僕は WordPress をここ数年使っています。自分でブログアプリ書いてもいいんだけど、ブログだけに関しては書く事に集中する事が大事で、フレームワークのエンジニアリングやメンテは他人がやるべきという意見。しかも Blogger などのホストサービスっていまいちカスタマイジングが難しいのでいつもスキップ。そうやって検索していくと、結局チョイスは WordPress ぐらいしかないんですね〜。
そんなこんなでお世話になっている WordPress ですが完璧なものなんて存在するわけなく、様々なフラストレーションがありました。特に著者インターフェースは Web アプリユーザの立場からみた時に、今イチブログを書くという行為に集中できないイライラ感が常にありました。
そんな僕にとって WordPress 2.5 のインターフェースは目から鱗もの。普通は一度 WordPress インストールしちゃうとアップグレードしないのが基本なんですが今回はアップグレード必須な感じです。なんでかは僕が口で説明するよりもデモビデオを観てもらうのが一番かと思います。
TechCrunch の記事＋デモビデオ
新機能：
- 管理者サイト look and feel がリフレッシュ
- 管理者サイトのダッシュボードが本当の意味での widget ベースになり自分のニーズにあったカスタマイズが可能に。
- フルサイズモードブログ記入モード
- ajax イメージアップロードインターフェース（複数同時アップロード可能）
- ブログ記事用の写真ギャラリー
- イメージの EXIF データ自動抽出
- 今回からは記事だけでなくページも検索可能
- 新規タグ管理インターフェース
- ブログ記事の同時編集阻止
- プラグインの one-click アップデート
FriendFeed is a search engine for the personal data and they are on a roll this month.
- They went open beta. By default supporting 28+ 3rd party sites. The idea is they login with your account credentials and scrape info off of your account so you have a centralized data store that is friendfeed.com.
- They added search capability on their site.
- They are exposing the API.
- People are definitely watching the site and talking about them from interesting perspectives.
The biggest concern here is the security/privacy of personal information. Stuff like digg.com feeds and flickr feeds are harmless, but gmail / gtalk chat transcript is the one where I went “hm, they can keep track of my chats?”
People are scared of the fact that Internet owns much of their personal information. When people are already having an issue trusting a single site to keep their information secure, how can they trust an information aggregation site to stay proactive about not exposing their private information?
Facebook is an interesting concept. I say concept, because it provides no practical purposes other than to provide a “hang out” place for people. Kinda like SecondLife and MySpace but less role playing perhaps.
The other day, I couldn’t go to sleep so I decided to give Facebook a benefit of doubt by spending a chunk of time on it. I looked at some of the top apps (most of which have no practical purposes), I looked at the newsfeed to see what my 50 some friends are up to, I played a bit with FB original photo album and events app, I updated my status, and I looked at interesting 3rd party websites with the Facebook outlet (in the form of FB apps).
In almost all cases, I ultimately had to wonder why I must visit the site to get the data instead of the data being pushed out to me. The kind of information on Facebook is stuff I’d like to know but nothing I can’t live without. Yes, there is Firefox add-on to see my friends’ activities, but I hate these side-column add-ons, so I found myself closing the add-on and not motivated enough to open it again.
Yes, bringing bling to my profile page is fun. Yes, obsessively stalking my friends online may be fun. But is it necessary? February of 2008 saw the first time both MySpace and Facebook unique visitors declined (according to compete.com). It’s still early to tell whether general purpose SNS (Social Networking Site) usage will decline long term or not, but I think there is an element of hype in the community and the significant amount of unique visitors are of curious party and not of permanent residents.
The problem with Facebook and just about every general purpose SNS is we have to visit the site. Most adults simply don’t have the spare time. As you may know, corporate warriors love Blackberry because of its push mail feature because it saves them from the chore of checking mail and from requiring a hot spot to do so. As much as us adults love the idea of using webapps to our advantages, going to Facebook a few times a day for no real purposes is a waste of time.
So, people are keep telling me Facebook is the next big thing in the world of Web2.0, but is it really? If so, why??
CocoaMySQL is a wonderful tool (at the time of writing I am using 0.7b6) for those of us Mac users who are too lazy to learn the query syntaxes. The only alternative I found was Navicat for Mac. But at whooping $129 price tag I wasn’t convinced I needed Navicat.
The part of requirement of being a web startup member is being able to find a decent software solution for free/cheap. I tend to draw the price threshold at $19.95. Anything more than that, I tend to consider the solution expensive and try to see if I can find an alternative solution or implement one myself. If a piece of software is less than $19.95 and works well, I pay just to get it over with.
Anyway, I settled with CocoaMySQL as the solution of choice for the time being.
The application is surprisingly well built for a freeware. It’s fairly robust and doesn’t seem to crash on my Mac. But I also found some annoyances with the app.
1. When loading a table content, instead of incrementally loading in the data and updating the UI, CocoaMySQL tries to suck in everything and display all once done. As such, when loading in a table with numerous records, the app appears to be hang until the data is done loading. Very annoying if you asked me because while all this is going on, if you let me build a query against the table and narrow the SELECT statement to a few records, I don’t have to wait until the entire table is loaded in.
2. SSH tunnel doesn’t seem to work. This is kinda important though the easy work around is to just create the tunnel yourself like this:
ssh -L <available local port>:<db server ip/dns>:3306 <ssh username>@<db server ip/dns>
Anyway, other than those two issues I find CocoaMySQL to be excellent. If you know of better alternatives including X11 apps that run on OS X, let me know.
超久しぶりに Wii ゲームにそそられました。っていうか後も考えずにパパッと購入。
ここの所 Wii ゲームにはちょっと裏切られっぱなし。だって同じようなコンセプトのミニゲーム系ネタばっかりで折角の Wii の良さが出しれてないんだもん。
・・・と思ってたところにやって来たのが Worms。続編となるわけですが、Wii では初めて。ちょっとどんな形でやってくるのか心配もあったこのゲームですが、期待に応えてオリジナルの 2D スタイルに戻ってくれました！しかも Wiimote を結構上手に使ってるじゃないっすかぁ！
オンラインプレイがなくてブーイングしてる人たちもいるみたいですが自分的にはオンラインプレイはどうでもよく、ローカルの４人プレイがしっかりしてくれているので満足。
但し Ninja Rope や Baseball Bat がないのはちょっと残念。ジェットパックの操作性が大分よくなったし、Punch Glove も使い易いからまぁいっか？