I’d recommend reading this illogical post from Duncan at Techcrunch and then rally around Matt in the comments section.
After reading all of Duncan’s and Matt’s comments I had to throw my two-cents in,
Duncan: I don’t see your point. You mention that Matt can’t have it both ways but by writing this article and placing *your* issues into a “gray area” you’re rewarding your terms with two-ways to lean; neither for or against, making you’re actually opinion irrelevant. And isn’t this just an opinion piece? I don’t see any facts–that are correct–, it’s all lambasting for self-promotion, similar to your friends at Vallywag.
No matter how many times you’ll be told that your statements are false and irrational you’ll always be clinging to that “gray area” message.
In your response to the question you pose to Matt, “WTF did someone do to you BTW? Where did this hatred come from?”. What exactly made you criticize Matt–and by association the entire wordpress community of developers and supporters–? All without one ounce of research of how to properly run a business through OSS, the business model of automattic and how Matt runs it, the history of wordpress or even get to know how spam works? Instead of reporting you glued your self-important thoughts together and lambasted the very person AND the community that built the infrastructure for you to get paid from.
I find this post so disturbing as D’s trying to associate taking advantage users by placing paid text ads on released code is the same as Matt providing a service through Wordpress.com and Akismet. He really needs to step back and learn a few things, specifically:
The Blogroll: it’s there as an example for users, is easily managable and provides a credit to the hard 
working developer community. Since Matt works very hard at wordpress.org he deserves it like the others. Lastly how does he make money off of those links again?
Akismet: Is entirely a service. Yes the free Akismet users contribute to the whole but they also benefit is the entire community. Matt is not holding back the perfect solution to stop all spam for every wordpress user, he’s just providing an added value to the paid users of Akismet because it includes a service level that the free addition could not support.
Wordpress.com: Charging for an extra service level through Wordpress.com doesn’t leverage the community nor the code-base. It’s a service level agreement that you’re paying for, similar to Akismet.
Update: Another comment.
To continue on with yesterday’s post about creating a tumbleblog with Google Reader I decided there’s other ways to aggregate my shared items so just now I just created what I’m calling a my Web Mix Tape, it’s simply a Yahoo pipe that aggregates all of my feeds and throws them into one RSS tumbleblog.
At the same time I thought it was appropriate that I added the feed generated for the pipe to my site and I’m using my latest plugin Add RSS for browser detection.
So go check out Web Mix Tape, I know it’s supposed to be cheesy.
And while you’re at it try to fix the issue of the pipe taking out the embed tags for video. I might switch feeds if I can’t figure it out because right now I wouldn’t read that feed when I could just read my shared items which embeds video perfectly.
Tumbleblogs are all the craze right now and I’ve heard a lot of people trying to figure out new ways to get one other than simply signing up and tumblr.com. For those who do not know what a Tumble blog are,
A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. – Wikipedia
So a tumbleblog or tumblog can be easily described as just an aggregator for all of your online identities and interests.
While I had a Tumblr blog I never really saw the benefit of having just another site act like a blog and without comments but now I see their purpose; to aggregate and share of your online identity. And I noticed that I’m already doing it through Google Reader.
 How I created my Tumbleblog:
First off you have to use Google Reader
Second you have to start “sharing” your items
If you find an article you want to share, simply press the share button at the bottom of the item or press shift-s and the item will now be marked ’shared’ and will be added to the site Google will create for you.
To get to your new tumblog:Â
Click on “Shared Items”
and your url is here
Google provides many other options to broadcast your shared items for you including RSS and an option to add it to your existing site.
What about other items? Specifically your own or items that aren’t in RSS.
To handle all of my own items, I subscribe to my own feeds (it’s a good idea just to make sure your feed is working properly) and then mark them for sharing.
For all the items that aren’t already in RSS, I use del.icio.us to bookmark those pages and mark them with a tumblog tag which I subscribe to through RSS and mark them the same as the rest through GR.
Pretty basic I know but know you have a simple tumbleblog and just because you don’t think it’s appropriate for yourself others might. I love subscribing to people’s shared items, I just wish people would make them more available.
Add RSS Detection
I’ve uploaded Add RSS to Wordpress Extend and updated it to version 1.5.
Description: Add RSS Feeds to your template header for Firefox and other browsers to detect automatically. Plugin facilitates adding your comments feed, per-post comment feed and allows for custom RSS feeds to be added. Feeds are not excluded to local RSS feeds of your site. Forexample you can add your Twitter or Pownce feed just as easily as adding a comments feed.
It’s a very basic plugin but I’m going to bet a lot of people would benefiting from it’s ease of use, especially the option to add per post feeds. And it works with any wordpress theme which is a plus.
