Yesterday I decided to treat myself (given my recent sale of a soundcard on Ebay) to the Motorola Milestone, a recently launched phone running Google’s Android OS.
I’m posting this using the even more recently launched WordPress app for Android, which appears to be a highly polished app for managing multiple WordPress blogs. Nice work Automattic!
The Milestone feels good. Beautiful screen, responsive, easy shifting from one app to another. I just read my feeds over breakfast and it was definitely a pleasant change from the small screen on the E71. It’s one of the reasons I decided to get this phone – my move to Cambodia has resulted in me having a lot more time away from a laptop/desktop and I’ve been using my mobile for a lot more web browsing, communication and social interaction. Having a phone with a nice big screen might save me from going blind.
I had been tempted by the Nexus One, but the high price over here, coupled with the lack of a physical keyboard pushed me towards the Milestone.
So here I am, sitting on my balcony in my new flat, sipping coffee and posting to my blog. Nice. The photo at the top is the view from my balcony and taken with the 5mp camera on the milestone.
I recently wrote a review of the elegant WordPress plugin called “After the Deadline”, which is a fantastic tool designed to help you write better articles on your WordPress-based website.
The great news is that this fantastic functionality is now available for writing anywhere on the web through a simple Firefox Extension.
…we’re pleased to announce the release of the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox.
After the Deadline works in text areas on most webpages. Simply push a button F7 or click to check your spelling, style, and grammar no matter where you are.
This add-on has all the After the Deadline features. You can enable the style checker options you use in the preferences and you can ignore errors to prevent them from coming up.
via After the Deadline for Firefox – Released « After the Deadline.
Download After the Deadline for Firefox
Another death-knoll for IE6. Hopefully the lingering user base will continue to rapidly decrease for this ancient browser. The more high-profile sites that continue to drop support for this browser the better.
I will feel more and more confident in placing a warning at the top of sites that is shown to IE6 users only which recommends that they upgrade their browser (there really is no excuse for using IE6 anymore).
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.
via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Modern browsers for modern applications.
Matt Mullenweg from Automattic has just launched a new website called the WordPress Foundation.
From their “about page”:
The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support.
This certainly sounds good to me. The aim being that WordPress and similar projects will have support to survive far into the future and provide a stable platform for generations to come.
It’s a non-profit organisation and I guess it has similarity to the Mozilla Foundation which was formed to promote and support development of open innovation on the internet. The aim of the WordPress Foundation is to ensure that people will always have an open-source option for publishing content on the internet.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for: the WordPress Foundation is now public. As they say, slow cookin’ makes good eatin’.
via Getting off the ground.
Congrats to Matt and co, and I hope the foundation is a success.
For the benefit of Meontwit_ter2 who was curious as to what a bluegrass version of Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” actually sounds like.
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This cover is by “Iron Horse” from their album “Fade to Bluegrass: The Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica”.
Enjoy!
Recently enough Google has changed their default search behaviour to include a “Show Options” button which brings up a sidebar to narrow your search results by a variety of parameters such as type, time, previously visited pages and so on.
However they haven’t extended this functionality to their Google Custom Search results.
I created my own Custom Search for searching WordPress plugins to make up for what used to be a very poor search functionality on WordPress.org’s plugin directory. This search function has massively improved but I still find myself using the Custom Search I created.
In order to add an option to view by date modified I found this handy tip on Lifehacker which I thought I’d share here:
Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string—&as_qdr=d—to the address bar and hit enter.
via Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick.
Since arriving in India my days have been extremely busy to say the least. My typical day has been:
- Wake Up
- Eat Breakfast
- Go to sound studio and work until late evening
- Return to hotel
- Eat dinner
- Work in hotel room on prepping next days work
- Sleep
That’s pretty much been it. I’m looking forward to being finished and finally getting a chance to look around a bit – fingers crossed I might post a little more often on here as well.
I have to head off to the sound studio to sort out the deliverables for this film, but I thought I’d share a video which demonstrates fairly accurately what Indian driving is like. I first saw this video a few years ago and it seemed insane to me at the time. Now that I’ve been here for a couple of weeks it seems quite normal…
Ever wanted to know what the first web page ever created looked like?
The World Wide Web project
Thanks to SixRevisions for sharing this and a huge amount more information in their article, The History of the Internet in a Nutshell, a really fascinating look back over the way this remarkable technology has developed.
A priceless video replete with examples of rap at its best.
Apart from the rap, another favourite part of mine is the sax-player that mimes along to a part of the song where there is no saxophone (there might not actually be a saxophone in any part of the song, not even a synth one, but I’m not sure I can watch it again to check), along with the piano player with the fixed grin staring at the camera and not at the piano.
Thanks to Graham Linehan for sharing. By the way, the video ends around 3.13, but plays a black screen to 5 minutes.
Am I stressed? Yes.
Remaining time to complete film
Timer courtesy of countdown.onlineclock.net
