Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Google announced the project lists for Summer Of Code 2008. Some of the more interesting projects from my perspective:

Adium

• Data Detectors for Adium

Dojo Foundation

• Native cryptography API for Google Gears
• Dojo-Charting improvements
• Dojo GFX Enhancement

FFmpeg

• AAC-LC Encoder
• MLP/TrueHD encoder
• Apple Lossless Encoder for FFmpeg

Gallery

• Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging

Inkscape

• SVG Fonts

Joomla!

• Multi-DB support, and Database abstraction layer implementation for Joomla!

The Mozilla Project

• Natural language parsing for automatic calendar event creation
• Powerful search engine for SUMO
• Support OpenID as an account login in Bugzilla
• Google Contacts Extension for Thunderbird

MySQL

• Streaming Enabled MySQL Driver for PHP
• MySQL query analyzing tool
• New in-memory storage engine
• Memcached for Query Cache

PHP

• Implement Unicode into PHP 6

Pidgin

• Master password support for pidgin

WebKit

• WebForms 2.0 Support
• Improving and Extending WebKit Inspector

WordPress

• WP-storage
• Integrated Caching Solution
• Improving the search system

Ran across this quote today which I just had to blog from WordPress.com’s Matt Mullenweg since I found it funny:

“We decided to show ads only on certain pages, only to the people who were sort of random drive-by visitors…if you use Firefox, you’ll never see an ad, no matter what, mostly because I like Firefox.”

Also kinda interesting from a business perspective. There’s been some suggestion over time that Firefox users are prone to ignore ads. Partially because of extensions that block ads (though products to block ads on the OS level, and in IE exist too BTW), but partially because they are said to be more technical.

I wonder if a practice like this actually provides a higher click through rate. Because they only show ads in certain places, it’s not about total impressions (they control that by picking where to show ads, and when). They control how many impressions they run in a given period. By targeting those more inclined to click on ads, theoretically your ratio should be higher.

I’ve heard of quite a few different ways to target ads over the years, but this is a new one.

This post is a follow up to the first Secrets In Websites. For those who don’t remember the first time, I point out odd, interesting, funny things in other websites’ code. Yes it takes some time to put a post like this together, that’s why it’s just about a year since the last time. Enough with the intro, read on for the code.

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A little while back I read about how WordPress was implementing Nonce to help enhance security. What I like about this technique is that it doesn’t rely on referrer checking (which is faulty at best).

Today I implemented that on a project I’m working on, rather similar in style to WordPress. I think overall it’s a better approach to referrer checking. It seems the nonce approach is actually quite popular on the web looking at commercial sites, but not a technique often talked about.

Well done by the WordPress team. My implementation is pretty similar to theirs (my variables and salting is a little different based on the app) since it was pretty hard to improve upon. Not sure how long to make the Nonce, so I stuck with 10, which is what I believe they did as well. Not sure if I should go with something longer.

One of the great things about open source is the discussion of best practices and techniques. It also benefits closed source projects who can gain influence and knowledge from those discussions.

WordPress is taking over Browse Happy. The announcement is here. WordPress has been a big Firefox supporter for sometime. Hopefully we’ll see some new content soon.

Fellow Jersey Guy Kevin Smith aka Silent Bob has a WordPress powered blog and a distinct SpreadFirefox “Get Firefox” badge on the lower right.

Apparently Silent Bob, isn’t so silent when you look at his site. One of my favorites just got a bit cooler in my book. Silent Bob rules.

[Hat tip, Matthew Mullenweg]

Matt Mullenweg just emailed me that he incorporated my changes for the firefox counter plugin. You can now get Thunderbird stats with the following code:

< ?php firefox_count('thunderbird');  ?>

Another toy is still in the works (waiting on something still). Hopefully you’ll see something soon.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo… plus a ton of blog developers sat down and came up with a fix. And there talking about rapid rollout on this one. Google Blog has the details.

Basically you need to have your blogging product of choice ad

<a href="URL" rel="nofollow">LINK</a>

to any link a visitor can add themselves (trackback, comments, etc). That will tell the search engines not to boost their rank based upon the linking. As a result spamming weblogs will serve no purpose. There will no longer be a page rank increase.

I’ve already hacked WordPress to cover part of this. It won’t do within comment fields, but will do so when you enter a website into the URL field when filing a comment.

Sorry spammers, the world decided: GO AWAY. We don’t like you, never have, never will. Your a bunch of “businesses” with unethical business plans (I have business in quotes since most aren’t even businesses, they are just people trying to scam someone out of some cash).

Thanks to:

Google, Yahoo, MSN, LiveJournal, Scripting News, Six Apart (MovableType), Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, blojsom, Blosxom .

It’s good to see widespread coordination.

Now what about email spam? When will they come up with a DomainKeys, SPF, solution.

I’ve started building static pages with WordPress, to see if I can speed things up (even more). I started experimenting with it a week or so ago, and have been toying around. At this point I think it’s pretty good, minus a few small glitches (all I can live with for the moment).

One apparently is that in WordPress 1.3, it doesn’t correctly show how long it took to process. For example I see:

Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.182 seconds
Static Page Served in 1,105,325,889.680 seconds

No, it didn’t take that long. It actually loaded quicker than the dynamic page.

But yes, I’m feeling even better about WordPress, it’s a solid platform to run a Blog on. Easy to setup, configure, install, tweak, skin. I love 1.5, but I won’t be moving over until it hits final.

I’ve been somewhat quiet these past few days, since I’ve been spending a ton of time coding away on various projects. It’s starting to get close to some of it being put into production. Though some larger projects are far from completion. Other than that, not much else to say.

I decided I needed some geeky play time this evening, so I downloaded the latest CVS build of WordPress (yes they skipped numbers) and ran it in a dev environment, just for me to look, poke, and play. I’m floored. A rundown of what I see/like:

• Themes - Makes sense, needed to happen. I love this feature a lot already, and I don’t actually have it yet, as the production blog is in 1.2.
• Static Posting - This is another thing I’m digging. I need this as well.
• Much Better UI - The User interface is so much better in WP 1.5 it’s amazing. Small changes but they make the app feel much more complete.

There’s no indication of a target release date. I’m hoping it’s sooner than later. Projects go on forever. Eventually one has to stop collecting new features and decide to start fixing bugs and getting things release worthy. Hopefully it will be out soon.

I’d like to use it a bit more professionally for more than just blogging, but I need things to be stable and release worthy. These are big features I could use.