Wordpress

Last week the PHP team released version 5.2.14 and with that came this:

This release marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.

I spent a large chunk of my day playing with Wordpress 3.0-beta. I must say that I am very impressed with the changes they have made. Doing a fresh install, I was very pleased with something I have wanted for years – the ability to chose your username and password at installation. I always considered the ‘admin’ username a security threat and would manually change the username in the database for any Wordpress sites I set up.

One of the heavier sides of blogging platforms is in comment management. Just sorting and rendering the comments can be heavy enough, but when you add in the extra overhead of services and systems to combat spam, you end up with a lot of your server power going to enabling your visitors to give feedback.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has just released a comprehensive report on the differences between the two sides of the political blogosphere and the approaches and technologies they embrace. The entire report is worth a read (58 page PDF), but this graph sums it up very nicely: