Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.

I know that Matt Mullenweg and Matt Thomas die a little each time they see WordPress fan art that uses a faux logo. I only notice the chubby W because I’ve been edumacated.

MT (the real) has updated WordPress.org/about/buttons with official WordPress logos in pngs and vector image formats.

WordPress Logos and WordPress Buttons

There are also WordPress desktop wall paper in various official colors and sizes. The official WordPress colors are given in a variety of code systems. Pantone 7468 anyone?

Fan Art

The fan art page could use some fresh contributions.

These naturalized WordPress logos would be nice additions:

WordPress India Independence Logo by Allan Fernandes

One or more of the WordPress Malaysia Independence Logos by Avijit Paul. My favorite are the one’s with the flower for the O:

WordPress Malaysia Independence Logos by Avijit Paul

I love the WordCamp Philippines logo:

WordCamp Philippines Logo by Andrew Dela Serna

What is your favorite WordPress art?

Lorelle’s category icons are brilliant. For example, she uses this image for WordPress News:

Anyone know the creator of this popular images?

Same day correction: previously the article suggested the font is Dante, but both Matts have come to my rescue. It used to be the WordPress logo font. When Jason Santa Maria designed the new logo a few years ago, he chose the lovely Mrs. Eaves.

Adam Freetly identified the creator of the “lens flare” logo as being Dan Philibin.

WordPress "Lens Flare" Logo by Dan Philibin

My co-worker Noel Jackson, tired of hearing me whine about the Six Apart TypePad Trap, has created a WordPress importer mashing together the MT formatted export file (missing permalinks) and the broken TypePad AtomPub (missing comments and trackbacks). We are currently testing this on WordPress.com before polishing the code up and sharing it. We are looking for some TypePad customers to help us test it — it’s completely harmless, read-only.

If you are interested, let me know and we can set up a private blog on WordPress.com for you to import into. Bonus is that you will have a backup of your blog ready to go live if anything ever befalls TypePad.

This importer wouldn’t be possible without the heroic effort Ronald Heft Jr put into creating a TypePad AtomPub importer for WordPress — it’s not his fault TypePad still doesn’t have a way to export your full blog.

What’s an AtomPub? While working on this importer Noel contacted TypePad support only to have them tell him they don’t know what AtomPub is, and that they don’t support it.

Anyway, as I said, if you are a TypePad customer, and want to participate in open source development by testing this exporter, or would just like a backup of your blog ready to launch on WordPress.com, leave a comment or send me an email.

Inspired by the incredible time I had at An Event Apart San Francisco, I’ve decided to learn a little bit of CSS to actually theme this blog. What should I do first?

The last couple of years I’ve had no real personalized experience on this blog at foolswisdom.com. Partly, because it greatly eases testing of the core WordPress software, partly to test Sandbox as it’s updated, and mostly because I’ve been too lazy, and busy helping other people.

Although, numerous times people have generously pointed out that “CSS is missing from your blog”, I’m surprised I haven’t received more nasty comments and emails about how offensive it really is.

What should I do first?

I’ve seen a lot of fantastic articles about what Google’s beta web browser Chrome is and isn’t, will and won’t be.

My good friend Chris Messina wrote a very interesting article, which in many ways comes down to a large, influential part of the web development community being disenfranchised from Mozilla.

Doom! Of course John Lilly is playing cool on the outside, because they have long fought giants.1 Mozilla’s ability to combat goliaths, and live with fear and uncertain contribute to them being the best browser development community there is.

Although Mozilla is the best browser community, like Chris Messina, I consider myself part of the disenfranchised community, tired of the Firefox is the web mentality. But I will readily admit nobody has a better track record than Mozilla for open source consumer software development.2

As impatient consumers, particularly impatient geek consumers, we all want our pet issues addressed right NOW. One of the greatest achievements of Mozilla these last few years is worrying about the right problems at the right time. And one thing they’ve always gotten mostly right is enabling participation in all aspects of Firefox development, promotion and support.

My instincts tell me that it has slowed them down (a lot), but positions them well for the long game.

