication: the success rate for comment spam is approaching zero … for blog/forum owners who know about Akismet.
OpenID issues
It appears that there are some downfalls to any centralized service … including an identity management tool:
Tags: openID, bugs, identity2.0, identity, john koetsier
Upgraded to WP 2.1
I just upgraded bizhack to Wordpress 2.1, so if you notice any odd squirreliness, that’s why.
Better backend Safari compatibility and updated security were the two reasons to upgrade … that and the fact that WP 2.1 is supposed to be a much stingier MySQL user (more optimized, better queries, fewer queries per page).
Plugin compatiblity was my big question mark, and it was a bit of a hassle to get my tag cloud working again. Still looks a little odd (top left column) but I’ll get to that soon enough.
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Oh, the one other reason to upgrade to 2.1? Wordpress now auto-saves your blog posts as you’re writing them. Awesome! No more losing 95% finished posts because I was too dumb to “Save and continue editing.”
Tags: wordpress, upgrade, blogging, john koetsier
16,777,216 comments on Slashdot
Amazing - and funny:
Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We’re awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement… but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we’re disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.
Live your life online: Parakey WebOS
I’m intrigued by Blake Ross’ new venture, Parakey. “We’re trying to persuade [people] to live their lives online,” he says.
Cool. So many of us do already, but if it can be better and faster and easier and more seamless and sexier: great.
The idea is something of a sharing platform, an evolved blog, that you create and maintain on your own computer and seamlessly updates to the web. Apparently you’ll have to download a small app to get started (Richard MacManus compares it to Radio Userland in this respect.) This really sounds like what Mozilla/Firefox was planning to do with XUL.
Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s.”
Matthew Mullenweg clarifies, by the way, that ALL of Parakey will be open source.
Blake started the company early last year with seed money from Sequoia Capital, so this has been in the making for closing in on two years now.
My concern with calling something a WebOS and saying that it will do everything an OS can do is that it really raises expectations. I mean, can I do video editing in Parakey? Companies and people have been raising expectations with this kind of language for a few years now, only to deliver a customizable start page with stock quotes, local weather, and personalized news.
An OS is a lot bigger than that.
Parakey sounds interesting in the way it is being built to bridge the desktop and the network, online and offline. Time will tell.
Tags: parakey, blake ross, web2.0, webOS, john koetsier
Sloodle: education, meet virtual reality
Imagine the classroom of the future. Does it look something like this?
Learn more at Sloodle - the “3D Learning Management System.” It’s a work in progress, as is most open source software. Here’s the vision:
SLoodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with the 3D world of Second Life. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world.
Wow. Wow, I say. I wish this group all the success in the world. This is just way too fabulously cool. All start-ups should dream big.
(I saw a link to this at A Media Circus while researching blogs for my weekly SLOB list).
Tags: social media, education, technology, moodle, second life, virtual reality, web2.0, john koetsier
Wordpress versus Wordpress
I set up this tester account at Wordpress.com months and months ago, when I was still running off the gilgamesh.ca domain.
I’m wondering if most of the development on Wordpress (the blogging platform) is now happening on improvements for Wordpress (the blog hosting platform). So I went back today and updated some of the links, added a first article, and so on.
It’s hard to say, but what I think is probably happening is that Matt & Co actually are focusing on Wordpress.com, but not to give it more features than Wordpress the blogging software. Rather, they seem to be trying to get it to feature parity: multiple themes, using your own domain, and so on …
Although, in a couple areas, they’re ahead of a default Wordpress install on your own server. Blog stats and feed stats are nice touches that, of course, because it’s on their servers, they can offer.
Overall, Wordpress.com is not bad … if it had been where it is now 6 months ago, I’m not sure I’d have needed to move my server to Media Temple, or have needed a server host at all.
On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for having your own space - and for having someone taking your money and therefore being accountable for the quality of your site’s hosting (and uptime!)
One thing’s for sure: my site definitely loads quicker.
I really wonder how Wordpress.com is going to make money. Will they put Adsense on all accounts? Or start charging a minimal fee?
After all, they’re not Google - I doubt they can keep doing it for free.
Google summer of code
Congratulations Rastin Mehr on being named a project mentor for Joomla’s entrants in the Google Summer of Code.
Rastin is a good friend and colleague, and will be a great mentor.
MicroChina: Quid pro quo
It never changes, does it?
I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.
Today, Microsoft basically purchased the privilege that it received a week or so ago: getting pre-installed on all of Lenovo computers made and sold in China. It’s a realpolitik manoevre that Microsoft basically had to make: buying $700 million of hardware in order to sell $1.2 billion of software.
Since software has few incremental costs to Microsoft, it’s a good deal as far as it goes. I’m sure that Microsoft views this as an investment in an ongoing campaign to fight piracy in China. At least it’s better than the alternative: continuing rampant piracy, and no revenue at all.
Of course, one wonders how an Apple or a Sun or a RedHat could compete against this. You need deep pockets to place these kinds of bribes.
Good thing China’s not in the EU.
Thurrot devastates Windows Vista
I don’t know that I’ve ever read such a devastating article on a piece of software as Paul Thurrot, a clueful PC guy, just wrote on Windows Vista, the next Windows operating system.
Thurrot writes about going to a conference in 2003, when Vista was still Longhorn, and how excited and passionate the Windows faithful were to hear Bill Gates intro the new operating system. Then he contrasts that feeling with today:
Two and a half years later, Microsoft has yet to ship Windows Vista, and it won’t actually ship this system in volume until 2007. Since the euphoria of PDC 2003, Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and dismissed, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?
He doesn’t go overboard: what Microsoft ships late this year will at least be an improvement, he thinks over what’s out there now.
But meanwhile, Mac OS X and the various open source operating systems have continued to advance as well. And, of course, Apple is going to be releasing a new version of OS X later this year … and they’ve had years to study what Microsoft is doing and (you would imagine) try to one-up Gates & Co.
Ultimately, Thurrott fingers Bill Gates as the person responsible. He did, after all, retire from CEO to being “chief software architect.” He’s got to take responsibility for the “utter disaster” of the new Windows.
. . .
Update: The “mock Scoble” posted a fairly good response to this article … about the only one he could have. It basically boils down to: we’re learning from this feedback; thanks for being honest.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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