Some bloggers have wondered whether the netbook hype that’s currently going on will popularize Linux among (former) Windows users. For me personally, I can aswer that question with a firm ‘yes’. Not only did I opt to install Ubuntu on my netbook, I’ve also set it up on my ‘TV-PC’.
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As you may know from previous posts, I’m not really a Mac zealot. In fact I’ve never owned an Apple computer myself. I have used them at work, and I’ve always liked having them around just for the sake of competition. It actually was an Apple IIc that got me ‘into’ computers. When I was eleven, a friend of mine’s dad had one and we taught ourselfs Basic just so we could write little games and apps to play with. Fond memories indeed.

Asides from the obviously superior design of some Macs, I just feel there’s little to lure me there. OSX annoys me at least as much as Vista does (which is not much btw), and since the innards are identical nowadays I see no reason for me to switch. Especially not when Apple itself, the company I mean, is bugging the hell out of me.
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Edward Terry’s Tweet3D lets you few any Twitter user’s most frequent topics as a 3D tag cloud. I’m not quite sure what kind of (undoubtably very clever) magic goes on behind the screens, but it appears that the topics are frequently used words. Somehow, Tweet3D extracts these from previous tweets and passes them to Cumulus to be displayed. Pretty nifty stuff!

Igor A. Melekhine recently sent me a modified version of my Youtuber plugin that adds a ‘high quality’ checkbox to the options page. When checked, Youtuber will attempt to play all videos in the superior MP4 format. Not only will this improve video quality, it’s also the only way to get stereo sound. I’ve incorporated Igor’s changes into a new version, 1.4. Available from your local wordpress.org now.

Thanks Igor, Novastar sounds so much better in high quality.

I just checked the download stats on the WP-Cumulus page at wordpress.org, and saw that the plugin has been downloaded over ten thousand times. Unfortunately, I have no idea how many people downloaded it from this blog before I moved it to the WordPress server, but the total number of users is probably even higher.

10,000 downloads is insignificant when compared to the hundreds of thousands downloads registered for some other plugins, but i’m pretty excited that so many people have taken the time to give WP-Cumulus a try.

I recently found myself wondering just how many people are making a living installing/theming/maintaining/pluginning/training WordPress. There appears to be a large ecosystem of freelancers and companies that rely on our favorite blogging tool for (part of) their income.

To get an idea of how big this ecosystem is, I decided to run a little survey. My blog only has a limited reach, so please forward this little poll to other people it may interest. The result may be very interesting and reveal WordPress’ true economical significance.

Please use the poll below to indicate how much of your personal income comes from WordPress-related work. Please do not vote more than once (or less!). There’s probably some sort of IP-based protection against double votes, but please do not try to find out just in case. This is all completely anonymous, I’m not going to steal your customers :).

Thanks in advance for passing this around.

Yannick Lejeune has ported WP-Cumulus to Typepad. Aptly named Tumulus, the snippet of code can be downloaded from Yannick’s site. One more step towards world domination (insert evil laughter here)…

I’ve been using Google’s new browser for little over a week now. I need to have Firefox and IE running when I’m doing web design stuff, but for actually browsing the web, I’ve been using Chrome. And you know what? I just made it my default browser.
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For as long as I remember, WordPress has had the option to send an automatic email to the admin whenever someone posts a comment. I used to have that option enabled. I love responding to comments right away. It helps keep discussions alive and it helps to keep you blog clean of any spam that might slip through Akismet. With the succes of WP-Cumulus however, the volume of comments has been increasing steadily, and I’ve had to disable comment notification.
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I would not have thought it to be possible, but Amanda has succeeded in porting WP-Cumulus to Blogger. She’s written a short tutorial on how to set it up, which is surprisingly easy to do. I haven’t used Blogger since 2003, and wouldn’t have known where to start. So thanks Amanda!

If you’re a Blogger user and you want to catch up with what’s been happening with the WordPress version, click here.