Apr 18

The sweet smell of retaliation, or how a great blog can really mess you up

By Alex Neihaus General musings, WordPress No Comments »

retaliation

At work, we use Clicky web analytics to supplement our web statistics. It’s a great service, and Sean at Clicky has always answered my questions quickly and personally. In short, they’re exactly the kind of people you want to work with.

So, I can imagine how furious he must have been when he had to deal with Linksys "technical" support on a blown switch.

You can read the story here, but the real point is that Sean got smart: he used his blog and his knowledge of SEO to make damn sure Linksys will pay and pay. Just check out the searches Sean posts. If I were looking for a switch, I’d search for exactly these terms and walk, no make that run, away from this particular switch.

The moral: not only is blogging the ultimate version of Consumer Reports (minus the holier-than-thou-1930’s Socialist slant), but the sweet, sweet satisfaction of really stickin’ it to mega-roadblocks like Linksys delivers catharsis and helps others.

Right on, Sean. And thanks for the warning, though I wish you had some Netgear stuff to trash. I want them to suffer, too, but my blog isn’t as well trafficked.

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Apr 01

WordPress 2.5 rocks

By Alex Neihaus WordPress No Comments »

WordPress 2.5 rocks

I know I’ve been very lax about blogging here because launching a whole new category of enterprise application development software is taking up all my time.

Still, I am compelled to stop for a moment and give WordPress2.5 maximum love for being a killer upgrade. Installation was a snap, and the single problem I had with uploading images was taken care of with one Google search.

In a word, awesome. Those VCs funding Joomla and Drupal are going to wish they’d never written the check.

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Dec 09

Shiny new blog

By Alex Neihaus General musings, WordPress No Comments »

New Toy cover

One of my favorite New Wave tunes was New Toy by Lene Lovich which contained the memorable chorus “I want a new toy, Oh ay oh!” OK, so poetry it ain’t. But we loved dancing to it at Spit on Lansdowne Street.

Anyway, that chorus comes to mind tonight because I have just (finally!) upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3.1 and installed a cool, new widget-capable theme. I love WordPress. Oh ay oh.

Oh, and by the way, I got an iPod touch, too.

“I’ve got to have it all until I’m complete…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding…”

Here, in case you need an 80s flashback, is a link to a YouTube recording of this memorable song.

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Sep 23

OK, I admit it…the borg have won

By Alex Neihaus Digitoy, WordPress No Comments »

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Those of you who know me well know that on one topic I have been completely consistent: for years I’ve considered Microsoft the ultimate market bully who simply assimilated (or copied) any technology or company it wanted to. To this day, the blood feud between IBM and Microsoft on the messaging and desktop application battle front continues. Why else would IBM revive the Lotus Symphony brand?

But today I discovered Windows Live Writer (in which I am composing this blog post), and I have to admit that it’s the most impressive application I’ve seen from Microsoft in ages. Even more, I have become a big fan of Vista and even have a warm spot for Office 2007 (even though the context sensitive help in Office is broken).

Microsoft seems to have entered a stage in its history which reminds me of IBM software in the 70s and 80s: exceptionally well-designed and documented software that has increasingly accepted (without “embracing and extending”) open standards. The one flaw both share is complexity.

Whether this happened as a result of its near-death brush with regulators (also an IBM parallel) or if it was inevitable isn’t important. Today, Microsoft is producing some seriously great stuff.

Who’s today’s new dominant bully? My vote goes to Google, which has all the attributes of Microsoft at its worst: a belief that everything in the world will go its way and an astonishing disregard for customers. (Just try getting Google support on the phone. It’s nearly impossible.)

Aug 05

Steal not this unreadable blog

By Alex Neihaus General musings, WordPress 2 Comments »

Steal this blog (not) — don’t steal content

I’ve written here before about the almost religious feelings I have about WordPress (here and here)…and about the amazing community it has spawned. It was a big disappointment for me that I wasn’t able to attend WordCamp last month. As a consolation, PodCamp Boston 2 is coming up and I can’t wait.

