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After my incredibly frustrating experience installing and configuring Textpattern, I decided to give WordPress a shot. Talk about night and day. You would either have to have years of experience working with Textpattern, or be a complete masochist, to even consider going with that package.

Neither of which includes me. After downloading the archive, creating a directory for it, unpacking the software, creating a MySQL database complete with credentials, running the installer, a little fiddling with rewrite rules—I had WordPress up and running with friendly URLs in 10 minutes. Okay, maybe not the famous 5-minute install, but I'm cautious and don't like to make mistakes that come back to haunt me later.

Themes

The default theme is okay, or you can go with the "classic" interface via the base install. Both one of which are a big improvement over Textpattern's default (boy, TP sure is the whipping boy around here lately). Anyway, I shopped around for a nice theme and quickly settled on iNove which is slick out of the box, and I discovered later really easy to tweak. Right off the bat I was impressed with this guy's skills. Little things like using Sprites for icons and other imagery, make a big difference.

Plugins

Plugins are a joy to work with. They're easy to install, and if you go with crowd favorites you're bound to find one that is well-documented, smartly coded and doesn't interfere with WordPress itself or other plugins. Thus far I've installed:

• Ajax Calendar — replaces WP calendar with one that doesn't page refresh
• Akismet — blocks trackback and comment spam
• Dagon Sitemap Generator — fully customizable sitemaps
• Google XML Sitemaps — for Google indexing, not users as above
• Highslide — zoom image thumbnails with many options
• Markdown — lightweight markup language for easier authoring of posts
• Page Links To — easily create links that are external to WP or offsite
• PageNavi — advanced paging navigation
• RecentComments — display recent comments in your sidebar
• Related Posts — create related posts links via tags
• SRG Clean Archives — search engine friendly archive listings
• WP-Syntax — source code syntax highlighting via GeSHi

Administration

Like any admin interface, it takes some getting used to. But I found the learning curve fairly shallow and was soon up to speed. Configuring your sidebar is really nice. You select items on the left side to place on the right, and using Ajax you can order them however you want by drag and drop. One thing that had me puzzled at first was the four sidebar sections: north, south, east and west. At first I pictured the entire page, but then realized your sidebar is dived into top, middle and bottom, with the middle having a left (west) and a right (east). Makes perfect sense now.

Configuring the menu bar was also a little strange. These are referred to as "pages" rather than "posts." You can put anything you want into them or use a plugin such as the sitemap generator mentioned above. The interface for adding content to these pages is almost the same as regular posts, but you can disable things like commenting and such so they appear as, well, normal content. Or you can "perma" link any of them to some other page, as I did in the case of my Contact option.

I fiddled with the theme stylesheet quite a bit to get things the way I wanted. It's easy to do right from the admin interface by selecting the Design tab then the Theme Editor. I also added a Blogroll OPML link next to my RSS feed at the top of the sidebar. But that involved a little PHP coding, adding a third icon to the feeds Sprite and again, modifying the CSS. I also fiddled with some other icon sprites, but I won't go into that here.

Conclusion

There are still a few little things that perturb me, for instance, when WordPress magically reformats my raw content when I select "Edit post" from the public side. My advice is to use the admin interface for fixing typos and such. I would also prefer a post preview that doesn't involve opening a new window (or tab if you have your browser configured that way). I can understand the rationale behind it, and I'm sure I could come up with a better solution. That really is the power of open-source software, if you have the skills you can make it do anything you want. Plus, using a scripting language like PHP makes it all that much easier. Especially when the code is well written and documented. Serendipity is a nightmare, at least this old version I'm still using.

But not for long! I will announce when I plan on moving over to the new blog permanently.

What's this, no multi-page post today—complete with code examples and links all over the place? Instead, I did some house cleaning, and added a new wing. JavaScript has been such a hot topic around here of late, and in the Web development community in general, that I took a look at my growing list of resources and discovered that indeed, the JavaScript category was in need of some pruning. Amongst the list, and in particular by studying the most popular tags, I found that JavaScript libraries would make an excellent category to splinter off and reduce the weight in the parent folder. I know, I know, I need to implement paging. PHP is another one that grew out of its clothes.

Speaking of implementing paging (and caching and a lot of other things on my todo list), I have been really busy behind the scenes fixing bugs and making other improvements to both this blog and loadaverageZero in general. Some of them my visitors may have noticed, some may not. But things are definitely on the upswing around here since health has improved.

One thing that really has me puzzled is what to do with this blog. I'm running a rather old, and hacked to pieces, version of Serendipity. I don't want to let go of the design, which I spent a lot of time on, yet on the same token it bothers me that my only recourse to block spammers and other miscreants was to disable comments and trackbacks. I'm not a big fan of Captchas, I would prefer to go the OpenID route.

Anyway, I'm starved and I haven't been to the diner for some good old eggs and bacon in ages...

Okay, my April Fools jokes are terrible, it's really only been one year since I completed the first version of the software that drives Web Developer Resource Index and started adding reviews. And what a year. I was hoping to make it to 1000 resources today, but fell a little short. There are 955 as of this post. Too many irons in the fire I suppose.

Like most software, the system evolved. One of the first features I added were RSS feeds for every category. This was quickly followed by an OPML of the whole directory. You can even extract the data as RDF if you want to. Initially, each resource was marked up with valid XHTML 1.1 (like the rest of loadaverageZero). Later, I adopted the hReview Microformat, which, to the best of my knowledge, makes DRX one of the largest examples of such reviews on the Web. Every resource is tagged with one or more keywords, so a tag cloud provides another interesting point of view.