In many ways their community, their team, is like the guiding principle of the Internet, they can remove a number of members, and the team will continue to function. Firefox development is highly robust and survivable.

Are leaders like Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, and Mike Schroepfer missed? Of course they are, but these are only a few of the many Mozilla champions.

“We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)”3

Chrome will be the browser built by Google, like Safari is the browser built by Apple. Firefox is the browser built by everyone.

Everyone that can cope in the structured, programmer-geeky rule laden Mozilla open source community. But maybe that is what is required for such a complex and important product.

What track record does Google have in open source development of consumer software? Any?

By extension what track record does Google have in supporting consumer products? Here they do have one, and it’s a poor one. Automation ultimately doesn’t cut it. Also, it’s much more fun when the software is installed, as opposed to a web service that you fix and update any time.

What community leaders has Google assembled for these heady tasks?

What open source tools do these Google leaders have in their arsenals? As great of gifts as the Netscape source code in 1998 were the open source tools to develop and collaborate on development.

Although today using Bugzilla and Bonsai (with Hg Web Viewer a poor replacement) would probably drive me nuts, those are a couple of the tools that makes development of a large, complete product by a large Mozilla community possible.

Google Code seems great for small projects, or non-consumer software projects with small teams, but I’m not convinced that Google Code is up for the challenge of a web browser.4 But I suspect it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t expect Chrome to become a leader in the browser space. I expect it to be about writing cool code, solving cool engineering problems, and pressuring Mozilla into solving the problems that Google cares about, or someone else will take Google’s code and solve them.

The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge. I expect Apple to be the first to incorporate this generously licensed code (third-party software). But Mozilla won’t be that far behind, because with the top teams collaborating on WebKit, the myth of the masses will be eroded. Sure, Mozilla’s development team may be made up mostly of volunteers, but those contributions are often picking at the surface of problems or polishing generally solved problems. The complexity of code necessitates highly skilled, highly focused, full time developers.

Chrome’s technologies will be powerful forces for the Mozilla disenfranchised. Will WebKit one day power Firefox? What other technologies or experiences will we see Firefox adopt from Chrome?

1. This is probably why they haven’t been the good friends they could be to the illegitimate offspring.
2. Though Ubuntu is starting to challenge Mozilla as the champion of open source consumer software.
3. Mitchell Baker, “Mozilla, Firefox and Google Chrome“
4. Look to Launchpad for a modern system likely up to the challenge.

One of the many things that Kathy Seirra’s session at WordCamp SF 2008 has me thinking about is what does WordPress say about us using it. And what do WordPress shirts say about the us wearing them.

About half way through her session she talks about “T-Shirt First Development (Guy Kawasaki)”. I have about 7 WordPress shirts. Occasionally, the ones with the WordPress logo will lead to a conversation — even here in quiet Victoria — with a blogger or web developer, but the ones that spark the most conversations are the WordCamp ones.

Here are some photos from Flickr of people rocking each year’s WordCamp SF shirts:

Joshua Wiltshire in WordCamp 2006 Tee

Chris Heuer in WordCamp SF 2007 Tee. Photo by Laughing Squid.

Alan Levine in WordCamp SF 2008 Tee.

Although WordCamps are happening all over the world, understandably, for most, shirts are not in the budget.

Shirt not in the budget for Dane Hurtubise. Photo by Michael Cummings.

I have found only one photo of a WordCamp tee from another WordCamp:

WordCamp South Africa 2008 Tee

When wearing a WordCamp shirt, conversations with strangers often start, “WordCamp, do you do spelling bees?” After I get over my initial little bit of embarrassment, I explain “WordCamps are WordPress conferences. WordPress is the blogging software that I use and contribute to.” It’s a great ice breaker, and lets me pimp the Press.

I haven’t had any particular funny conversations or found myself in any strange situations, but I like to imagine that others have.

Kris Krug captured what looks like master of creating conversations Francine Hardaway giving everyone a flash of WordCamp during her Gnomedex session:

Jokes. Kris’s next photos reveal that Francine was doing an on stage costume change, or maybe transforming from mild mannered Francine (can’t imagine) to part of Generation Y (which her session was about). I can’t wait for the video!

