Planet WordPress

Web sites judged in a blink “If the first impression is negative, you’ll probably drive people off.” We always knew this but there is more research behind first impressions on the web. However, how does this work when content is read through syndication?

Interview With Digg.com Founder Speaking on the Digg technology, recent VC funding, redesign and the effect of Digg ing on the blogging world. Nothing really revelatory there, sad to say. A good writeup on the internal technology would be nice.

Technorati Tags: interview with digg founder

Behind the scenes of WordPress there are dozens of people spending hundreds of hours a week keeping the WordPress community humming. There are many ways to contribute to WordPress but following the 2.0 release a lot more emphasis has been placed on the development and testing side.

We recently decided to split WordPress up into logical divisions and allow people to volunteer to help out with particular sections, be it as an organizer, a tester, or a coder. You can view the various sections and sign up to help with one on the Codex. In a week we’ll begin contacting the various rockstars who volunteer to coordinate and organize everybody.

Andrew says ProBloggers Use WordPress based on this poll at problogger.net which gives WordPress + WordPress.com about 40%.

(Rant warning.) What’s it called again when you can’t unsubscribe from a service that sends you email almost every day? This is broken:

1. I get my daily email about changes in the LoicLeMeur Wiki that I signed up for sometime at Les Blogs.
2. “To stop receiving or change how often you receive emails about changes
   to LoicLeMeur Wiki, go to: http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/emailprefs “
3. Redirects me to this URL.
4. It appears that I am logged in. I change my preferences to “Never”
5. Of course when I go to my settings it shows me as “user78247″, so I didn’t actually cancel my subscription, it just showed a stupid subscription page to me even though it obviously doesn’t have my email address right now and I’m not logged in.
6. Okay, click the “log in” link.
7. Type in email and password.
8. I am now mysteriously redirected to the FOAFnet wiki, which hasn’t been touched in like a year. NO IDEA WHY.
9. Wait, the top still has a login button, but also a settings button?
10. Settings takes me to the user page for “user19254″, even though I JUST LOGGED IN.
11. Okay, click login again.
12. Now I’m redirected back to the FOAFnet wiki again but this time it shows me as being logged in.
13. Where the heck do I go now???
14. I go back to the Loic wiki via the address bar.
15. It says login in the top right corner again.
16. I enter my information, and am redirected by to the FOAFnet wiki. I can sense the wiki mocking me.
17. Okay, maybe if I go back to my settings page where it worked.
18. It forces me to login to the FOAFnet wiki AGAIN even though I did just SECONDS AGO.
19. I now am logged in, I click on settings and go to “My Workspaces.”
20. It only shows the FOAFnet wiki, even though I know I’m a member of the Loic one because I GET EMAILS FROM IT EVERY DAY.
21. Also now for some reason every Socialtext wiki I try to visit, like this one from Web 2.0 conference, redirects me back to the FOAFnet wiki. (cue blood-curdling scream)

Any suggestions? I would just dev/null them in my procmail, but I prefer not to do that to legitimate companies. At what points could the user experience be improved?

(And yes, I have reported this problem to them. I demonstrated it in person in August 2005 at BarCamp. It’s January.)

Update: Socialtext responds in the comments. “[T]his morning we disabled email notifications for all the public wikis on our site, due to the confusion people had when trying to turn them off.” A thoughtful, effective, and quick response.

Fleur-De-Lys for WP 2.0 is available at http://wpthemes.info/fleur-de-lys/. Check it out !

Pop elements of 2006 websites: Nah. Mashups are sooo 2005.

Technorati Tags: Web trends

Yesterday I participated in an event called Mashpit with some interesting folks and with Cal and Alex built a version 0.1 of a translation manager, the idea being that people can submit translations for phrases in a moderated wiki-like manner, allowing for community translation of projects large or small. It was a lot of fun and very rewarding to get something functional done in such a short period of time.

More VC equals More Pro Bloggers? More fun on Web 2.0 VC funding for “Pro” blogging. This article looks at the other side of the coin. In my opinion, all of this funding does not spell the demise of print.

Guy Kawasaki on hindsights, a great non-tech read for everybody.