The one big update I’d love is the ability to set the “add an image” option to always be set to “by URL” because I use (and I assume others do too) Amazon S3 for storing images.

You can update your WordPress software to 3.3 now by using the auto-update function with the administration interface.

Here’s the features overview video for WordPress 3.3 from the WordPress team:

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1. WordPress Releases Critical 3.0.4 Upgrade Patch
2. Latest WordPress Version 2.8.4 Exploited
3. WordPress 2.8.5 Upgrade Available

No details yet on when registration will open for the event – last year the registration sold out in minutes so you better be quick this year.

I attended the event last year as a paid attendee and thought it was ok overall – way too crowded. Frankly it seemed like most people went for the stuff they handed out which included a Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet and a Samsung Chromebook.

I wonder how Google will deal with the people who already booked travel and have to pay fees to change their tickets/hotel bookings.

Related posts:

1. Google Launches Initial Google+ API
2. Google App Engine Video Overview
3. Google Releases mod_pagespeed for Apache Web Servers

Here are the important pieces of the Nokia offer:

We’re happy to offer you the option of a free UX Evaluation or Usability testing session for your application if it’s on Series 40, Symbian or MeeGo platforms for Nokia!

What are the UX Evaluations and Usability Testing?
UX Evaluations are when design specialists who are well versed in Nokia platform style guides review your application and provide a report with tips and recommendations on how to optimize your application, both from a design and usability standpoint as well as from a style guide perspective. Each report takes about 8-10 days, and the process is we look at your application and then send you a report.

Usability testing is when we recruit everyday users to try your applications in a lab environment and then based on their interactions with your application, we create a set of recommendations for improvements for your application. Each reports takes about 8-10 days from the scheduled usability test. The usability schedules vary as we recruit users for the testing. In addition, we will not schedule a usability test until you’ve undergone a UX Evaluation first.

If you are interested, please send your app or download link to nokia-uxsupport@etnoteam.fi with the following fields completed, and with “Launchpad UX Evaluation” in the subject line:

• Name of your app:
• Your (developer) name:
• Your contact email if we have questions:
• What country are you in? (this helps if we need to set up a call):
• Two sentence description of your app:
• Who is your application targeted to (what kinds of users?):
• What are the most common things the user will do with your application (what is the primary user journey)?:
• Target platform (choose one, such as Series 40, Symbian, MeeGo):
• What country or countries are you creating this application for?:
• What language is your application in?:
• Is the app based on a current website or service (or is it already available on another platform, or on the Ovi store)?:
• Are there any specific instructions regarding application installation and usage (for example, are there IMEIs needed)?:

Please note that we cannot start your UX Evaluation or Usability test without all of the above information.

The good part about getting one of the 40 slots is that the Nokia team will see your app and could increase visibility for your app as well.

Related posts:

1. Mobile Web Standards Announced
2. Free HTML5 Mobile Training From O’Reilly
3. Is Your Site User Friendly?

Howdy Viddlers,

Many of you are the reason Viddler has risen to where it is today. You are the ones that dedicated hours everyday creating videos, viewing and commenting on the videos of others, and participating in the many community adventures. There’s been countless smiles, tears, frolics, artworks, deep thoughts, kids, birthdays,unboxings, and marvelous accents.

Gosh, this is looking like one of those farewell letters you receive from a company that got acquired and then gathers dust (*ahem* Jaiku). This is certainly not the case.

It’s no secret that Viddler’s community of free users hasn’t been as active in the past couple of years. You guys and gals have grown up, changed hobbies, switched jobs, fallen in love, or just miss iJustine. That’s understandable, but we still love you, so we’re giving away a return trip to AUSTRALIA if you login and upload a video.

Okay, not really. Maybe one day.

In all seriousness, we do love you, and we just want to let you know that we’ve decided to remove the option to sign up for a Personal/Free account. This will not affect any of you, but it will mean that new users will be required to sign up for a Pro, Business, or Enterprise account.

This decision was made because a good portion of new user sign-ups are spam or businesses wanting to trial our service without using the free business trial (which previously required a credit card, but now don’t).

Since this is a fairly significant change, there will be changes to the website which might confuse some of you who haven’t been back in a while. Rest assured, your videos, comments, tags, and more will stay intact.…

---

If you have any questions or handy feedback, then you’re welcome to contact me:derek+signups@viddler.com.

I look forward to seeing you around Viddler, and next time we meet in person.

To keep up-to-date with everything Viddler, please visit and subscribe to The Viddler Blog.

Huge thanks and many hugs,
Derek Steen
Community Participant since 2007
Community Leader since 2008

P.s. This message was shown to several of our Personal users and they approved of its contents. I hope you all feel as accepting as they did.

It’s neat to see that, despite this difficult business decision, the principals of Viddler are keeping their sense of humor. It’s kind of a shame we, as personal users, didn’t see more communication of this caliber in the past. For some users, that kind of personal touch can be exactly what’s needed to convince someone to switch to a premium account.

It will be interesting to see how Viddler fairs going forward.

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2. Adobe Limiting Free ConnectNow Accounts Even More
3. Is Your Site User Friendly?