Has a WordCamp shirt taken you to any strange places?

Photos Used (because WordPress captions feature doesn’t yet support links):

1. Joshua Wiltshire self-portrait.
2. Chris Heuer photo by Scott Beale.
3. Alan Levine self-portrait.
4. Dane Hurtubise photo by Michael Cummings.
5. Photo by Flickr member StrategyOnline.
   
6. Francine Hardaway photo by Kris Krug.

Thursday Update: Aiza sent me a link to “WordCamp [Philippines] Preparation”

WordCamp Philippines 2008 Tee.

The GNU Project is 25 years young! And Richard Stallman and crew are working as hard as ever. Thank you!1

The GNU Project is most famous for it’s versions of UNIX utilities and the GPL family of licenses. But whatever you think of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation’s hard-line approaches and politics, everyone has benefited from their work. Every computerized device, if it doesn’t run GNU software, likely contains software that was influenced by the GNU project or software released under a GPL license. And the GNU Project’s influence extends beyond software to most areas where technology meets freedom.

Thanks again GNU!

1. Hat tip Joi Ito

Gels Saby Demoing at DemoCamp Victoria

While at An Event Apart SF, I went to look up something on the Victoria Better Web Posse’s site, and was saddened to find that it’s offline, “Address Not Found”. I’ve emailed Gels Saby hoping to find out the status, but haven’t heard back from her yet.

Joan McIlmoyl Cleghorn on the Victoria Linux User Group (VLUG) wrote

As I understand it from someone who was a member of Web Posse, it has folded. OTOH, WEAV amalgamated with Big Blue & Cousins about a year and a half ago. Currently, a former WEAV member is running a Web Tools Special Interest Group monthly.

If this is the case, this is a big bummer. I found the Better Web Posse to have a refreshing design focus lacking from WEAV before it and Big Blue & Cousins still today. The Better Web Posse brought together many talented designers, developers and other workers of the web.

It seemed like Gels and a few other people did a lot of work to bring the posse together. Thank you!

Any way I put together the title it was this long monstrosity, so I just removed the filler words and then some.

So, one of the WordCamp SF sessions that I was eagerly awaiting the video being available to share is Kathy Seirra’s “Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users”:

Kathy Seirra is one of my favorite speakers, because she makes me feel like I can kick fleshy parts you sit on too!

Peter Nowak wrote a CBC article yesterday about Quebec being sued for not accepting software contract bids:

“Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused…”

The article has the tantalizing title of “Quebec government sued for buying Microsoft software“, but the heart of the matter is that Quebec is being sued for not accepting other bids. This policy is an anti-competitive business practice, and by effect anti- open source.

Quite a few of the comments in the article try to scapegoat the issue saying the government also relies on other vendors that have Microsoft Windows only solutions, but no one is arguing flip the switch and suffer. A government’s needs aren’t short term, and the very job of these policy analysts and technology procurement specialists is to weigh the options and total cost of ownership over the long-term.

It’s frightening that not only do they think there are no other options, but they are standing behind a law that shuts down all conversations. Their own belief that they are locked in, should scream to work towards alternatives. For a public office, important measures are openness and public value.

Another argument used by commenters to defend the current policy is that open source has a different, often worse user interface and experience. This isn’t really the case. There are a large variety of open source solutions with some mimicking Microsoft products and others having focused task based experiences. With choice, with open source, they can best meet the needs of their customers.

The last favorite scapegoat is that open source is free, and that this means that it’s unsupported. Many companies have built or reshaped their business around providing world class support of open source including IBM, Sun, Novel, Oracle, RedHat, and Canonical (Ubuntu). This won’t be profitable if the software products themselves weren’t world class. Canonical’s Ubuntu Support is even headquartered in Montreal, Quebec.

This policy hints at Canadian goverment offices being behind the curve. They have a great opportunity to review and measure how many other countries are using open source, and demonstrate how open standards and open technologies is how industry and government are investing in themselves and their members.