AJAX CSS Switcher
I’ve also added CSS AJAX CSS Switcher (I’ve changed the name) to the repository and I’ve updated it to version 1.5. Hopefully this release will help the ailments of the last version which had problems with the version of prototype in wp-includes.
Description: This Wordpress Plugin allows you to add CSS switching to your theme without any reload. It also stores the users selection for future visits. This plugin uses UDASS The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher.
“The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher combines the power of Server Side processing and DOM scripting to swap style sheets on the fly with the power of Ajax. If JavaScript? is disabled – UDASSS degrades gracefully to improve your website accessibility. Needless to say, it is very sexy indeed.”
I created my first Yahoo! Pipe and I’m impressed with how easy it was. My first pipe involves manipulating my Pownce feed with a few regex expressions to include the post link and the comment count in the description of the item. And most noticeably I’ve taken out the “DANCAMERON:” from the title.
The reasoning: I’m using feedwordpress to pull my pownce messages to create posts on this blog. This is so my RSS readers can go straight to a post with the ability to comment rather than force them to Pownce where they’d have to sign-up to comment. For my regular readers that don’t use RSS you can just go here.
If you check out my pipe know that I still have a lot of work left. I first want to make it work with the atom feed straight from pownce, I went the simple route and used the feed from feedburner since it was converted to RSS2 already. More important then that I want to get the link within my pownce messaged to show on the post (Pownce allows for “link” messages as well as standard messages) then I want to create a published app so anyone can use it.
Update:
I’ve gone ahead and published it and the new link is here. Now anyone can use it to sanitize the atom feed and I’ll be adding more later.
After the comment on how I added additional RSS feeds for browser detection I went ahead and made the least necessary plugin I’ve ever released. Maybe Movable Anything is unnecessary for more users but this plugin might take the person longer to download and install than just modifying their header file in their template, even though it has an options panel.
For those who do not want to edit their header template I scraped this plugin together in 30 minutes. Add RSS is:
Add RSS Feeds to your template header for Firefox and other browsers to detect your additional RSS feeds. Feeds are not excluded to local RSS to your site. For example you can add your Twitter or Pownce feed just as easily as adding your comments feed.
Updated version just uploaded, 3pm PST.
I went ahead and added a bunch of RSS options to my site:
Just click the RSS icon in your browser and you should see the options above.
Update:
If you’re wondering how, all I did was put the rss feed in the header.php file of my theme. Example,
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Main” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Comments” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/DanCameroncomments” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – No mini-posts” href=”http://dancameron.org/category/general/feed/” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Pownce” href=”http://pownce.com/feeds/public/DANCAMERON/” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Google Shared” href=”http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/17910337670127747913/state/com.google/broadcast” />
I do apaligize for the duplicates yesterday. After migrating to Pownce and shutting off twitter tools to pull in posts Twitter Tools went crazy. Every time I deleted the twitter posts they automatically were added minutes later without my doing. I’m thinking it was a cron issue because only after I deleted the cron value from the options table did it stop, but I did delete the plugin instead of just deactivating it and also deleted the tweets table so I don’t know.
Anyways for the people who do not prefer my mini posts (now from Pownce) I do have other feeds for you to use, depending on the category:
http://dancameron.org/category
http://dancameron.org/category
In my next theme I’m going to make these more clear for readers because this morning I received a concerned e-mail,
I’m interested in what you write from a web design point of view and would certainly resubscribe if you create a feed for entries only
Since I’m talking about Pownce as my mini-blog tool; I really don’t know how I’m going to manage it in the future. I do want the posts in my feed and I do want everyone to be able to comment, not just Pownce users. So for now I’m going to keep them the way they are. Currently they’re being pulled in by feedwordpress and then a post is created. This is actually the same way I used twitter tools with the only caveat that my site’s sidebar will now link directly to Pownce. My reasoning is my “fans” will read my RSS and will be able to get to the post on my site to comment, my guests on the other hand will just go to Pownce directly if they click a link in the sidebar and hopefully they’ll just followup at Pownce.
In the future I do want to seperate the two becuase I really want the ability to segmant out my actual friends so I can post whatever I want and send whatever I want without any questioning about it being appropriate. And Pownce does that for me. An easier transition would be for them to fix their damn commenting if you’re not logged-in/registered.
I mentioned a new theme and I want to say that I’ve been inspired by simplicity of some major blogger sites, namely Dave Winer’s site. The plan is to either get going on a new theme for the sandbox competition or wait until the entries are released so I can fork one of the entries. The later seems more reasonible at the moment however I don’t know what I’ll be doing on some Friday night at midnight in the coming weeks.
