WordPress company acquiring IntenseDebate, makes a blog into a forum

By tim, on September 24th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I was glad to see on Matt Mullenweg’s blog that Automattic, the WordPress company, is acquiring IntenseDebate. I’m not actually familiar with the product, but the features it promises address an obvious deficiency in WordPress: the comment system. IntenseDebate adds features including comment threading, reputation points, comment widgets, and Twitter, FriendFeed and email integration.

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WordPress permalinks broke my RSS feed

By tim, on July 2nd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I am beginning to regret my pretty permalinks. Apparently it broke the RSS feed for some subscribers. The problem was caused by a combination of factors. When I started this blog, I used a different blog engine; and when I migrated to WordPress I fixed it so that the old feed URL still worked.

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Pretty permalinks improve stats reporting

By tim, on July 1st, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Last month I reconfigured this blog to use WordPress pretty permalinks. I didn’t rush to do this because I don’t mind the default, where the post is identified by a numeric url argument. The new permalinks do look nicer though, and some claim they help search engines, though I haven’t noticed any impact on

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A real-world account of Google Adsense – and it doesn’t look good

By tim, on April 6th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Advertising is “the economic engine that powers the Web”, according to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie. Google’s rapid ascendancy, enabled by advertising revenue, is the primary evidence for this. That said, Rick Strahl’s post on Google advertising highlights several problems with Google’s approach. It is about Adsense, the mechanism by which third-party sites (like this one)

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Fixing Server 2003: reprise after two and a half years

By tim, on March 3rd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Sometimes the Internet reminds me of Tony Hancock’s Blood Donor. You post advice when you have it, and take it back when you need it.

It was like that last night. I am following my own advice and weeding out any instances where username/password combinations are transmitted in plain text. Occasionally I send mail

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2007: the most commented posts, and a bit of blog introspection

By tim, on December 29th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Here are the posts that received the most comments on ITWriting.com this year:

Vista display driver takes a break (220 comments)

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken (173 comments)

Annoying Word 2007 problem- can’t select text (101 comments)

Why Outlook 2007 is slow- Microsoft’s official answer (95 comments)

Adobe CS3 won’t install (35 comments)

…continue reading 2007: the most commented posts, and a bit of blog introspection

.NET history: Smack as well as Cool

By tim, on November 23rd, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Jason Zander comments on my piece on the early history of ASP.NET:

The CLR was actually built out of the COM+ team as an incubation starting in late 1996. At first we called it the “Component Object Runtime” or COR. That’s why several of the unmanaged DLL methods and environment variables in the

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Kim Cameron hacked, commenters make fools of themselves

By tim, on November 1st, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Kim Cameron has an amusing post on the aftermath of his blog being hacked and defaced over the weekend.

The reason for the hack: a security bug in WordPress. More proof of the problem posed by millions of apps out there on the internet with no update mechanism in place. Security fixes are made

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Matt Mullenweg’s less-is-better approach to software quality

By tim, on October 11th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Interview with Matt Mullenweg in the Guardian today. This was done at the Future of Web Apps conference. I enjoyed meeting him. He is open and articulate. I had not appreciated until now that WordPress.com took the opposite decision from Google over the issue of being blocked in countries such as China which are

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The curious silence of the IE team – Microsoft needs to rediscover blogging

By tim, on October 8th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

There are huge numbers of Microsoft bloggers; yet in some important areas Microsoft seems happy to let its opponents make all the noise.

Internet Explorer is an obvious example. There is an official IE Blog, but you won’t find anything there about IE8, just occasional news of minor IE7 tweaks. The comments on the

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