Drupal Camp Victoria is happening all day Friday and Saturday Sept 5th and 6th. It’s hosted by North Studio at their training center, 301-771 Vernon Ave (plaza just coming into Victoria, near Save-On-Foods, Walmart).

It’s a free event, and if your work is any way related to the web, you will be missing out if you don’t attend. Register now before the event is full.

Besides, we need to support the grass roots Victoria tech scene — stop the Vancouver tech drain

Dave Olson points out that it’s “strategically scheduled for the same weekend as The Great Canadian Beer Festival”. So it seems safe to expect a good turnout from Drucouver. I know Boris Mann will be in attendance, and participating.

I hope to at least make an appearance. I’ll be looking for opportunies for WordPress collaboration. But me making it there is based on the whim of my baby son — and I won’t have it any other way.

WordPress community superstar and regular web tools collection contributor Jeff Chandler (jeffr0) recently published a passionate article, “Stop Blaming The WordPress Team“. The article is about plugin developers blaming WordPress for too frequent updates without testing of popular plugins. His conclusion ends “So the next time you upgrade WordPress and realize your favorite plugin is broke, don’t blame the WordPress team, blame the source.” There are almost 200 comments on the article, and reading through them I imagine almost all perspectives are represented.

My hope is you don’t blame anyone. Maybe, it’s the core WordPress developers fault, maybe it’s the plugin or theme’s author, but that matters much less than everyone involved staying positively pumped.

The worse possible outcome is plugin developer and theme designer exhaustion. These people are as much the WordPress team as anyone is!

Thank contributors. For many that is all the compensation they are looking for, but don’t berate the contributor that is looking for more.

The blame game doesn’t help. Instead, if the plugins or themes you use are a gift to you (free), blog about, comment on forums, write the authors directly thanking them for the work that you miss because it isn’t working with the newest version of WordPress. Why wait till there is a problem, thank them today.

If you really need to blame someone, blame me. I can take it.

For years when people ask if I have any siblings, I’ve said, “Yes, I have a brother. He looks like me, but is a taller, strong version. A real Canadian Moose.” And I’d raise my shoulders and pretend to flex.

My brother living in Beijing was described in a Metro News article as “[sporting] a tall frame and sandy brown hair.” The article quotes his advice of tolerance:

“People yelling “hello” at you, asking to take their picture with you, staring, or commenting on the sharpness of your nose — they don’t mean any harm by it,” he said good naturedly.

So during my talk “Switching to WordPress Painlessly” at WordCamp, (video coming soon!) Six Apart’s Open Platforms Tech Lead David Recordon was in the audience and rather than have a chat with me at any one of the numerous times we passed during the day, he made this cute tweat instead:

There are a couple of things immediately apparent from David’s tweat:

1. He has never exported a blog from TypePad
2. He has never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Never exported a blog from TypePad

I know this because I’ve done numerous TypePad exports and also working through my customers trying to get support from Six Apart in the export. For most TypePad blogs, it’s impossible to truly export the blog. Six Apart provides no tools or documentation on how to export in a way that preserves the permalinks, and because of a bug in TypePad and an unpublished permalink creation rules that have changed over the years, it guarantees a tedious, manual process to truly export the blog.

About a year ago, I approached members of the Six Apart leadership team in the hopes that they would commit to fix this issue. I was really nice back then and the whole time until recently. Now, I’ve concluded they were playing games.

Six Apart CEO Christopher Alden’s even promised “A Bright New TypePad in 2008“, “TypePad is the only blogging service that gives you complete ownership of your blog”. Appreciate the humor of that? You are trapped on TypePad.

Chris, and all the leadership team will wave their hands, “AtomPub is the answer.”

Never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Having tried to guide Ronald Heft Jr in creating AtomPub exporters for TypePad and Movable Type, my only conclusion is that no member of Six Apart has written a blog exporter using AtomPub.

Six Apart VP Anil Dash likes to brag about them having helped create Atom and AtomPub. An exporter would have been one of the perfect real world applications to create as part of the creation of the specification. And wouldn’t you think if they were going to tell everyone that is the solution to exporting from TypePad that they would have built such an exporter? They couldn’t have because you can’t without hacking around AtomPub, a lot, which is what Ronald has done.

