I attended WordCamp San Francisco once again this year, the annual geek lovefest for all things WordPress, and here’s a summary of highlights.

Matt Mullenweg taking questions at WordCamp SF 2010 courtesy of BloggingPro

First the keynote speech by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word.

WordPress 3.0 will have the following:

• New default theme Twenty Ten, with dropdown menus, custom post headers/images, custom backgrounds à la Twitter
• Custom Post types, making it easier to do what we’ve been doing for years using custom fields; this takes custom taxonomies to a new level and allows for Event-type posts, Press Release-type posts, each with their customized fields in the admin edit view.
• Custom Menus where users can define links in navigation menus in any way they please; this seems like the most important advanced in terms of WordPress as a CMS.

Matt mentioned some numbers too:

• 74% of WP installations are being used as CMSs.
• Core contributors went from 4 to 9.
• 1,400 users on Trac, the bug tracking software, double from 2009.
• 21m downloads of WP (10m in 2009).
• 35 billion page views for wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
• 8.5% of sites crawled by a Drupal-backed study were running WP.

The future:

• Making using WP more fun.
• Enhancing security, especially plugins via core (vetted) plugins.
• Improving publishing via mobile devices.
• WordPress.org being redesigned and to move to BuddyPress.

As you can see, the State of the Word is good.

even the "small" dowstairs hall was packed this year

Other highlights included:

• Joseph Scott on writing secure plugins. A must see talk which I will link to when it is posted on WordPress. tv. In the meantime, here’s a video about WordPress security, and a useful guide.
• Mitcho Erlewine on abstracting your code. Another must-see talk I will post (also Mitcho convinced me we should be making our plugins publicly available – more on that later).
• Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux OS. Richard explained the difference between Free software and Open Source software. As it says on the GNU.org site, it is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech” instead of “free beer”. From now on I will make a point not to confuse Open Source for Free Software.

All in all it was an excellent conference, and great value at $50. I truly appreciate Matt’s continued efforts to make the world a better place through software as opposed to trying to make as much money as possible.

Philippe Alexis and Juliette Donohue will be teaching a 2.5 hour “Workshop for Generating Leads Online” in San Jose next Thursday, February 19 from 9 to 11:30 am in San Jose ($200 before February 16).

It will give you a solid foundation into the principles of Internet marketing, and how to put them into practical use for your own website. We will also be giving out a workbook to take with you as a guide to implement the workshop recommendations.

Sign up and get more information here.

Firefox 3 (FF3) launched on June 17 2008 with much excitement and fanfare. On launch day (Download Day!) the Mozilla foundation, creators of Firefox, set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours with more than 8 million downloads. A few weeks later that number nearly quadrupled with over 28 million as of July 2nd. If you don’t have it yet, you can download it here.

Firefox Downloads

That is definitely exciting for Mozilla and family and a big congratulations to them! But what does that mean for the average user and the average busy web developer?

First off, a new browser always presents some differences in how it displays pages, and this one is no different. Many of our clients have already experienced some cross version issues and we’re making sure to stay on top of any new fixes.

1. The Good

When I first downloaded Firefox 3, I didn’t notice any new benefits and didn’t understand what the hoopla was all about. But it didn’t take me long to realize that not only did it live up to its claim of being faster and lighter, but it is one of the fastest browsing experiences I have ever had. The best way to test its speed is to open an application that was previously sluggish (in FF2) such as GMAIL, do a “before and after” test and you’ll notice a huge speed difference. It felt like I just put another 4 GB of RAM in my computer.

Aside from the obvious speed benefits and security enhancements FF3 has a lot of tools for developers to quickly add extensions and toolbar features.

