Blogging

We know, it sounds too good to be true. A plugin that can automatically upgrade your WordPress blog? That’s what we thought, too, until we tried it. Successfully. Twice.

The fact that WordPress Automatic Upgrade isn’t a default part of WordPress 2.5 is a crying shame! It installs just as you’d expect: you download the zip file, unzip it, upload the resulting folder into your plugins folder and activate it.

Once activated, you have a new entry on your Manage page in your blog’s WordPress admin, called Automatic Upgrade. When you activate it, it will walk you through the following eight steps:

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

There is a fully automated mode, but we weren’t quite brave enough to try that. Considering that we didn’t experience so much as a hiccup on the two blogs that we upgraded to 2.5 using this plugin today (one was at version 2.2.1, and the other at 2.3.0), we’re more than happy to stick to the manual mode which involves occasionally clicking the next button and downloading a couple of backup files once they’re ready. Plus, it’s nice to know what’s going on in case there’s a failure and you have to recover manually, and the plugin is great about giving verbose explanations as to what is actually going on.

BBC, DRM, and the iPhone: it doesn’t sound very steamy. But things are definitely heating up in regards to the BBC and DRM.

The release of BBC’s new iPlayer brought with it the typical suffocating DRM restrictions, with the typical amount of outrage in the blogosphere.

However, when the BBC released the new beta iPlayer software that allowed users to view BBC streams on their iPhone, the streams made for the iPhone didn’t didn’t include any DRM.

Certain intrepid programmers and users were quick to jump on the fact that the iPhone streams were unencrypted. One user was able to use a PC to watch the unencrypted streams by using the Firefox plugin Fast Agent Switcher to convince the iPlayer that it was an iPhone. Developer Paul Battley released a Ruby script to download the iPhone formatted files to your PC.

In response, the BBC iPlayer took countermeasures to block the streams from non-iPhone devices. Just yesterday, in fact.

In response to the response, and after a mere 24 hours, users again figured out a few ways to watch the iPlayer iPhone streams without an iPhone. To get around the BBC’s countermeasure, all you have to do is structure the request header in the same way an iPhone does. Or, if you want someone to do the heavy lifting for you, Paul Battley has updated his Ruby script to defeat the just-released countermeasures.

So, with all this intrigue, what should be our conclusion? Should the BBC bite the bullet (however imaginary) and release the streams without DRM? Or is it the BBC’s fault that the shows have DRM in the first place?

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing wants the BBC to lay down its arms and give users access to unencrypted content. His argument: a British license-payer who records a digital video-stream from BBC’s broadcast towers can store the recording forever, so why limit the iPlayer?

Others argue that the BBC has its hands tied; that most of the BBC’s content are produced by third-party production firms that own the copyrights to the shows who generally won’t sell the BBC the right to continuous rebroadcasts of episodes to ensure that there remains a market for DVD’s, syndication, and other money-making opportunities.

What a tangled web we weave.

Are you in Austin for SXSW? Come meet a few of the people who make Download Squad tick. We’ll be at Lovejoy’s on Neches St, Saturday the 8th, from 4pm to 5:30. We’ll even have a few things to give away.

Drop by, say hello and make yourself known. If you’re lost, you can find me or Christina on Twitter and we’ll try to help guide you in.

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, has released new features, including a homepage redesign and developer platform. Sure this is going to be a little more useful to business users, but does LinkedIn need to expand and focus outside the business sector to make things stickier?

LinkedIn’s new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?

People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google’s OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.

Nonetheless it’s great to see that LinkedIn is growing…mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?

Yet another solution to a problem I didn’t know I had, much like many of the utilities that find my way onto my
system or widgets that find their way onto my personal blog. Grazr allows you to
replace the blogroll on your blog with an interactive miniature application that allows your readers to browse a folder
structure and read excerpts from blogs that you want to promote.

The most obvious use of this is to import your
OPML file from your feed reader, and let your readers browse the content that you consume. It’s really nothing more
than a web toy, but it’s very well done and could be a very useful tool for burgeoning blog networks, or simply to
impress your readers with the lofty sites you read.

Note that Grazr is currently in Alpha, so as always YMMV.

Gmail hacks, aren’t they wonderful? Here’s another
one: Gallina, a Gmail-based blogging system. It’s very
clearly labeled a "proof of concept," and as we all know, Google owns Blogger, so why use Gmail for blogging?
I don’t know, but it’s a cool thing anyhow. You use Gmail messages as entries, and use the stars to set publish status.
Any replies to the message show up as comments. And it supports images and comments via web. So yeah, that’s about it.
For some reason this seems like a much better thing than Blogger, at least for the rapid-fire instapublishing sprinting
marathon that has become the blogosphere. All you need is a little time and php to get it running, so give it a try and
see what you think. Here’s a demo. Now all we need is Google to break it!

This one couldn’t be simpler: grabbing URL’s from
a page of text. Ever get a newsletter or article with a bunch of links? Ever try to cut and paste, then go back through
and extract those links in some other document? URL Bandit
automates this process a bit. Xteq, makers of a bunch of other neat little apps, created URL bandit to be pretty simple
and effective, and I’ll say it is. It actually monitors your clipboard for copied text with embedded URL’s, and proceeds
to log those. Even a power outage will keep them, as it saves this info to a temp file. You can see all those URL’s in a
little window, and URL Bandit stays down in the tray for later use. As I always say, free, fast, and simple apps are
gold.

[Via digg]

I’ve been trying out MySpace since last month. And yes, I know I’m late to the party, but what’s all the fuss about? Granted, I’ve reconnected with some old friends and whatnot, but what is up with their system? A quick straw poll of everyone I know on MySpace indicates the interface is total garbage, never mind all the server issues they’ve been having. You’d think that buyout from News Corp. would have gained something for their troubles. And since "Tom" (if that is his real name) won’t respond to my queries (probably out spending that $500 million from Murdoch), I thought I’d share what I would change about MySpace. Please leave your own suggestions in the comments, and I’ll forward them to the mysterious keeper of MySpace…

• Start using Ajax. Seriously, what’s with all the clicking and half-empty pages? Something tells me you’d be a lot nicer to your servers if you reduced the overhead by not having to load 3 distinct pages just to leave comments.
• How about a control panel for customizing alerts and subscriptions? Each friend of yours could have a simple checkbox UI for issuing message alerts (which I don’t need usually, and they often lag), or reading blog posts, etc. Again, this would help those server issues.
• Speaking of server-side, is it wise to keep using ColdFusion? Not trying to start a flame war about backend tech, but I hear php can really keep up with the obvious scaling issues you’re having.
• Let’s try some more consolidation of the interface. Do I want to view my comments or view my profile as others see it? Do I want to post a blog or a bulletin? Make these things clear please… And add some RSS feeds for Pete’s sake.
• Snippets of blog entries would be cool, as would scaling of images on comments. Nothing like scrolling, is there?
• Maybe it’s my browser, but cookies would help so I don’t have to log in all the time. Gmail does a great job of this.

What exactly is so clunky about the interface? And where’s Jakob Nielsen when you need him?

iFeedPod is a cool little app that downloads RSS and Atom feeds to your iPod. Just add your favorite feeds to iFeedPod—OPML import is supported—and click on Sync and it’ll copy your feeds’ contents to your iPod in the form of notes. I can see this working great for some feeds and not so well for others. iFeedPod is free and unfortunately only available for Mac OS X.