Then as we had it working, hacks and all, this past weekend, TypePad changed it, fixing one aspect of their AtomPub (drafts are identified), changing a few things that we can adjust to (changed the URL endpoints, switched to MT tag names for consistentency), but also breaking our importer:

• Can no longer retrieve comments on posts.
• No longer contains Pages.
• XML-RPC for trackback retrieval broke.

These issues have been reported to Six Apart and hopefully they will be fixed soon, but there is absolutely zero transparency. There is no way for us to check on the status of these issues.1  Wouldn’t you expect the changes to be documented on the “The Official Everything TypePad weblog” and mentioned on “Six Apart Status“?

I cringe to think of the mess it would have been if we had already included the TypePad AtomPub importer in a release.

It seems that independent developers are left out in the cold.

The open web starts at home

Although, I’m excited by the work Ronald is doing, should it really be necessary for TypePad customers to come to the WordPress community to export their blogs?2

I’m reminded of Dave Winer’s excellent article “How to do data portability” which includes “The best way to achieve data portability is to just do it”. That article really moved me, data portability, and by extension the open web, starts at your own company, on your own product.

How much longer do TypePad customers have to wait before they can export their blog?

1. Over 2 years ago when I was the QA lead of Flock, when we discovered problems in TypePads API, I requested a way to track the issues we.
2. Six Apart’s own Movable Type has no solution.

“If Movable Type was as popular, and under the same amount of scrutiny, I can’t imagine they would still be storing passwords as plain text.” upset at least one reader of “Movable Type Pro, Setting Social Networking Free, Vaporware, WordPress, BuddyPress“. His comment wasn’t polite, so I’ll answer without here without publishing it or calling attention to the comment author.

While working on the TypePad and Movable Type AtomPub Exporters (still in progress), programmer Ronald Heft Jr had a problem interacting with the WSSE authentication both use. The problem ended up being in his own code, but it also led to some interesting observations about how the authentication works.

TypePad doesn’t require as secure code.

• TypePad can handle the WSSE nonce either base64 encoded or plain text. Movable Type requires the nonce to be base64 encoded. Ronald had been using base64 on the nonce from the beginning, and TypePad accepted it. The APE does not encoding the nonce, so it works with TP but not MT.

• TypePad allows the same nonce to be used multiple times, while Movable Type requires a new nonce for each request. The AtomPub library Ronald had been using did not regenerate the nonce as it was centered around TypePad. Once he started giving a new nonce for each request, MT started authenticating.

This is a good reminder that allowing programmers a less secure option, and they will likely take it because they trust you, and have other deadlines.

WSSE authentication is inheritantly insecure.

When Ronald looked in his Movable Type database he found that the passwords were stored in plain text. WordPress remote access development lead Joseph Scott explains that the only way to support WSSE is to store the passwords in plain text on the server, which is one of the reasons why WordPress won’t be supporting WSSE.

Six Apart VP Anil’s response today on the official Six Apart blog to my Movable Type Pro Introduction video parody doesn’t surprise me1, but where is the link love?

If I wasn’t clear my video really is in no way a comment of the MT Pro product — I’ve never tried it. All the Six Apart teams are clearly very talented, so I’m sure it’s a great product. Though I’m pretty sure it won’t live up to “setting social networking free”.

Let’s break it down:

focus more on telling a story

People that know me, know that I’m all about the story that a product tells, and I think their video failed in the very way that he thinks they succeeded. I didn’t see a compelling story about the experience of Movable Type Pro. As my voice-over reflects, I saw a story that looked like any blogging platform and comments.

Both of us are extremely biased at opposites ends of the spectrum, so neither of us will get it right on this one. I would love to know the results of a diverse group of people each separately watching the video and sharing their reactions.

Honestly, we assume that that everyone else on the web will respond by copying great ideas, as they usually do. Hell, we want them to, so that more people can benefit from open communities on the web.

