Jeffrey Veen: Making A Better Open Source CMS: A rant from Jeffrey Veen about Open Source CMS usability. I agree with some of his points, but disagree with his characterizations. In other words, he makes the choices sound very easy. In Open Source CMS development (as in any other development environments that have a widely seperated user base) not every user wants everything to be spoon fed, just like every user does not want to have to understand the inner working and settings for a “pingback”. There is a delicate balance that has to be struck. (Though I agree that many developers tend to forget the differences between the developer model and the user model). The one item in his list that I am striving towards (for WordPress) is to write task-based documentation first. Spolsky and his paper on Technical Specifications come to mind. Via: UI Designer

PHPThumb: An interesting PHP image manipulation function. The problem still lies with the fact that GD is used by this function and must be installed on the server. Imagemagik is still a better solution for image manipulation and does a MUCh better job.

Plume CMS: Here is another CMS system brought to my attention. It uses PHP and MySql. With a single installation of Plume you can have multiple websites, file management, multiple authors with different rights and websites in any languages thanks to a full utf-8 support. Plume CMS proposes a flexible plugin infrastructure to extend it and is fully accessible with output providing standard compliant code by default. There are some screenshots available and they look a lot like Blogger in many ways. Thanks Michael!

GBlog: Another PHP based, non-database, simplistic blogging software, and No, this has NOTHING to do with Google. Via: Om

Manageability – How to Automagically Make the Technorati 100: Photomatt is Number 3!

A thorough article on the Object Oriented Programming of Javascript

Gnomedex Attendee blogs Via Jeremy Zawodny

Technorati Hackathon at the new San Francisco Offices: Here is a little You provide and We provide thing from Sifry. WE PROVIDE: Free pizza, beer, soft drinks; Fast WiFi, whiteboards, lots of room to hack as a group or individually, experts, help, and advice. YOU PROVIDE: Creativity, energy, good humor, great ideas, willingness to teach and learn, readiness to hack! I really wish I lived on the West Coast!