Today I thought I'd take the opportunity to look back at that first week, and list 20 selections. I guess you could call this the polar opposite of Recent Additions.

• XHTML 1.0 The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
• NYPL Online Style Guide: XHTML
• The Emperor has New Clothes
• XHTML 1.0: Marking up a New Dawn
• The Perils of using XHTML Properly
• HTML 4.01 Specification
• HTML Advanced Guide
• HTMLSource: HTML Tutorials
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Eric Meyer: CSS Work
• Learn CSS: Complete CSS Guide
• Maxdesign: CSS Tutorials
• Resource Description Framework
• RSS at Harvard Law
• RSS Tutorial
• OWL: Web Ontology Language Overview
• Semantic Web
• MySQL Reference Manual
• The C Programming Language
• PHP Manual

I started with fundamentals, you should too.

Face it, flickr is fabulous, but these mashups and Web apps make it even more fun.

1. flappr is a really slick flash application for searching and browsing flickr photo archives. Once logged into your account, you can add the ones you really like to your favorites. Also presents the users tags by popularity, and details of each pic.

2. flickr spell couldn't be easier, just enter a word and keep clicking each letter image until your aesthetic sensibilities are satisfied. You can then use the JavaScript code provided to insert the resulting image set into your blog or Web site. I cheated (hopefully these images are not copyrighted!)

3. flickrfling is an innovative way to explore RSS feeds. Just enter the URL to an interesting one, and let the app render the feed in images based on keywords found there. The results can be quite surprising.

4. Tagnautica has to be experienced to understand it. Not that it's complicated or anything, just enter a keyword to get started.

5. Flickrball is a six-degrees-of-separation game, using flickr thumbnails and tags for clues. Warning: Kevin Bacon is watching you.

Not to be outdone by digg spy, DiggLicious is indeed a cool site. Built with the Joomla! PHP CMS framework and an Ajax mashup of the digg and del.icio.us APIs (although according to my research, the digg API has yet to be released, so I have no idea how the guy is pulling this off), the site allows you to watch in real-time as stories are being dugg and sites are being bookmarked. The output is non-stop, a testament to how popular these social sites are. Each entry displays the total bookmarks/diggs, and a title/URL/link to the resource. It even includes the del.icio.us tags—go figure.

I'd hate to have this guy's bandwidth bill, but his server seems to take the load pretty well. Nicely done.

From David Sifry and Technorati, some exciting stats (complete with graphs) on the exponential growth of blogging over the past several years: State of the Blogosphere.

A few highlights from the summary:

• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

There are a lot more details, many of them specific to how much data Technorati handles. I used to complain about their performance problems (which has been much better of late), but wow, they have their hands full and there's no end in sight.

Keep on blogging on!

John is looking for Web site design patterns. Here's my contribution:

Pattern type: Site
Pattern name: Social Bookmarks
Also known as: Folksonomy, Shared Favorites
Examples: del.icio.us, digg, reddit, furl, jots

Description:

A shared collection of links (URLs) that, unlike in traditional categorized lists (taxonomies), the user can freely assign keywords or "tags" to each bookmark.

Comments:

Some collaborative lists are restricted to a certain subject area such as technology, while the majority are general in scope. Most bookmarking sites provide features that display link relevance by popularity (weighted lists or tag clouds) and/or front page (most popular) bookmarks, RSS feeds for each tag (and often user) and a Web service API that allows developers to tap into the datasets stored by the system.

If you're going to be in NYC in February, consider setting aside an extra day to join Cal Henderson's Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr. Although we haven't had the chance to meet face-to-face yet (I just missed the opportunity on a recent trip to Sunnyvale), I have spoken with him a number of times after taking over as pro bono developer at Digital Web. I appreciate Cal's no-nonsense, practical (and sense of humor) approach to the sometimes dry and technical field of Web development. Expect to learn a lot, and enjoy yourself as well.

The day-long event, sponsored by Carson Workshops, will be held at the Center for Architecture on the 16th. The Center is located in the West Village, between Bleecker and Washington Square Park, so if you're a fan of New York and architecture like I am, then your excuses for not considering the trip are dwindling.

+ My only question is, why did it take so long?

Read all about it at the Yahoo! Search blog: Great Tastes That Go Great Together. And at the del.icio.us blog: y.ah.oo!

Hey! They stole my tagline.

Jason says So long, Technorati, and I don't blame him one bit. I've been increasingly frustrated with the speed, reliability and results of their system for months now. Even after the "new" Technorati came out recently, they seemed to have done nothing to improve the basic infrastructure of the system. It's just a new cover on an old book with a broken spine.

As for the acquisition rumors, I don't know who'd buy such a mess, but if someone does, I look forward to them improving it to a usable level. Pretty much everyone I talk to in the industry thinks the site sucks and we've just been waiting for it to get better because, well, it would have to at some point, wouldn't it? Well, I'm tired of waiting. Goodbye, Technorati...your url will darken the door of my browser no longer.

I've been saying the same thing in response to many blog posts with similar complaints. Fix the engine, worry about hype, sales, and user experience later. Hell, valuable results (content) and a decent response time are user experience.

One more example, and then I will leave this topic alone. I'm subscribed to several RSS feeds from Technorati that return result sets on certain blogs I watch. Every time, and I mean every I refresh my feed reader I watch the list: bing, bling, zoom...one by one and then it stalls:

Waiting for technorati.com...