If you are familiar with Anil’s writing, you may end up with the conclusion, like I have, that he is actually obsessed with being first — or that is one of the SIx Apart key messages anyway. Maybe, it all started because he was Six Apart’s first employee. Check out the Movable Type blog, “A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide” [sic] article for a bit of a taste. If you enjoy the flavor, a Google search will lead you across the Web.

Of any software spaces, blogging is one of the richest for borrowing from each other and providing a consistent experience to customers — everyone benefits from this! I’d like to think WordPress has had as many firsts as any blogging platform, but even if that isn’t the case, I’m much more interested in focusing on doing it well. An example is the TypePad iPhone app was an iPhone launch partner, but the WordPress iPhone app is much more popular, has more reviews, and is higher rated, and we are still busy fixing and improving it.

Until then, they’ve created a parody of our video.

So me spending a couple hours playing around with iMovie in my own time (my 1st time using it), somehow becomes the Automattic answer to MT Pro?! And as I mentioned, no link love, no mention of my name (Lloyd Budd) — very, very bad blogger etiquette. Is iMovie that good that Anil thinks it’s a first rate production? I don’t think so, listening to it again, it is clearly the crap job that I remember doing for my own amusement.

without having your it look like another Facebook or MySpace clone

Did I voice-over the wrong video? I’m pretty sure it was their video that started with Digg, Facebook and MySpace. I might have misspoke, but I thought it would be obvious that I was referring to having social features beyond commenting like those platforms.

Our long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, “Digg-proof” pages.

That is one of Anil’s favorite sound bites. I know Anil can’t seriously be suggesting that a file based “cache” is a whole solution to being highly scalable.

The funny part is that substitute in WordPress and you have at least an equally true assertion, ‘[WordPress's] long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, “Digg-proof” pages.’ The reason why this sometimes looks not to be true is because of WordPress’s popularity.

I would bet, with no hesitation, that WordPress sites are far more often dugg, and that unfortunately some of those sites dugg, like my own, are on inexpensive, shared hosted environments that aren’t Digg ready.

For most WordPress customers the dynamic, responsive experience is far more important than “Digg-proof”, but for those that do want to prepare for a digg storm, there are high quality plugins like Super Cache and Batcache and many others that suit your specific configuration and needs.

There is no question that WordPress is scalable, fact is WordPress powers far more of the web than Movable Type, both in terms of web pages served and web sites. Fact is Movable Type doesn’t even power Six Apart’s hosted TypePad, and to my great frustration is incompatible in numerous ways — wonder why there is no Movable Type app for iPhone anyone?

remedy some of the missing features in WordPress if you have enough free time to find the appropriate plugins

Talking out the other side of his face, Anil will point out Movable Type’s rich plugin and theme collection. I’m pretty sure, Pro has even been presented as plugins built on top of MT at one time — bundling.

Of course, there is a huge collection, much larger, of WordPress plugins and themes, and I haven’t heard complaints that it’s hard to find the appropriate plugin. The wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives you information about popularity, and the interface will continue to evolve.

This past weekend, during Matt’s “State of the Word” at WordCamp SF 2008 (video will be online soon!), spoke to how that experience will change and how the actually WordPress plugin usage data will directly help WordPress evolve, with top plugins are polished and integrated into WordPress.

prominent independent security researchers do warn, “[T]he abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk”.

Why pick on the plugin developers brother?

That’s on top of WordPress being one of top ten least secure applications around

Each of the most popular blogging and CMS made the list, as does Linux.

the Department of Homeland Security’s data showing WordPress having twelve times as many reported security vulnerabilities as Movable Type

Should I even touch this one? Since Anil discovered that Home Land Security site I think that has become his favorite. I think it’s more telling that the Department of Homeland Security, and many other US government offices use WordPress (conversation).

And Anil’s article is one of the worst security related articles I’ve ever read. No security expert, nor scientific minded person would sign their name on it with it’s broad, sloppy brush strokes.

There is shame. Security was part of Matt’s State the Word. I don’t know anyone in the WordPress community that is happy with our security history, but it’s getting better and so are our developers.