2. The Bad

A) Display Problems

We have all experienced at one time or another the quirky display and layout problems between Internet Explorer and Firefox. With FF3, we now have another browser that we must check for styling, layout and positioning problems. Here’s a sample of a positioning problem with our own site (which has since been fixed):

Firefox 2 Display Snapshot for NoDiamonds

Firefox 3 Display Snapshot for NoDiamonds.com

The search bar is positioned to the right in the older version (FF2) and to the left in the newer version (FF3). These are easy and straightforward CSS fixes, but it does mean there is extra work to be done checking sites in a new browser.

We’re building a library of quirks that will help us ensure this transition is seamless for all of our users. Note that the quirks may not be due to bugs but to FF3′s better implementation of CSS and XHTML standards. The jury is still out on this one.

All of our internal testing now requires cross browser checks for 6 browsers: FF2, FF3, IE6, IE7, Safari and Opera.

B) Crashes
Not sure if it is my computer , but since installing FF3 , I’ve encountered a few crashes. Some sites that I visited crashed pretty hard within a few hours of installation.

At any rate, I’m still a believer and am sure these hiccups will be worked out soon.

3) The Tips
A) Simultaneous Firefox Versions on a Single Computer

If you’re a developer, you may need to simultaneously run both versions of Firefox for some time before ultimately switching to the new version completely. We initially tried to run the 2 versions “out-of-the-box” but every time we clicked on the new desktop shortcut it would execute the new version without trying to access the old version. Here is a helpful tutorial which shows you exactly how to run 2 FF versions simultaneously.

B) URL bar

The old URL predictor bar in the older version (FF2) was simple and useful. Sometimes as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This could well be the case for the new and “improved” URLbar. If you have downloaded the latest version and tried to type in any url address , you’ll notice a lot of new jumbled text that makes the url bar seem cluttered. It is difficult to see the actual target site and degrades the experience. Here’s a way to turn off this new and improved feature.

Re-Cap

All in all, we think that the new Firefox release will definitely help FF increase its penetration into Internet Explorer’s currently dominant browser position. Perhaps the ease of use, speed and new security enhancements will help catapult FF3 past its 20% market share mark. Just watch out though because Microsoft is close behind with its IE8 version coming soon.

Firefox vs Microsoft Market Share Stats

Source: Net Applications ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ )

I’ll be speaking on Ecommerce this Thursday December 14 at the Entrepreneur Center of the SBDC TAP (Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program, 84 W. Santa Clara St – downtown San Jose 95113)

The holiday party starts at 6pm and will include:

• 15 Minute Technology Demonstrations on Mobility, Ecommerce, Finance, VoIP
• Valuable door prizes
• FREE online subscription to Small Business Technology Magazine
• Networking with Leading Technology Consultants and Local Small Business Entrepreneurs

Register online here
Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen comes out with a list of 10 web design mistakes every couple of years. Here's the top 3 for this year (2005):

1. Legibility Problems
Most complaints were about small font sizes or frozen font sizes (which you cannot alter using a browser's Text Size command). This one really surprised me, and it prompted me to start making websites with bigger fonts. With the baby boomers getting older, it's only going to get worse.

2. Non-Standard Links
This is broken down into 5 sections:
– Non-obviously clickable links (not underlined)
– No differentiation between visited and unvisited links
– No explanation of where the link leads to (a typical example is click here)
– JavaScript or other fancy techniques that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links
– Opening pages in new windows (but Jakob says that's OK for PDF files and such)

3. Flash
Jakob says that

Most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won't recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

That fits in well with my philosophy and the reason I called my company no diamonds, meaning not flashy.

Jakob's homepage – an exercise in leanness weighing in at 15k with no images at all – too bad it still uses tables and is not XHTML valid

A war game was held last April by Fuld & Company where student teams from MIT and Harvard impersonated the big four web properties in a “Battle for Clicks”. As the Economist reports, this is how the teams introduced themselves:

already MSN and AOL are out of the picture

Yahoo!: “We don’t have to be the best at everything; we just have to be good enough for you.”

Google:“We are the true technological innovator.”

MSN: “We are all about leveraging Windows.”

AOL: “We are fortunate just to be invited to the party.”

