Automattic Releases WordPress iPhone App
Today Atomatic released version 1.0 of their WordPress iPhone application. The app works really well and I’m actually using to right now to write this.
It doesn’t have many features other then being able to create posts and save them locally as drafts on the iPhone, edit posts, and change post satuses but it works well.
I haven’t had any buggy issues and have easily set it up both with this blog and CyberSurge (by the way, I would have linked to CyberSurge but there is no way to put links in posts with the app, check the update below).
The only other feature I’d like to see added (other then the linking) is the ability to moderate cooments. To be able to mark a comment as spam or even reply to comments from within the app would be great and theoretically could easily be added, but we’ll have to wait and see what Automattic decides to do to the app in the future.
Update: I updated the post from my computer to add links and images, the app doesn’t exactly make it easy to add images and it’s impossible to add links.
Got $100,000 You Can Have Your Own TLD
So ICANN in another attempt to make more money from nothingness is now going to allow anyone with $100,000 the ability to become it’s own domain registrar.
So that means you can expect to see some crazy top level domains like maybe .xxx, .sex, .pig, etc. This will clearly make it more confusing to the average joe and maybe even make it easier for phishers to catch a few credit card numbers or usernames and passwords.
ICANN must not realize that this isn’t going to help anything, of course this is great for people like Google and Yahoo, search engines are going to be incredibly necissary to navigate the net when you have thousands of top level domains to remember, I have a hard enough time trying to remember whether or not some websites are on a .com or a .net TLD, this will only make it harder.
So thanks ICANN, this is one more step towards making the internet a confusing and ridiculously insecure place. I salute you and your stupidity.
Associated Press Charges Bloggers For Quoting
So apparently this is what the Associated Press considers fair use. Quoting 4 words or less can be done for free (that’s practically not even a quote), quoting 5-25 words will cost you $12.50, quoting 26-50 words will cost $17.50, quoting 51-100 words will cost you $25, quoting 101-250 will cost $50, and 251 words and up is $100.
Do they really expect this to work?
Unfortunately for AP there are too many blogs for them to look through to make sure everyone is following the rules, obviously they could just sue the big guys until the little guys get scared but that is no way to do business (we’re learning that from the music industry right now).
I think every blogger has their own rules for what is and what isn’t acceptable, I for instance believe that I can quote no more than 3 sentences and afterward must give a link to the original story. Some may consider 3 sentences to be too long but I think that any less (in most circumstances) wouldn’t be able to give enough context and someone would be able to twist the quote into meaning something else.
I think the AP is still trying to live in the newspaper world, and now that they can’t control where they’re content is going (like they could by licensing it to newspapers) they are getting scared. Of course they shouldn’t be scared because the only rule they should have is that people link back, meaning that when someone looks for that story because other places are linking to AP, AP will always show up higher in search engines.
Bottom line is that they are going about it all wrong and I wouldn’t be surprised if people completely disregard these rules (as they have been for a long time) and just do whatever they feel is right.
New Google Reader For iPhone Makes Me More Productive
Yesterday Google released a new version of Google Reader for the iPhone with some much needed improvements. Remember this is a beta (hopefully it doesn’t stay this way for months and months like so many other web 2.0 properties do) but it seems to be incredibly stable and I haven’t run into any problems with it myself.
The new version is a lot like the list view in the desktop version, you can scan the titles of items and star them without having to reload the page. If you want to read an item just tap it and it will expand in place so you can read the item and tap the title again to have it collapse back in on itself. You never have to read list view to do all of your feed reading. One last thing that I think is great about it is that when you tap to see the original item it use to take you to Google’s make-pages-look-better-in-cell-phones server which on the iPhone isn’t the optimal way of doing things, now it takes you to the full web page.
Because it is still beta going to google.com/reader isn’t going to automatically take you there, instead you have to go to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to use the new and improved version.
There are a couple of things I don’t like about it though, “mark all items as read” at the top of the page but “mark these items as read” at the bottom of the page seems very odd to me , who ever wants to mark all of your unread items in all of Google reader unread at one time? I also don’t like how the “Refresh” and “Feeds” buttons look, they seem a little too big for me, although it could just be the design of the button that makes it seem so large.
Technorati Will No Longer Index Vulnerable WordPress Blogs
So Technorati has decided to no longer index blogs that may be affected by a security issue in WordPress before version 2.3.3. Now WordPress has already reached version 2.5 but I’m not exactly sure how to feel about this.
On one hand I’m glad someone is standing up and telling the community that they really need to stay up to date or bad things may happen but at the same time I feel like it isn’t an indexers job to tell me that my blog needs to be up to date.
For a while this blog wasn’t up to date, mostly because I had almost abandoned it due to some personal reasons combined with becoming incredibly busy on my other blogs, but that’s a whole other issue entirely. I would probably be very upset if Technorati quit indexing this blog, even if it wasn’t up to date.
But at the same time I also think that it is Technorati’s job to point you towards quality blogs, and if these blogs aren’t quality (not staying up to date may be a symptom of not being of quality) then I don’t want Technorati to point to them.
Overall I think that this is probably good but I still wonder about those who don’t really know how to upgrade WordPress because someone else installed it for them originially, is the installer going to contact them and tell them that they need to upgrade? Probably not, so I guess the solution to this whole problem is, If you know how to update WordPress, stay up to date, and if you don’t find someone who does and have them help you.