There is appropriate optimism. With each release I see more potential security issues being reviewed and, when genuine, fixed earlier in the release process. The foundation of WordPress is also being improved to make security mistakes more difficult.

No one justifies the security issues because of popularity, but the IBM’s paper does reflect with popularity comes scrutiny. The loudest message from the paper might be that the bad guys have moved their focus from Windows to open source and to the web.

It seems only in the last couple of years has web security come to the forefront of the industries collective mind, and we’re all learning a lot. All three “top ten”, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are benefiting from each others improvements, and the larger PHP community is helping a lot.

If Movable Type was as popular, and under the same amount of scrutiny, I can’t imagine they would still be storing passwords as plain text.

I’m confident that WordPress’s security record will get better and better!

The great technology rests on top of world-class support, an incredibly talented professional services group, and a media services team that will help your site and your community succeed.

That last link there is a 404, and maybe that is meta irony there. All those links go to Six Apart services, as does one from earlier in Anil’s article “(We’ll even help you design it.)”.

This is probably the largest difference between Movable Type and WordPress. WordPress is community developed and support — world class.

I remember reading Anil’s comment on Josh Catone’s Read Write Web article “Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams“. Here Anil didn’t like that WordPress Prologue — actually that’s a great example of someone not getting the idea, the story — but what bothered me was his attitude towards WordPress plugin developers:

There’s also an important distinction that this is a key part of our platform, developed by the core MT team itself. That means that it’s not a PHP script somebody cobbled together on their own to try to make a lifestream, it’s a framework to actually help open up *all* of these services

I read that as disrespectful to independent developers, WordPress or otherwise.

I see the Automattic team as the WordPress guide. WordPress is completely community created and supported. Automattic takes on the big (scalability) problems that the community doesn’t have the resources for like: providing the free WordPress.com service and fuding usability testing of a new WordPress dashboard experience.

We work with our community, not compete with our community. The work Automattic does is open source, released under the GPL.

Though the WordPress Consultants list, wp-pro and WP jobs are pretty good tools, currently, I expect much of the WordPress professionals’ work through personal relationships in the community. I think this is one of our greatest opportunities as a community. If you agree (blog about it) get in touch with Toni.

I mentioned that the work Automattic does is open source, whenever possible (Akismet is an exception). This isn’t the case with Six Apart’s Movable Type. I’ve written at length, “Movable Type 200% Open Source!“, about the missed opportunity.

With the release of Movable Type Pro, I think Six Apart’s current approach is bad for open source and actually dilutes open source. It seems others share my opinion, as on every thread there seems to be an open source advocate upset about MT Pro not being open source.

At first I was excited to see that the open source information was now on MovableType.com’s download page:

But then I realized the game this table plays is that the open source version isn’t good enough for “Bloggers”, only freetards like myself. I’m pretty sure, I’ve also read Six Apart telling people that the open source version isn’t tested or supported (but it’s the same software without some plugins, promise).

First, we set publishing free. Next up, social networks.

Actually, the WordPress community can take that first credit (not that I’m obsessed with 1sts) by creating the most popular installed blogging software, and it being open source. I don’t know about the next up, but there are many contenders, and WordPress and BuddyPress communities would be honored to be among them.

If I wanted to use Movable Type Pro for a social network with that Six Apart’s pricing it would probably be a social network of one. Anyway, without it being open source, it won’t be setting any one free, just making it a little easier to disobey the boss.

And that is why I think, Anil, people are so excited about BuddyPress, because it is among the real possibilities of setting social networking free.

our lead by planning to provide some of these abilities for WordPress in a collection of plugins that you should be able to assemble around Christmastime or so

There are so many reasons why I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Anil Dash has been pissing all over the web calling BuddyPress vaporware. See his comments at:

• CNET Webware “Movable Type, Wordpress becoming social platforms“
• Mashable, “Six Apart Provides Social Networking Capabilities with Movable Type Pro“

Where I come from, vaporware is a derogatory term. It’s clear that he doesn’t like WordPress BuddyPress being part of the conversation.

BuddyPress isn’t vaporware, a community is developing it today. You can download the code today. It is open source today!