One of the most famous voices in the WordPress world is Lorelle VanFossen. Ms. VanFossen is gaining the kind of well-deserved fame that an original in a new medium deserves. Lately, she’s been getting attention from the mainstream press for her stand on content theft (and more recently on nytimes.com, registration required).

Lorelle, I couldn’t agree more. It pisses me off, too. Especially since you are a working author, I completely agree that it’s like stealing food from your mouth.

But, I have to say one thing about Lorelle on Wordpress: sometimes I find it incomprehensible. There’s so much content, I am overwhelmed. And for some reason, I can’t grok the organization of this blog. It all seems like one long stream of text. I have trouble telling one post from another. Sometimes, it’s such a sea of links (all admittedly useful) that I lose all context about the actual post. And it may be picky, but since we read English left to right, I think it adds cognitive dissonance to have a left-hand column in the way of the post content.

However, I sure do appreciate the presbyoia-friendly font on Lorelle’s blog.

I expect to be told I’m an idiot and worse. But, at least my idiot mind will make it impossible for me to steal content from Lorelle.

Aug 01

reCAPTCHA isn’t Boston-ese for being repeatedly tagged for speeding on the Pike

By Alex Neihaus General musings, Open source, Politics, WordPress 1 Comment »

reCAPTCHA isn’t Boston-ese for being repeatedly tagged for speeding on the Pike

Though I am not a native Bostonian, I have some experience with authentic Boston accents.

My lovely wife can occasionally be unintelligible (“Alex, have you seen the sizzzahs?”). To wile away traffic-jam time, I sit in the car and mimic Tom Finneran. Finneran, a WRKO talk-show radio host, former Massachusetts legislative big-wig and (unsurprisingly) a plea-bargained felon, has an amazingly real Boston accent, one you can hear in every word.

You know that you can hear the real thing, even if you can’t imitate it, when your ears bleed listening to Matt Damon in The Departed. This actor’s attempt is among the worst fake Boston accents I’ve ever heard, and a complete embarrassment to everyone in Chelsea, Malden and Lynn, not to mention Southie itself.

Anyway, when I first heard about CAPTCHAs, I thought it was a killer pun: someone from CMU must have had a Boston background. Maybe so, but really it means something else entirely, and only sounds like it was invented in a drunken episode at the Black Rose.

I manage a bunch of blogs that have been increasingly become the victim of comment spam, usually from China and always complimentary. I now realize that dude in Guangdong who reads my posts mutliple times and always says, “Good post” isn’t really into my content. Naivety mixed with ego had me manually marking these as spam just in case there was a real gem from somewhere in the Middle Kingdom.

The volume has gotten so large that it’s been driving me crazier than Matt Damon’s inability to banish the letter “R” from his spoken English.

Enter reCAPTCHA. An easy way (there’s a simple WordPress plug-in) to stop the comment spam and build a digital library. Can’t beat it. Took five minutes to implement on all the blogs I manage.

Now, it’s off to the Cape and them lobstah rolls.

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Mar 08

C’mon and gimme that ole time subculture

By Alex Neihaus Digitoy, Open source, WordPress 3 Comments »

subculture.jpg

First, I hope this racy image won’t have the MPAA giving my blog an R rating…but it was such a cool graphic I couldn’t help myself.

Well…ahem…back to the post at hand.

I’ve been taking some…uh…commentary from both friends and business associates about my apparent infatuation with all things blog and podcast, but especially about all things WordPress. You know, comments like “It’s OK to stop ranting about this now” and “Here comes the blogger.”

Mostly I smile and take it in stride because I know what they don’t: there’s a subculture around WordPress that is worldwide, massive and far more rabid that I could ever be.

It’s simple. WordPress is just too cool to ignore. Consider: a multi-user content management system easy enough for non-techies to author in and which middling geeks can setup and maintain for…uh…zero dollars.

But it’s not just that the system is so rich. It’s that there’s this amazing community that supports and enhances it. It’s the whole subculture that makes it so engrossing.