Startup blogger Robert Scoble put together a list of some of the feedback on the new API – it seems the reaction is mixed. RSS creator Dave Winer says Google “doesn’t get it”. Why am I surprised that a company who has a VP, Bradley Horowitz, post on Twitter that he only cares about Twitter users with over 100,000 followers might not fully understand how to promote a new API to developers?

The Google Plus team notes that they are using the follow existing standards and best practices where they can:

• Our API methods are RESTful HTTP requests which return JSON responses.
• Our payload formats use standard syntax (e.g. PoCo for people info, ActivityStrea.ms for activities).
• We use OAuth 2 for secure trusted access to user data.

The Google Plus API is located here if you want to start to play with it.

Related posts:

1. Google launches Finance site
2. Google IO 2012 Moved to June & Now Three Days
3. Google App Engine Video Overview

Although it’s disappointing to see these types of issues arise in popular software, it really shouldn’t come as a major shock. Both of these scripts are extremely powerful, and, as we all learned from Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” In this case, that means that we, as users, need to be especially vigilant when using something that performs such complicated tasks so easily.

I am very happy to see that the author of TimThumb jumped on this issue so quickly (the phpThumb vulnerability went unpatched for over a year with no action from the author). It does look, though, like the author finally released a new version that supposedly patches the issue in April of this year.

The bottom line is that, whenever you use any kind of script on your server, especially one as powerful as TimThumb, phpThumb or even WordPress, it is extremely important to keep the scripts updated to the latest versions, to continuously monitor any news (especially security bulletins) about the script and, to a lesser extent, try to understand as much as possible what the script actually does.

You can grab the latest version of TimThumb from its Google Code project page and you can grab the latest version of phpThumb from its Sourceforge project page. Be forewarned, though, that these scripts might both still contain vulnerabilities; and make sure you stay on top of any security bulletins about both.

In addition, I wouldn’t recommend using either of these scripts if you don’t need them. If you simply need to resize images and are using WordPress as your blogging system or CMS, use the built-in functionality in WordPress. Even it does include vulnerabilities, WordPress can be patched much more easily than phpThumb or TimThumb, and you are still working with a single set of code, so there are fewer areas open to vulnerabilities. The only reasons I can imagine that you should use TimThumb or phpThumb instead of the built-in WordPress image manipulation functions would be:

1. You need images to be cropped from a region other than the center of the image
2. You need the images to be resized instantly and dynamically (though, that might just be poor planning)
3. You need to modify the images by adding filters to them (such as a watermark)
4. You need to enlarge images (though, really, you shouldn’t be enlarging images programmatically – the quality will degrade just as much as it would to simply display the original image at a larger size using CSS or HTML attributes, and the file size will obviously increase)

If you don’t need any of those features, you should probably investigate using the WordPress image API rather than trying to use a separate script. You can use the add_image_size() function to register a new image size (cropped or proportional); you can use the wp_get_attachment_image_src() function to retrieve an image at any size (you can provide a registered image-size name, or you can provide an array of width and height to retrieve the nearest-sized image and size it using CSS or HTML); and you can use a plugin like Regenerate Thumbnails to clear out the existing cache of images and recreate all of the images at the newly registered sizes.

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1. Image manipulation in VBScript
2. WebShell Hack – An Update
3. WordPress Multi-Site: Get Featured Image from Another Blog

By using the Services, you consent to allow Yahoo!’s automated systems to scan and analyse all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account. This includes Mail and Messenger content already stored in your account. Unless expressly stated otherwise, Yahoo! Mail customers will not be allowed to opt out of this feature.

The entire Internet seems to be in an uproar over these changes. Some folks are saying things like “I’m glad I don’t use Yahoo! Mail“, “Users of Yahoo email are furious that changes to the terms and conditions will let the company snoop on their emails.“, etc. The thing that confuses me, though, is how this differs from the Gmail that most of those people are using. As David Land pointed out on Google+, Gmail’s service includes the following statement:

… automatic scanning and filtering technology is at the heart of Gmail. Gmail scans and processes all messages using fully automated systems in order to do useful and innovative stuff like filter spam, detect viruses and malware, show relevant ads, and develop and deliver new features across your Google experience. Priority Inbox, spell checking, forwarding, auto-responding, automatic saving and sorting, and converting URLs to clickable links are just a few of the many features that use this kind of automatic processing.

Why do you suppose everyone is upset about the fact that Yahoo! is implementing this, but never seemed to care about Google doing so? Is it simply the fact that Google is supposedly not “evil”, is it the fact that they never bothered to think about the terms to which they agreed when they signed up for Gmail, or is there something else going on here?

An interesting side note; David also pointed out that:

• Gmail has 200 million users
• Yahoo Mail has 284 million users
• Hotmail has 364 million users

Related posts:

1. E-mail Client Survey – What Are People Using?
2. Is Yahoo! Protesting the sale of Delicious?
3. Google Hosted Apps and Sending Mail From a Web Server

Further, once a post is published, any changes made to it are automatically published, without any way for another user to review those modifications.

As a blogging platform, workflow is very rarely necessary, but as WordPress becomes more and more of a website content management system, especially among corporate customers, that lack of workflow can become a bit of an issue.