No points for guessing who won (Google). This neatly sums up the current situation with those companies.

Although Yahoo! came last in the war game, there are those who say that its bid to become a major content provider and an advertising giant is working. On this blog I have 10 search results for Google and Yahoo, but I am leaning on Google.

I came across a fascinating site, the Annotated New York Times, which tracks online discussions on NYTimes articles. We get the physical version of the paper every morning, and occasionally I even have time to read it. I often wonder what kind of reaction certain articles provoke, and now there's a great way to find out.

A blog tracking blog entries on NYTimes articles

For example, David Brooks, the token conservative columnist of the NYT Op-Ed page, wrote a negative piece on Tom DeLay (for international readers, he is a top Republican Congressman) about some possibly corrupt practices, like getting $500k paid to members of his family.

This was an example of a Republican criticizing another Republican, something you don't see very often, so I checked out the discussion on the Annotated NYT site to see what the reactions were. There were 21 citations of the Masters of Sleaze piece. Some quotes:

we just aren't very 'conservative' anymore

And:

A miracle has occurred. David Brooks wrote a good column.

The Fourth Estate, from Wikipedia, is

the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues

The Annotated NYT is part of the phenomenon known as the Fifth Estate, where the people as represented by the blogs, watch the watchers, as represented by the press.

Since the beginning of the internet in the early nineties, browser market share has wildly fluctuated. As an excellent article on the browser wars at evolt.org explains:

In the First Era of browser history Mosaic and the other early browsers ruled. The Second Era was that of Netscape dominance. Microsoft's challenge to Netscape marked the beginning of the Third Era, the Heroic Age of the Browser Wars. Netscape's bleeding to death marked the start of the Fourth Era of Explorer dominance.

We are now officially in the Fifth Era, where Explorer starts to lose its dominance to an Open Source (freely available) competitor, Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation.

Here are some reasons to switch:

- Inbuilt Popup Blocking
- Tabbed Browsing (viewing more than one web page in a single window)
- Privacy and Security (no AcitveX controls, thus much safer than IE)
- Intelligent Search (Google Search is built into the toolbar, and there's a great “find in page” functionality)
- Lots of neat extensions, like local weather and controlling your music center at the bottom of your browser window

At its peak, IE had 93-94% of the market. As of April 2005, there have been more than 40 million Firefox downloads and Explorer's share is eroding fast. Microsoft originally announced that they would not update IE until the next version of Windows, but now they are scrambling to release an IE 7 beta version by this summer.

I live in Palo Alto, which is in the middle of Silicon Valley, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. Just a few miles from my house are Google, Yahoo, eBay, Apple and many other cutting edge technology companies. Plus there is Sandhill Road, also know as Venture Capital Central, and Stanford University, which provides a lot of the raw materials (aka brains) to fuel the innovations in the Valley.

It was exciting living here during the boom years between 1997 and 2001, where everyone was involved in startups and VC's were lining up to fund them. Recently there's been a resurgence in startups around here. My evidence is anecdotal, and includes job listings, conversations and billboards along the 101 Highway.

I came across 3 interesting startups in the past month:

certainly competitive at $1/DVD, could it be the new Netflix?

Peerflix – tagline: Trade DVDs, don't rent them! For $1 you can trade a DVD in your collection for someone else's DVD. The trade is permanent, so no late fees. I don't know if it will work but it makes perfect sense on paper.

gotvmail – allows you to outsource a complete phone answering system. It can forward phone calls to home offices or cell phones, and you can receive voicemail as email attachments. Thanks Nancy for the hat tip. (I would have included their logo but their site is a little Flash heavy, so there were no readily accessible images to grab).

Cellknight

CellKnight – tagline: Track cell phone minutes usage and STOP paying cell phone minutes overage fines
Basically it sends you an alert of how many minutes you have left in your cellphone's monthly plan, so that you can manage it better and avoid going over. You can see it's a real startup from the use of Clipart in the logo.