And what’s always amazed me about technical subcultures is their binary nature. Once you stumble onto (or into) them, being involved is like driving a fast car on the track. It consumes you a little.

The other side is that if you aren’t “in it,” not only does the subculture not exist at all for you, but you are likely to swear the subculture can’t exist. If someone twists your arm and forces you to look, the binary off state makes you minimize the value of the subculture (“Who reads blogs? I don’t know anyone important who reads them.” “Nobody’s making any money from blogging.” “My customers are pizza delivery people.” “Blog, schmog.”).

Today, two things happened that made it clear to me I’m clearly in the on state with the WordPress subculture.

First, I found the WordPress podcast. No surprise here…I loved it. This is a high-quality, authentic podcast about the subculture. It’s proof positive this thing has gotten bigger than outsiders can see.

Then, tonight, I had a long email thread with a plugin developer whose plugin isn’t working for me. Lemme tell you, Microsoft and IBM can’t support a product better than this or at lower cost. This guy is doing it for the community…for the subculture…because he likes it and he knows how important it is.

So, all I can say is, it’s good enough for me.

Jan 25

The love affair continues

By Alex Neihaus General musings, WordPress No Comments »

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If you even lightly press the “talk technology” button on Alex, you are more than likely going to get a lot of gushing from me about WordPress.

Since I first found WordPress 2.0 in the early summer, I’ve been amazed at what I, last a developer 15 years ago, could do with this industrial-strength, multi-user content management and publishing system.

It’s so astonishingly simple in concept…so amazingly easy to implement that I’ve had great success in getting people to use it. And, as a further testament to its ease of use, I’ve even seen what can charitably be described as low- to no-talent geeks convince themselves they’re the next Torvalds because of the instant feeling of success one gets using WordPress.

But now, even when I thought it couldn’t get any better, along comes WordPress 2.1. Following the instructions for upgrading took about an hour (much of that spent backing up files). After that, everything worked perfectly.

This is my first post in WordPress 2.1 and I’ve already fallen in love even though I’ve only been using it for about 10 minutes.

When you’ve been around software as long as I have there are a couple of ways that you can tell right away when something “has it.” In WordPress 2.1, those indications are all over the product. From the fact that it upgrades more easily than any complex publishing system has a right to, to the small stuff like a “last saved” indicator in the editor and subtle yet massive improvements in the UI that don’t make the user re-learn anything, WordPress 2.1 might be the most impressive and accessible achievement the open-source community has created.

Matt and the team: congratulations, and thank you very much.

Oct 11

Amazing doesn’t describe it

By Alex Neihaus General musings, WordPress No Comments »

I’m in love…with WordPress.

Since late July, I’ve been using this amazing system to produce blogs. What blows me away is that this system has all the features of industrial-strength commercial software.

Having been in the software biz since the 70s, I never thought I’d ever be able to say that about an open-source, GPL-licensed product. And trust me, WordPress is a real product in every sense of the word as I’ve heard it used in my software experience.

What’s so astonishing to me is that no matter what task I’ve needed it to do in the last 90 days, there’s been either a way to do it in the base product or a plug-in that did it and which we could install and use in minutes.

The plug-in that has just totally blown me away this week is Podpress. This is a simply astonish piece of functionality that turns WordPress into the most amazing podcast feed imaginable. Total time to install and customize: about 30 minutes.

Today, with zero training in PHP (and very little HTML background to boot), I was able to customize a template in WordPress. Though the finer points of CSS and browser incompatibility continue to drive me wild with frustration, for a curious hobbyist, there’s nothing else like it on the Internet. With WordPress and a run-of-the-mill ISP hosting account (1and1 has a great one for $3/month), you can achieve a level of muti-user content management and publishing unheard of for hundreds of thousands of dollars just a few years ago.

I style myself as a geek snob, knowing what’s good and what ain’t in tech. I haven’t got the words to describe how amazing WordPress is. 

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