Sabre 2/3rd Tiger v3

Lionel rave prompted me to have a look at Bloglines. It certainly looks interesting. Here’s my public subscriptions so far.

• Bloglines – Lionel, 18 Mar 2005. “I’m surprised myself, that Bloglines changed my websurfing habits completely and immediately. A time and effort saver I can’t live without now.”
• Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines – Napsterization, 5 Feb 2005. “Ask Jeeves is integrating Bloglines into their search system.“
• Bloglines – Jon Udell, 25 Jul 2004. “Since last fall, I’ve been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. “
• RSS Tutorial Part III: Using Bloglines – LawLibTech, 14 Apr 2004 provides a very good tutorial. “… there are other web-based RSS aggregators out there such as MyFeedster, DailyWhirl, Newsgator, even MyYahoo, none hold a candle to Bloglines.“
• The 2005 Wired Rave Awards for Mark Fletcher – about Bloglines, “An RSS reader that makes Really Simple Syndication even simpler. Fletcher’s company, Bloglines, lets users pull together their news sources – all the best blogs, each favorite Web site, and every last data feed – on a single, continually updated Web page.“
• About.com Bloglines Review – “Bloglines is a great, web-based way to read RSS feeds. There’s no software to wrestle with, and using Bloglines is smooth and easy.“

The Inquirer, Thursday 17 March 2005, 15:29 says:

ONLINE ENCYCLOPAEDIA the Wiki is close to reaching half a million English articles online. [...] According to its English page, here, there are currently 499,690 English articles on the resource.

Wikipedia Press Release 18 Mar 2005 says:

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 500,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia (Wikipedia.org), the free, open-content, multilingual encyclopedia. Wikipedia, begun on 15 January 2001, is the world’s fastest-growing, most current, and largest encyclopedia. It is listed as the fourth most popular reference website on the Internet by traffic counter Alexa.com and receives approximately 50 million “hits” every day

From the press release talk page and the half million pool talk page it seems the 500,000th article has been concluded to be [[Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union]] created on 17 Mar 2005 @ 20:54:46 UTC.

Republished. First Published: 18 Mar 2005 @ 16:44 MYT.

• Wikipedia English Main Page – shows 500569 articles at 18 Mar 2005 @ 0840 UTC.
• Wikipedia Malay Main Page – shows 3894 “rencana” at 18 Mar 2005 @ 0840 UTC.
• Wikipedia Malaysia – main page.
• Snapshot of Wikipedia turning 500,000 articles old – Brian Mingus, 17 Mar 2005.
• Wikipedia Publishes 500,000th English Article – Angela Beesley, 18 Mar 2005.

InsaneOx blog just steered me to One click backup for WP plugin, that I’ve been meaning to search and install. Just done. Worked beautifully. Only got to figure out the .htpasswd stuffs next.

For my readers, few though they may be. For my kids, who’ll remember what I wrote when I don’t. For my staff, who’ll remind me of the nice things a boss I said should do. For other bloggers, who read and trackback my stuff.

• Who’s your audience? – Mr Kiasu, 10 Mar 2005.

I’ve just took some time to do the following WordPress customizations:

• Permalink with virtual site structure using .htaccess and mod rewrite.
• Recent Comments List plugin.

Some XHTML code to remember …

<div class=”someclass” style=”float: right; margin-left: 5px;”>Some text floating on the right</div>

A passing surfer alerted me to this Long Tail, providing random interesting bits of blogs at lower end of the long list sorted by “popularity”. Some people do think the “long tail” has much more significance/mass than the “short head”. And web publishing does allow a very very long tail of written stuff, instead of just those deemed worthy of publication by publishers.

• Chasing The Long Tail – by Edward B. Driscoll, Jr on 7 Feb 2005 – about the power of the blogosphere long tail.
• The Long Tail – by Chris Anderson in October 2004 Wired – about e-retailers wielding the power of the long tail of purchasers.

Okay, I finally made the upgrade to WP 1.5. Welcome to the third version of my blog site.

• v1 was blogger based (now here) .
• v2 was using wordpress 0.71 on newsguy.
• v3 now using wordpress 1.5 on my own domain.

When I received this email, I thought it’s a good time to revive my blog into its third incarnation. Though, it took me a bit more than a week to actually do it. :-/

From: “Matt Mullenweg”
To: “sms”
Sent: Thursday, 17 February, 2005 9:17 PM
Subject: WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”

Howdy folks!

It’s that time again: we’ve got a beautiful new release — WordPress 1.5 — ready just for you. This is the one everyone has been waiting for, so now you have no excuse not to upgrade and take advantage of all the great new features we’ve introduced. There’s far to much to talk about here, but you can read all about it on our blog:

http://wordpress.org/development/2005/02/strayhorn/

Here’s the Cliff Notes version:

* Easier template system
* Gorgeous new default template
* Great comment management
* Refined administration
* Faster, more secure, smaller, cuter, et cetera
* Still free as a bird

I sincerely hope you’ll try it out and let us know what you think. Feedback both positive and critical is golden and keeps us trucking.

Have a great Thursday! (Don’t worry, the weekend is almost here.)
–
Matt Mullenweg
http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com