About a month ago, I attended a BarCamp-style conference in San Francisco all about social media, and at the beginning of the conference, everyone was asked to introduce themselves and share what their favorite social networking site was–by far, the most frequent response was Twitter. Indeed, Twitter may very likely become one of the great wonders of the world. Who would have thought that a service that dubs itself as nothing more than a way to answer the eternal question, “What are you doing?” would turn out to be as addictive as it has proven to be. As the proud owner of over 4500 tweets since the end of January 2007, I oughta know.

In my opinion, the real reason that Twitter has been successful (despite the fact that its reputation for reliability is the same as, if not worse than, that of MobileMe) is because it’s the first product that fills a real niche in our lives. All of us, particularly myself included, have an inner urge to share certain tidbits of our lives–just to get them out there, whether or not people are even going to care about them. Tweets don’t have to just be about things that we are doing, but often contain things that we are feeling at a particular time. They’re inspired by the moment. For example, a month ago, on July 14th, I pulled up to my local Apple Store to the point where I was surprised to find a long, snaking, around-the-block line for the iPhone 3G–a full three and a half days after the thing first became available! I thought that the situation was just visually hilarious, and I thought of just so many things that could be said to make fun of it, so just to get it out of my head, I sat myself on the park bench outside of the store, cracked open my laptop with the store’s free wifi, and churned away about a dozen tweets on how crazy the situation was.
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Tags: blog, Blogging, Personal, thoughts, tweets, Twitter

Okay, I’m sure that if you’re looking at Webmacster87.info, you’re wondering, “Whoa, what happened? Where did the great big W go? Where did the beautiful-looking theme go?” (If you’re reading this post in some kind of RSS fead reader, go to Webmacster87.info and start reading this post over again.)

Well, today is the third annual CSS Naked Day, and also the first one that I heard of in time to make the necessary preparations to participate in. The purpose of today is to promote the purpose of web standards and its importance in our everyday use of the internet. In fact, I think that Lorelle VanFossen said it best:

This is the third year of the annual CSS Naked Day which honors web design and designers around the world who help make our websites and blogs look “pretty” to the eye while still being totally functional under the hood. Dustin Diaz wanted to give the web world an opportunity to remind everyone of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages, giving a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

Webmacster87.info is one of hundreds of websites going naked today for this cause. My blog will be entirely CSS-free all day today (in my timezone, anyway, as defined by the clock on my website), and since the event is done in honor of designers, I want this to honor my good friend Hans Reikmann (macattacks10), who has graciously volunteered his time to do numerous designs for me over the years, including the artwork for both this version and the previous version of my website, some of my 2005-era forums, and all of my podcasts.

If you want to go naked on your blog or website today, there’s still time, and Lorelle has suggestions for how you can participate. In the meantime, enjoy this low-fi version of Webmacster87.info!

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, today is the 100th Day of 2008! Woo hoo!

Tags: blog, community, CSS, design, event, internet, naked, standards, web design, Webmacster87.info

I must say that I am. Granted, WordPress does have the best admin layout of any blog/CMS platform that I’ve ever used, but I have had my share of picky points to complain about here and there. But yesterday, the folks at Automattic released WordPress 2.5, which they have deemed to be the biggest UI change since 1.5 came out three years ago. The main attraction of 2.5 is a brand new administration layout that is much more user-oriented. It has a much nicer, better-flowing layout that also permits a nice amount of customization. (And the Dashboard is actually useful now, woo hoo!)

So, the good news with WordPress 2.5 is that it’s got a lot of great new features. However, the bad news with WordPress 2.5 is that it’s got a lot of great new features. That means that if you’ve heavily customized your WordPress installation with plugins or theme tweaks, you may need to think a couple of times before you begin the 2.5 honeymoon. A wide number of incompatible plugins have been listed by the community, and if you use some of the more popular plugins listed at the bottom of the page, you may need to hold your horses for a week or two until the authors start rolling out some updates. I know that I’m going to be holding off for awhile until I have a significant amount of time to dedicate to updating. Also, due to the size of this upgrade, doing a very comprehensive backup will be HIGHLY recommended.

However, congratulations to Automattic on this release, and I look forward to examining it in more detail.

Tags: 2.5, administration, Automattic, backup, blog, Dashboard, layout, release, upgrading, user interface, WordPress

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year! Unfortunately, I am contractually obligated (to myself, my standards, and nothing or no one else) to produce on this blog, on the first day of each month, a Best Of post featuring the best from the previous month. Unfortunately, Webmacster87.info was down for the majority of December, and so there were only eight posts on this blog during December, and two of them had to do with closing out the month of November! Anyway, this Best Of will be shorter than usual, probably, but here we go.
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Tags: archives, Articles, Best Of, blog, December, episodes, Podcasts, posts, Tech Podcast Network

Well, the year 2007 has definitely been an interesting one. There have been plenty of great things that happened this year, and lots of bad things that happened this year, so my overall outlook on this year is pretty much a neutral one. I also did much more blogging during the year 2007 than I have before, with almost 270 posts spanning January-December. But now, as it is New Year’s Eve, December 31st, it’s time for me to close out the year 2007 with my Year in Review.
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Tags: 2007, Awards, blog, events, Personal, Podcasts, review, year