I get emails and IMs from friends that have checked it out and are already grooving on where it is going.

Collection of plugins

That is just a packaging issue, and packaging issues are easy.

Christmastime or so

This coming from a key member of the team that made a press release seven months before the open source flavor of Movable Type — well over a year, if a public bug tracker is an important detail to you. The community will decide when the code is ready to be called a product.

Wow, this is way long. I’ll wrap it up here.

I didn’t find the Movable Type Pro introductory video well done or sincere, hence the parody. Am I really so bad for poking fun at the competition? Does the tension date back to Six Apart not being invited to the Blogger and WordPress dance off?

1. Embrace and redirect is a standard tactic.

I’m sure Movable Type Pro is a fantastic product, but when I watched the introduction video in the announcement article I wasn’t feeling the “profoundly powerful new set of capabilities that shows the web where blogging is going next.”

I thought it was ripe for parody, and so here is my voice-over:

Update: Six Apart shared my video with all of their customers, but gave no link love or attribution to me (no Lloyd Budd anywhere in sight), see my response “Movable Type Pro, Setting Social Networking Free, Vaporware, WordPress, BuddyPress“

“1960 Winter Games. CBS paid $50,000 for the right to broadcast the games in the United States, and this marked the first time the Olympic Games were televised.”

In response to Wikiality, a friend sent me the above quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympics_on_television.

With the right context, the wikiality is likely true, but you only need the most basic knowledge of world history to believe that an earlier Olympics was the first televised. I’m no history buff, and I know that footage of the Olympics in Nazi controlled Germany was televised.

The reference for that wikiality 1960 Winter Games truth is “Olympics and Television” published by the Museum Broadcast Communications, an American organization. The article appears completely focused on American television. The article begins “Since their first telecast in 1960, the Olympic games have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with television.” That would seem to be the origin of the fact.

Olympic.org, “the official website of the Olympic Movement” makes no mention of television for the 1960 Winter games article. Articles on other sites, such as “Television Sports Milestones –– A Chronology Of An Industry” don’t include the 1960 Winter as a milestone.

There are numerous sources that dispute that fact:

• From an Olympic.org article, “The 1936 Olympics were also the first to be broadcast on a form of television.”
• From a TVHistory.tv article, “1936 German (Berlin) Olympics … This marked the first live television coverage of a sports event in world history.”
• Another article from Olympic.org includes, “The 1948 London Games were the first to be shown on home television, although very few people in Great Britain actually owned sets.”

It seems there is no strong support the “1960 Winter Games [...] marked the first time the Olympic Games were televised.”

I was helping a friend last night find a solution to easily share Microsoft Office and PDF documents for review and for sharing with students of his seminars. After looking at what is out there, we settled on box.net.

Box.net has a friendly interface for uploading and sharing these folders and files, and looks like a well regarded service that has been around at least a couple of years.12

The free option of 10MB max file size, 1GB storage and 10GB/mo should meet his needs, though it would be better if the max file size was larger.

1. Bonus: they use WordPress for their blog.
2. Bonus Bonus: There is a WordPress.com widget to display your box.net publicly shared files in your WordPress.com blog’s sidebar.

It’s web address. Although, Delicious Social Bookmarks has had the delicious.com URL as long as I can remember (3yrs?), it’s only now retiring del.icio.us in favor of it.

There are many things to talk about with the long anticipated new delicious design, the one that stands out for me is them finally fixing this egregious usability issue.

Delicious’s own Britta Gustafson describes the issue well:

The shift from del.icio.us to delicious.com is a usability decision the dots are confusing for many people. Far too often, we’ve seen it spelled de.licio.us, del.icio.us.com, delicio.us, etc.

Maybe, Delicious’ competitor Ma.gnolia.com will also see the light. Their problem is probably worse, because they don’t break after the syllable. Web search for Mag.nolia and Mag.nolia.com and it’s clear that this issue with a trivial solution is worth solving.

Filed under too-smart-for-our-own-good.

Update: Video shows changes made in redesign.1 The domain name change is punctuated both at the beginning and the end:

1. Hat tip Darren Barefoot