Bwana.org » wordpress

RSS Cloud Is Exciting News

Bwana — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:59:58 +0000

I’ve always been a big fan of real-time information on the internet. Ever since the early days of IRC and Usenet, I would prefer IRC since the entire experience was live and real-time. Usenet and forums had the delay factor.

Yesterday, I read about the decision WordPress made to support RSS Cloud. What is RSS Cloud? It’s essentially modifications to the existing RSS specification to enable real-time publishing via RSS feeds. That’s my take on it anyways. That means if you use a supported RSS reader like Dave Winer’s River2 or Lazyfeed, you’ll receive a “instant” notification when a RSS cloud supported blog is updated.

This blog is supported by PubSubHubbub via Feedburner, but I’ve installed the WordPress RSS Cloud plugin anyways.

Why is all this exciting?

Those who claim RSS is dead don’t realize their newfound love for Twitter would be moot if it were not for RSS. Breaking news on Twitter comes from two main sources in my mind: websites and personal experience. For tech news, I doubt there is much personal experience for news unless there’s a conference or an event. Most juicy, 0-day news comes from websites. These websites often have a… wait for it… RSS feed. The race to post tech news first on Twitter usually stems from who can refresh their RSS reader the fastest.

This is exciting because RSS has been empowered to update us all in real-time and have less dependence on others reposting and retweeting stuff they found first. Tools like LazyFeed are leading the way in this charge and more will come thanks to open standards.

RSS is hardly dead, it’s becoming more useful.

Server Move Complete – New Look

Bwana — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:19:02 +0000

Welcome to the new Bwana.org (DNS changes still propagating). For months I’ve been putting up with sporadic uptime due to increased traffic and an overworked virtual private server at Dreamhost. I’ve switched providers to Mosso (The Rackspace Cloud), and am utilizing their Cloud Sites product. Yes, this is a more expensive solution than what I’m currently paying at Dreamhost, but I’m a big believer in “you get what you pay for”. I considered a lot more options out there and what drew me to Mosso was it’s great reputation and scaling solution. I also had a good conversation with Robert La Gesse of Mosso who took the time to answer a lot of my questions. As a result of the more expensive solution, I’m opening up advertising on my sites for anyone interested. Email me for more information.

We’ll see how things go here at Mosso, and I hope you all enjoy the new look and feel. I figured since I’m moving from a long time relationship with Dreamhost (since 2005!), I’d accompany it with a new look and feel. Thanks everyone for your patience and let me know if you experience any kind of issues with the new site. I look forward to providing more content without the fear of server death.

Intense Debate Now a Part of Automattic

Bwana — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:08:11 +0000

The commenting software, Intense Debate, was acquired by Automattic today according an announcement on their blog. I’ve went on record to state my support for Intense Debate and their benefits over their main competitor, Disqus. Recently, I’ve been beta testing some of their newer features and I can definitely see the reasoning behind the acquisition. There are some exciting features coming!

Intense Debate has temporarily went back into private beta (which won’t affect current users), so you’ll need to wait a bit to create a new account. If you’re not familiar with Automattic, they are the parent company of great blogging software such as WordPress, Akismet, and Gravatar. Intense Debate adds a great commenting system to the fold and I can’t wait to see what becomes of the merged technologies.

Congratulations Intense Debate, I’m happy for you guys and will continue to show my support.

akismet is sweet

Bwana — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 06:59:00 +0000

in the immortal words of eric cartman, “sweeeeet”. glad i upgraded to wordpress 2.0, so far it’s been wonderful.

wordpress 2.0 released

Bwana — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 05:56:57 +0000

as promised, the fine folks over at wordpress released version 2.0 of their blogging software to public on december 26th. i have installed 2.0 on braytek.com and it is working fine so far. the new features (mainly the admin interface) is a refreshing change. there’s little things they fixed/added that makes the blogging experience pleasant. i wish they would add more of the advanced editting features for safari, but oh well. i’ll just continue to use the plugin for such. if you want to take it for a test drive, go create an account on wordpress.com. they are running 2.0 on the servers now.

if you are upgrading your server, be sure to read to upgrade instructions and also check to see if your favorite plugins support the new release. enjoy!

wordpress upgraded to 1.5

Bwana — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:11:47 +0000

i’ve upgraded my wordpress installation from the old nightly build from january to 1.5 final. so far things look ok. i haven’t run any major tests so if you see any problems, be sure to comment on this entry and let me know.

braytek, wordpress

google nofollow wp plugin

Bwana — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 08:49:34 +0000

shortly after google announced their method of reducing comment spam, this wordpress plugin, wp-nofollow, was created to add a rel=nofollow to all comment links. i’m sure the comment spammers are working on working around this, but hey, the war continues. i doubt i’ll need it on my site since my authimage plugin is working superbly.

braytek, wordpress, google, comment spam

technorati tags

Bwana — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 00:00:39 +0000

technorati introduced a new feature a few days ago called ‘tags’. those of you familiar with del.icio.us and flickr know what tags are and how cool they are. adding this feature to technorati brings a lot of cool things together. if you wish to read more about technorati tags, check out this page. to celebrate, i’ve installed a nifty wordpress plugin called technotag which allows you to link to technorati tags from various keywords in your blog entries and comments.

you’ll notice i’m using this plugin everywhere now. just look for the little technorati bubble next to links.

braytek, technorati, tag, technotag, blog, wordpress, del.icio.us, flickr