There are a few plugins, though, that aim to help WordPress achieve a little more footing in the area of workflow.

First, there are quite a few plugins that set up admin notification for drafts and/or “pending” posts. The one that I have used in the past was called “WP Status Notifier” by iDope, but it seems to have been removed from the WordPress repository for some reason (the author is currently investigating the issue). However, a quick search of the WordPress repository offers up quite a few results for alternative options.

To handle the workflow issues related to modifying published posts, I wrote a new plugin to do just that. The Post Revision Workflow plugin was pushed into the WordPress repository today. You can read more about the plugin and see some screenshots on my plugin website. It’s an extremely simple plugin that is in the infancy of its development, but it seems to get the job done. If that’s not quite to your liking, there are one or two other plugins listed in the repository that seem to be after the same goal. Based on the descriptions (I have not installed or used any of the others), Edit Flow looks especially promising.

Related posts:

1. My First Official WordPress Plugin
2. A Few of My Favorite WordPress Plug-ins
3. One Awesome WordPress Plugin: WordPress File Monitor

I have heard first-hand accounts of people trying to download the album and ending up with only one or two songs. After that, the whole download process seemed to fail for them. In addition, a lot of people seem to have taken to Amazon’s review system to voice their displeasure over the download fails. As of right now, there are 103 1-star comments on the album; and quite a few of them speak to the frustrating issues people are experiencing while trying to download the album; rather than making any comment at all on the quality or enjoyability of the music, itself.

Is this a major fail for the online retail giant, or is it just a tiny hiccup in their path to total world domination? Will this experience make you think twice before purchasing music from Amazon in the future?

For me, quite honestly, the download issues aren’t nearly as troubling as the fact that I am apparently required to install Amazon’s download manager in order to get the songs to my computer. I have enough proprietary software on my computer already; I don’t need yet another download manager just to purchase a single 99¢ album.

Edit – After reading a few more tweets and microblog posts on the issue, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the users experiencing download issues are those that chose to add the album to their Cloud Player account. Users that bypassed the Cloud Player and decided to download the album directly (of which I am one – I bought the album for my wife, honest) have been able to successfully download the tracks with little hassle. Therefore, if you still haven’t purchased the album but are thinking about it; you should bypass the Cloud Player for now.

It also came to my attention that this sale is only available to users inside the US. All other users seem to get an error message telling them that mp3 downloads are not available in their country.

Related posts:

1. Amazon Lowers Prices for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
2. Amazon Discusses The S3 Downtime
3. Amazon S3 Down For Over Three Hours… and Counting!

There was some minor controversy over the game, after it was discovered that it still requires Flash in order to play the game (to produce the sounds and music for the game rather than using HTML5 audio), but there are some potentially valid reasons for that.

First of all, the HTML5 audio spec is still in its infancy and support for it across browsers is still pretty spotty. Using HTML5 audio for the in-games sounds and music quite possibly would have produced inconsistent experiences for users. Secondly, Angry Birds is a premium application for Android and iOS (and Windows Phone in another 6 weeks). If the free Web-based application was built entirely without any proprietary technologies, a lot of people might flock toward that on their mobile devices instead of ponying up the cash for the premium native app. With the Flash content in the game, most mobile devices won’t be able to play it properly, acting as a low-tech method of keeping the premium native apps value up.

Then, the other day, news broke of a Linux distribution/emulator that can actually run in the browser, powered by JavaScript. jsLinux is the name of the project, and it is reported to run in Chrome 11 (apparently it doesn’t currently work in Chrome 12 beta) and in Firefox 4, including the versions of Firefox that are available for Android. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do much yet, but the fact that it even exists is pretty impressive. I can only imagine what possibilities it holds for the future.

Finally, I was made aware of a Gameboy/Gameboy Color emulator that runs in your browser, using HTML5 and JavaScript technologies. It is capable of running Gameboy ROM files that you upload from your computer or from online sources. I briefly tested the emulator by running a public domain Gameboy Color ROM I had on my hard drive, and it seemed to work fairly well. It’s not full-speed yet, and the audio is a bit choppy, but it was definitely playable.

Following is some information about this new emulator (from the “About” dialog in the emu):

[GameBoy Online] is a GameBoy Color emulator written purely in JavaScript by Grant Galitz.

The video is done either through HTML5 canvas or by a fallback of creating BMP binary picture format data URI strings and appending the result to regular HTML img tags.

Save states are implemented through the window.localStorage object, and are serialized/deserialized through JSON. SRAM saving is also implemented through the window.localStorage object, and are serialized/deserialized through JSON. In order for save states to work properly on most browsers, you need set the maximum size limit for DOM storage higher, to meet the needs of the emulator’s save data size.

Are these projects going to eventually be the nails in the coffin for Flash? Will Flash begin to adapt appropriately to fill more specialized niches while people begin to utilize newer Web technologies to perform tasks that were traditionally done with Flash? What are your thoughts? What other cool real-world HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript applications have you seen lately?

Related posts:

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2. A Look Into HTML5 and CSS3
3. Free HTML5 Mobile Training From O’Reilly