Tag Archives: Microsoft

Bing Maps Photosynth Mashup

I’ve always been a big fan of Google Maps. . [...]

Posted in Tech | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Back from WordCamp Birmingham 2008

Dougal, Mitch, and Donna

Dougal, Mitch, and Donna

As mentioned previously, I gave a presentation last weekend at WordCamp Birmingham 2008 on “The Future of WordPress”. My section on “The Past of WordPress” ran a little longer than I had planned, but a lot of people told me that they liked that overview, so I guess it was alright. [...]

Posted in Blogging, Community, The South, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Atlanta PHP

Tomorrow night, I will be attending the April Atlanta PHP meeting. My friend Glen Gordon will be giving a presentation titled, “I’m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. [...]

Posted in Community, Development, Operating Systems, Servers, Tech, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Internet Explorer 8: Progress!

It seems that Microsoft has reversed their previous decision to make Internet Explorer 8 crippled by default. They will be enabling the standards compliant mode by default in IE8, and webmasters will have to use the X-UA-Compatible header to force it into IE7 mode, for sites that can’t be updated immediately. Huzzah for progress!

And on that note, I’ll mention that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download. [...]

Posted in Browsers, CSS, Community, Design, Development, Standards, Tech, Web Design | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Internet Explorer 8: This is progress?

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. Huzzah!

But waitaminnit… What’s this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don’t, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?

That’s just dumb.

Screw their stupid “don’t break the web” motto. [...]

Posted in Browsers, CSS, Community, Design, Development, Standards, Tech, Web Design | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

14+ Awesome WordPress-powered sites

[A screenshot of welovewp.com]

WeLoveWP.com highlights great looking WordPress sites, and it’s powered by WordPress, too!

From time to time, someone will hear that I’m involved with WordPress, and ask me a few questions about it. Some people already have a WordPress-powered site (either self-hosted, or on wordpress.com), and some have never actually used it, but they’ve heard of it. [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Web Design, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , | 131 Comments

Benefits of Blogging

My brother-in-law, Bob, has been keeping a blog on wordpress.com for a while now called Arcane Code. He mostly writes about software development using Microsoft tools, because that’s what he does for a living. He’s also had some interesting posts lately about installing various flavors of Linux under Virtual PC, and a long series digging deeply into SQL Server. But one of his most recent posts caught my eye and I wanted to share it: Arcane Thoughts: Benefits of Blogging.

In this article, Bob briefly outlines six benefits that he gets from writing on his blog: Meet and Greet, Self Documenting, Self Promotion, Mentoring, Education, and Giving Back. [...]

Posted in Blogging, Blogs, Community, Family, Personal, WordPress | Also tagged | 12 Comments

AOL and OpenID

Here’s an addendum for my previous post about OpenID: AOL supports OpenID authentication for all(?) screennames. I’ve verified that this works with AIM usernames, even if you don’t have a “real” AOL account. [...]

Posted in OpenID | Also tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

OpenID News

Since my WordPress upgrade and theme change, the OpenID sign-on functionality here has been a little iffy. I think I’ve got all the kinks worked out now, and it should be working correctly again. There seems to be a buglet in the functions that attempt to automagically add the OpenID login fields to the comment form. So I had to disable that option and manually edit my comment template file to insert the appropriate bits. I don’t like having to modify the theme files (it’s going to make it harder to upgrade when a new version of Sandbox comes out), but that was my best solution, short-term.

In other news, Microsoft is working on interoperability between OpenID and their CardSpace™ framework. [...]

Posted in Microformats, OpenID, Services, Standards, Tech, Themes, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Drinking the Ubuntu Kool-Aid

For quite a while, I had considered nuking Windows from my laptop and starting fresh. A few weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. I started with a full backup (two, actually — a file-by-file backup, and a partition image). I toyed with the idea of dual-booting, but finally decided that I’d try to go completely non-Windows, and see how well I could get by.

After hearing one of my co-workers rave about how impressed he was with Fedora Core, I was going to give that a try. But the DVD he burned for me wouldn’t install for some reason. [...]

Posted in Browsers, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Tech | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments