Over the years I’ve used a gajillion different Content Management Systems. For websites that need custom features and extensions, I go with Drupal 98% of the time. But for a basic blog or mostly standard website, great selection of themes, plug-ins, and drop dead simple site maintenance, Wordpress can’t be beat.

The main reason? Updates. If you maintain an interactive website, you should know that it can be dangerous. If you don’t install the latest patches, you’re leaving your site vulnerable. If you’re lucky the bad guys will just post porn spam, like they did for these elementary students in the UK when their Moodle site wasn’t properly patched. If you’re unlucky, your user database or content can be compromised or destroyed.

Traditionally (and with many current CMS) the process to update the core software or modules goes like this: download the new software, upload it to your webhost, login to your webhost, unpack the software, backup your database, backup your existing software, carefully install the new software (taking care not to overwrite anything custom), upgrade your database, cross your fingers, test. This process usually involves using a terminal (command line) program, file transfer program, database program, and the admin section of your website. Maintaining one, much less dozens of CMS driven sites, easily becomes a chore for system admins.

With Wordpress, the upgrade process is mostly automagic. First, when an update is available, it lets you know after you login:

You then push the “Upgrade Automatically” button, and Wordpress does the rest for you:

The process is the same for third party modules you may have installed:

As a lazy website admin who likes to keep sites up to date, this version of Wordpress is a joy to use.

Now I know all you broadband whipper snappers out there will just shrug, but since when did it become normal for software updates to consume over half a gig of disk space? I feel for you rural folks on satellite Internet. PS: when will Microsoft recognize that Macs need an enterprise software update service?

On June 1st, 2009, a fire in our neighbor’s basement spread to our home causing total loss. For information on the relief and (hopeful) rebuild effort, visit http://basinroad.com.

I was recently reminiscing about my geeky childhood when I came across a memory about my first robot. I was overjoyed to get Verbot for Christmas one year, and tried desperately to make the dern thing follow my prepubescent voice commands. My only real solid memory is frustration at it not doing what I told it! But I do have vague recollections of getting it to pick up something and move around while clinging to it. Or maybe I’m just remember the commercial.

Oh Verbot, where are you now? Some landfill somewhere I imagine.

Some of you may know I’m a moderately big Star Trek fan. Yes I’ve been to a convention. No I didn’t go in costume. Yes I’ve watched all episodes of the original series and Next Generation as well as all the movies. No I haven’t watched all the episodes of the decidedly crappier Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise series.

I should also point for disclosure that I took a 48 credit course in college whose overarching theme was Star Trek. We used the show as a jumping off point to study sociology, screen writing, spacial physics, cognitive psychology, and many other related subjects.

Of particular interest to me was how the original series could run for only three seasons but make such a huge impact. After 1969 when the show ended, there wasn’t anything else (with the exception of a cartoon) until 1979 when the first movie came out. Yet in those 10 years the ethos of the characters and storylines grew and developed into one of the most popular mythologies of our time. How did this happen? Fans. The fans continued the adventures of the characters through unofficial “slash” stories and conventions.

So I was naturally excited that they’d come out with a new movie. All the other movies were pretty lame, starting with the abhorrent Star Trek I, which came out shortly after Star Wars and looked like a pitiful imitation, and ending with the attempt to bring the TNG cast onto the silver screen which never really panned out.

This latest movie though, they did a number of things right. Here’s my bullet-point grading of Star Trek 2009:

• Relative to other Trek movies: Great
• Relative to TV series: Really Good
• Compatibility with existing storylines and “science”: Great
• Acting overall: good enough
• Overall rating as a standalone movie: average-good (two stars on a four star scale, three stars on a five star scale)

I thought the writing was good to Star Trek standards, especially in the campy humor that only makes sense if you’re already familiar with the ethos. They did a good job making the storyline fun and accessible to everyone, dumbing down the complexity enough while still building on the epic timeline of, let’s face it, one of science fiction’s most revered characters: Spock.

I think they modeled this movie mostly after the original series, minus the presence of a Gene Roddenberry-esque omnipotent creature. Roddenberry always tried to introduce the concept of something larger than us, in more control than us.

For our main characters, they did a great job setting them up. The legendary James Tiberius Kirk especially. None of the prior movies or TV series really gave us the back story we needed to understand why Kirk got to captain the best ship in the fleet. Knowing that he’s a Will Hunting like smarty pants really helps to understand his position in Starfleet.

Overall, I give it a big hearty thumbs up, from an insiders perspective. For people who don’t know the entire Star Trek context, it’s a good science fiction movie with plenty of fun action, although much of the humor predicates on knowing some back story of the characters (Scotty in particular made me LOL).

I’ve always wondered about this one and I finally looked it up. Turns out my confusion is well-founded:

The Anchorage Daily News has reported that Royal Caribbean cruise ship “Serenade of the Seas” has a crew member infected with H1N1 (Swine Flu). The crew member became sick on May 2nd. According to the 2009 cruise ship docking calendar the Serenade arrived in Juneau on May 8th after leaving Ketchikan on the 7th. She continued on to Skagway on the 9th, Petersburg on the 10th, and then moves on to Sitka (12th), Prince Rupert (13th), and Vancouver on the 16th.

For more information about the geography of H1N1, try this flu-tracker map.

Laurie Garrett gives a detailed look at the state of healthcare and community response to potential pandemic. This video is from Feb 2007 and focuses most on the Avian flu but is quite pertinent. Her primary bottom line is that defenses should be arranged at the community not individual level.

