King  Gary 

Recently, I’ve been seeing a little icon on websites more and more often. Sometimes, when I least suspect it, I’ll be visiting a well-known open source project or a popular web application, and then my eyes will shift to a box that shows prominently on the homepage, linking to the same site.

I’m talking about the upcoming Webware awards, of course!

The button shown above is a common image seen on websites that have been nominated by the website in a total of 10 different categories; in the end, a total of 100 of the ‘best web 2.0 products’ will be announced on June 18, this coming Monday.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

A few weeks ago, Darren from ProBlogger asked me to create a new WordPress plugin for him, one which would save him countless hours that he had to spend before. That plugin is the Group Writing Project plugin, which is now used to help simplify the process that Darren has to go through whenever he decides to start a new project.

I’ve posted about the non-technical side of the plugin and the benefits that he gained from the plugin before, so in this post, I will walk through how a plugin like this is created, and the typical workflow and thinking that goes behind creating something like this.

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Read/WriteWeb has announced that today is the “day without Google“, meaning that all participants are supposed to live today without using Google search (they should’ve made it more interesting by disallowing use of ALL Google services, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader!)

I just checked the average number of Google searches that I make a day, and it turns out that I do nearly 200 Google searches a day. I also have a total of 28,555 Google searches since Google started tracking my searches.

Could YOU live a day without Google search? I know I can’t!

Popularity: 7% [?]

I just finished watching Apple’s WWDC 2007 keynote. Below are my thoughts on what has been announced.

Safari

It looks like Apple really wants more than that measly 2% browser market share that it currently holds, with Safari. They’ve just released Safari for Windows as well, giving Windows users the opportunity to try out one of only a few Apple-created application available for the alternative operating system recently (iTunes was a great move for Apple since it was the iPod’s tipping point.)

People have already told me that is really IS a lot faster on Windows than Internet Explorer, so I’m happy about that. I rarely, if ever, use Safari on my Mac since I depend on my Firefox extensions, but as a web developer, this news is great for other developers on Windows because they can finally test their websites in Safari without a Mac.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

While going through my instant messenger contact list, I began thinking of new ways that I could use to sort my list. There hasn’t been any innovation in terms of how contacts are shown in a contact list. A list always consists of a list of groups, and then there are contacts under each group. Each contact can only belong to one group.

It would be interesting to see tags applied to contacts. I’d love to see a web-based instant messaging client take an initiative on this, such as meebo, or desktop clients such as Adium or Trillian, because they are more flexible and can apply these types of features without requiring that the actual network support it.

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I’ve recently been receiving more spam comments on my blog that have bypassed WordPress‘ spam protection program, Akismet, more often than usual. I marked them as Spam, which aids Akismet in detecting these types of spam again and protects other bloggers using Akismet’s service from these comments which currently bypass the filters.

I also commonly receive email in Gmail that are spam and that bypass the filters. The Gmail spam protection system works similarly to Akismet’s, in that they both use a network filtration system by relaying any emails that one user considers spam to all the other users; the more times the same email or comment gets marked as spam, the more the system will believe that to be true and protect the other users from receiving the same item.

I’ve reached the point in both Gmail and WordPress where the number of spam/day that I get in my Gmail and the number of spam/day that I get in WordPress are about the same; I’ve currently got 12140 spam; divide that by 30 days, and that’s 405 spam per day. In WordPress, I’ve got 6130 spam comments, over 15 days; that’s 409 spam/day. They’re nearly the same by now.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Something Awful wrote an article talking about Wikipedia, discussing that if you take two articles that are similar (the example they give is Knight and Jedi Knight), then you would see that the article that is more related to nerds, which is the latter in this case, is longer and more comprehensive than the former.

TechCrunch also picked up on this, and Michael agreed with Something Awful and the claims that it makes. He says that “People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.”

I digress.

The examples that are given include the following:

• Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
• Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
• Girlfriend v. Video Games
• Half Life v. Half Life 2
• Love v. Masturbation
• Bathing v. Acne

I will analyze the first two examples, below.

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John C. Dvorak, a writer who is no stranger to writing about bad news, asks the question of whether it’s time to sell your Apple stocks. He bases a large part of why you should sell your Apple stocks on the fact that he received a phone call that stated the iPhone keyboard is going to play a key role in the failure of the iPhone.

A lot of people have talked about how a keyboard that has no tactile response will feel after long sessions of usage; it’s no secret that tactile keyboards have their clear advantages. You use a keyboard every day, and it has tactile feedback because you can feel when you’ve hit a key square in the middle or when you’ve hit two keys at the same time by accident (I still do that sometimes - and my fingers reach for the ‘delete’ key automatically.)

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In a similar nature as my previous post regarding cleaning up my list of feeds, I’ve begun to clean up my Facebook friends list.

How do I determine if I should remove someone from my Facebook profile? Well, Facebook nicely reminds me whenever a friend’s birthday is coming up within the next few days. If I would find it awkward if I posted a simple ‘Happy birthday’ message onto a friend’s Facebook profile ‘wall’, then they probably shouldn’t be connected to me on Facebook.

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Six Apart has announced that they will be releasing their Movable Type blogging platform as open source later on this year. This is a major move by the company which made a poor decision in the past when they heavily enforced their MT 3.0 license and which gave rise to WordPress to become a major player in the blogging platform arena, and arguably, the CMS world.

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has posted his thoughts on how he thinks the battle between WordPress and Movable Type will play out, now that both will soon be open sourced. WordPress has really taken a strong foothold and has now become the blogging platform of choice among millions of users worldwide.

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Popularity: 16% [?]