I'm a Web developer and weather nut based in Charleston, SC, where I work with the BoomTown team to disrupt the real estate industry. These are my thoughts on technology, weather, and other miscellany.
Matt Mullenweg:
Every Jetpack-powered WordPress is now a Jabber node you can subscribe to with im.wordpress.com
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) January 10, 2012
Glad to see someone still remembering how powerful it can be to get notified of social media over IM. It’s still a real shame Twitter never brought back its XMPP bot.
Head over to im.wordpress.com and get the bot if you’re into being pinged about blogs — you can subscribe to my blog using the command sub jaredwsmith.com.
Count me among those who find plenty of value in blog comments not only because the ability to add something to another person’s Web page is quite powerful, but disparate conversations on third-party services are pretty hard to wrangle (Echo and LiveFyre are getting better at this, but they are far from perfect).
Ultimately, whether you have comments is your business — there’s no blanket “right” or “wrong” way to do this. I, personally, get a lot of value out of the debate and accountability well-managed blog comments can provide, so I’ll more frequently patronize sites that have them than those who don’t.
WordPress 3.3.1 is now out. Upgraded here without a hitch. It fixes a security problem so be sure to update sooner rather than later.
A rumor that Facebook Timeline won’t support IE 7 got traction over the New Year’s weekend. According to a comment by Facebook engineer Stefan Parker, though, Facebook will eventually support Timeline on IE 7 (and 6, for that matter). IE 6 got all the attention for being the straggler, but with it finally fading out of view, I suspect Web developers will increasingly turn their collective ire on the five-year-old IE 7 now. We’ll know for sure when Microsoft launches “IE 7 Countdown.”
Not sure what happened earlier when I posted my missive about IE 6, but Apache lost its mind and ground to a halt earlier today. A quick look at some vitals indicated that the issue was related to the Twitter API (which points to the Twitter Tools plugin which has archived my last four years of tweets). Interestingly, my disk IO skyrocketed at the same time. Nuts. Anyway, here’s hoping that was just an isolated incident and that I won’t have to troubleshoot this site again for another year and a half because I really don’t have time for that. :)
Internet Explorer 6 usage share in the US is now below 1 percent according to Microsoft. If you’re still expending energy trying to design for IE 6, it really is time to move on. It turned 10 last year. For some perspective, the other active browsers at the time of IE 6′s release included Netscape Communicator 4.7, Netscape 6, and Opera 6. Do you still test for those?
If you’re using Internet Explorer 6 by choice, stop. You are missing out on the best the Web has to offer. If you can’t upgrade your machine from Windows XP or earlier, there are still working versions of Firefox and Chrome available for you (and IE 8 works on Windows XP, too).
And if your corporate IT policy demands Internet Explorer 6, your corporate IT department is knowingly running an insecure browser (Secunia reports at least 15% of IE 6′s known flaws remain unpatched). Who in the world would think this is sane IT policy?
IE 6 had a remarkable run largely at the expense of the advancement of Web standards. Fortunately, Mozilla disrupted things and kicked Microsoft out of cruise control and back to competing (a position from which Microsoft has historically done its best work). IE 9 was a massive improvement over any previous version of IE to date, and IE 10 is expected to be pretty fantastic standards-wise, so even if the open source alternatives aren’t palatable, Microsoft is doing a much better job on this front and should only continue to improve.
From my 2011 blog statistics, as packaged festively by Jetpack on WordPress.com:
Guess I better blog smarter in 2012.
2011 was bananas.
I got married, moved to the biggest metro area I’ve lived in since I was 4, worked my butt off, got to see the Space Shuttle with a ton of amazing people, and a whole lot more.
2011, you were a crazy mofo. I can’t even imagine what 2012 will be like.
Thanks to everyone who was a part of one of the most amazing years of my life. Here’s to a healthy, happy 2012.
MLB concludes a very uneventful collective bargaining negotiation and comes out looking like the poster child for labor peace. What kind of parallel universe is this?
I’m trying to get into Path more. While the idea of a social network with an extremely low friend limit (150 friends) is hard for me to grasp given my assumptions that anything I publish online is for public consumption, I’m won over by its excellent design — indeed, it has a timeline implementation that Facebook could only dream of — and its ability to be a universal publisher to the big four social sites (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Tumblr).
By far the most interesting use of Path I’ve seen so far is by Jon Mitchell on ReadWriteWeb, where he uses Path to illustrate a story on his experiences serving on a jury and what they mean for the social Web. It only works, too, because Path is so well-designed and thought out.
It will be fun to watch Path’s path. It could be quite a contender in 2012.
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This work by Jared W. Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. The opinions and views expressed on this site are solely those of the author.