Not long after FriendFeed went live with realtime social networking they rolled out a feature that lets you search and subscribe to the Twitter followers of any Twitter user.

Naturally I used this for my own Twitter username first. But then I discovered it works for pretty much any username. So I decided to give it a real test. Here’s how I created a FriendFeed list called “Scoble’s Minions”, and subsequently got locked out of FriendFeed.

First, in FriendFeed go to http://friendfeed.com/friends. Click the Twitter button and enter the Twitter username whose friends you want to search for.

After a good while of the spinning progress circle I’m given a screen where I can select which folks I want to subscribe to:

And the list I want to put them in:

Warnings, Caveats, Etc:

• First of all, I have no idea why anyone would want to do this with a user like Robert Scoble, unless you want to introduce a ridiculous amount of noise to your stream or if (like me) you’re just playing around.
• Keep in mind while it adds the users with open feeds to the list you create, it sends a request to those with private feeds. When they accept, it will automatically put them in your Home feed. For me this was a little annoying since my Home feed is tuned to just have the people I want in it. So I had to do some cleanup.
• I’ve noticed a SIGNIFICANT change in the speed of the Add/remove friends screens in FriendFeed, especially when editing friends on my Home feed list. In fact it became nearly impossible to remove people from my Home feed. I sent Robert a DM asking if he has similiar slowness.
• I wonder if doing this can be considered abuse? Perhaps FriendFeed didn’t intend it to be used this way. I’m not sure.

One thing that is for sure, after enough banging around FriendFeed became downright non-responsive. Looks like they’ve blocked the IP address I was using during all my testing of this. Oops!:

UPDATE: My IP is no longer blocked by FriendFeed.

The problem with social media, as thousands of users have experienced, is it only becomes valuable when you have a people in your networks that reply to you.

It’s easy enough to get some family members and high school chums to reply occasionally, but for the fascinating professional feedback we all crave, you have to network with people you know and share commonalities with. If you “follow” a bunch of people who don’t know you, they won’t reply to your posts because… they don’t know you. Social media is all about the relationships. People rarely decided to “like” or “retweet” based on the content of the post alone. They balance that with their knowledge of the poster.

So if you want social media to have a positive effect for you in more than just a casual way, you have two options:

A) Get all your coworkers and colleagues to use the same networks that you do, proficiently.

or

B) Work laboriously to become part of certain networks by posting to their blogs, commenting on posts, and generally showing yourself as a person worthy of their CPU cycles.

(image credit)

The new FriendFeed beta is out and it brings with it the web’s first well done implementation of realtime information sharing. For some the deluge is too much, for others it’s a huge improvement.

From what I’ve demo’d in the beta, this is a significant step forward, and gives us a glimpse of what a future web may look like. It’s a web where you don’t worry about being flooded in the river of information, because you’re able to easily tune your social networks to filter it for you. It’s a web where you can easily engage in the conversations that interest you, track them, and access your history with them at any time.

FriendFeed isn’t all these things yet, but it’s the first service to give us a functional look at it.

Some of my favorite features include:

My discussions link that takes you to a feed of conversations you’ve participated in or “liked”.

Simplified layout provides an overall improved experience.

Lists are now Filters and are more flexible, allowing you to tune a subset of your social network by users, keywords, popularity, and more.

Friends are now Subscriptions and include more than just a person, but rooms or custom RSS feeds. Also when you do a search (basic or advanced) you can easily create a Filter from the results.

Many folks have been chiming in about what’s missing , and I’ve got my feedback on the matter as well.

Suggestions and Improvements:

Link to Collapse Comments. There’s a link to expand all comments, there should be one to collapse them as well. As it is now, if I expand the comments on a thread there is no obvious way to collapse those comments. With long threads, this makes navigating the site tiring on the scrollwheel (try this on a conversation with 200+ comments, your index finger will get tired).

Comment Link at Thread Bottom Too. After expanding comments you scroll all the way to the bottom to read the thread, then if you want to join the conversation you have to scroll all the way back up to to the top to click the Comment link, then scroll all the way back down to type your comment. Why not have the link at the bottom of the thread.

Syntax for Referring to Other Users. FriendFeed needs a natural way for users to refer to each other in public conversations. The problem with conversations in FF is that they’re linear and easily get too long. A user may make a comment, someone may reply to them, but the reply easily goes un-noticed amidst the river. By employing something like the @username convention, meta data would be available to show a user all comments directed at them as well as give the To: box a more definitive feel.

User Cues that Something is About To Change, and What Changed. The realtime interface easily gives the sense that much is happening that you can’t keep your eye one. By using color and fade-ins FF can give the user more “heads-up” that an update is happening, and where the update is on the page. Instead of a new post just pushing everything down, a subtle hint that the new post is coming will give the user’s brain a chance to unfocus and be ready for the position of text on the page to change.

More UI Configuration Options. The use of colors and timing of updates should be configure-able by the user. There will never be one color scheme that “works” for everyone and the beta’s use of colors seems a bit sesame street-ish, so give the people the ability to customize their look/feel and they’ll invest themselves more into the product.

More Filter Configuraiton Options. Filter’s are a great step forward but could use improvement namely in regard to the kinds of things you can filter on (language is the main one that pops to mind).

Lurk a Discussion. If you Like something, or comment on something, it goes to your My Discussions feed. But what if you just want to lurk on a discussion and have an easy way to find it again without having to bookmarking. An option to add a thread to My Discussions without Liking or commenting on it would be good.

Search Results and Filters aren’t Realtime. Only the Home feed and lists are realtime, and there is no option in the new FF interface to create lists.