Automattic has acquired After The Deadline, a Wordpress plugin startup company.  After The Deadline designed a solid grammar and spelling plugin for Wordpress.  Matt Mullenweg, the chief developer of Wordpress called up Raphael Mudge, the only After The Deadline employee to find out what it would take to buy out his entire company.

The deal was made this past July and now After The Deadline was made accessible for all Wordpress.com users.  Automattic has around $30 million in funding and purchased the blo.gs pinging service from Yahoo! this past April.  Automattic also bought out PollDaddy in October and Intense Debate in September.

Blogs that run on Wordpress.com now automatically have the RSSCloud feature integrated into them. Wordpress.org users can download a plugin from here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsscloud/.

RSSCloud is a service that adds a cloud feature to RSS feeds. As soon as an author writes a blog post or news story, an update ping is sent to a cloud server. The cloud will determine whether that post is being subscribed to. If someone is subscribing to them, then the RSS aggregator is updated. This all happens within a second. The RSSCloud protocol was made by Dave Winer, the inventor of the original RSS specification.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of Wordpress wrote about the changes on the company blog. “There’s only one reader so far (River2) that supports RSS cloud, but we expect there to be more in the future. We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible, making blogging a more real-time experience. Since RSS Cloud is so easy to add to RSS, it seemed like a good place to start,” wrote Mullenweg

Those who are running on an old version of open source blog platform Wordpress may be susceptible to a worm attack.  Currently Wordpress powers over 5.3 million blog websites.  Twitter power user and blogger Robert Scoble was hit hard by the worm attack.

“A few weeks ago some hackers broke into my blog here (this was before 2.8.4 was released). At first I thought they just left some porn sites in a couple of blog entries. So we upgraded Wordpress (I was on 2.7x back then). Deleted a fake admin account. Deleted the porn sites. And thought we had solved the problem. We didn’t,” stated Scoble on his blog.  “They broke back in, but this time they did a lot more damage. They deleted about two months of my blog. Yes, I didn’t have a backup. I should learn to do backups (we’re doing them now). Life has a way of beating you if you don’t have backups.”

If you notice something fishy about a new account that was created called Administrator (2) or have a strange addition to your permalinks, then it is likely that your account was hacked into. One of the best ways to avoid getting hacked is by upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress which has security patches.

Now more than ever we have to work very, very hard to earn our money.  Time equals money and task management is the forefront of productivity.  I could go on and on with additional cliches such as “action breed results,” but I’ll just get right to the point.  Here are the top 14 best mobile to-do list services.

14. Motask.com

Motask.com is a free, simple service where users can add, edit, and mark tasks as finished.  Motask’s simplicity makes it a very intuitive service.  The site is best viewed from mobile browsers, but it also works well with any normal PC/Mac browser.

13. Todoist (Smartphone Web Interface)

Todoist was started by Amir Salihefendic.  Todoist is a very minimalistic to-do list service.  It has a Firefox sidebar plugin, GMail integration, keyboard shortcuts, labels, reminders, Quicksilver plugin, iGoogle, and Netvibes widgets.

The mobile version of Todoist is located at: http://todoist.com/m/.

12. TooDo (Google Android)

TooDo is a Google Android app that has two-way sync with Remember the Milk and Toodledo.  Task notifications can be setup on a contextual or geographic basis.  Tasks can be submitted via SMS.  And notes can have images, audio, and video attached to them.

The most recent version of TooDo can be downloaded here.

11. Jott (iPhone App)

Jott is a free iPhone application that converts your voice into notes and tasks.  All of the notes are backed up on Jott.com and added to your account.  Tasks through Jott.com can be added from the iPhone app, the desktop app, Twitter, Google Calendar, etc.

Below is a screen shot of the iPhone app in use.  The app can be downloaded from the iTunes App store.

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The winter season is officially less than two weeks away.  Temperatures are dropping and the snow is already falling.  Are you and your blog ready for the winter?  Here is a list of 42 of the best Wordpress winter themes I’ve seen. The list is in the order that I found them.

1. Cool Winter

[Demo] [Download]

2. Metamorph Ice

[Demo] [Download]

3. Iced

[Demo] [Download]

4. NT Winter Theme

[Demo] [Download]

5. Winter Ice

[Demo] [Download]

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Automattic has made an acquisition that will help improve upon the comment system that they have built on Wordpress, the open source blog platform that receives millions of downloads.  The company Automattica acquired was IntenseDebate.  Wordpress has been continuously improving upon their comment system through the integration of Akismet.  Pulse 2.0 itself has been able to avoid 200,000 spam comments through Akismet.  But I want the ability to easily add comment threading just by installing a new version of Wordpress.  If this acquisition speeds that up, I’m happy.

The new version of Wordpress will automatically have IntenseDebate preinstalled.  This directly affects the business model of Disqus and JS-Kit.  During the post-acquisition integration process, IntenseDebate will be going into private beta mode and will be invite-only.  This gives the company enough time to ramp up on hardware. 

Intense Debate is based in Boulder, Colorado and raised $300,000 in funding from seed investors according to Eric Eldon.  The acquisition price is unknown.  Intense Debate will continue to build plugins for multiple blog platforms. 

On March 18, I read and wrote about the new features of Wordpress 2.5. When Automattic released 2.5 days later, I upgraded right away. But to my disappointment, there were some bugs when using the open source blogging tool on Windows Vista: on both IE7 (Internet Explorer 7.0) and Firefox 2.0. These errors were directly associated with the image upload and media library tools. I’ve managed to resolve the issue by reading Wordpress forums.

Here is how you fix these errors.

Firefox
Go into the root folder where you copy the wp-admin, wp-includes, wp-content folders. In that folder is a file called “.htaccess.” You need to edit this file so that the below code is inserted before # END WordPress.

The code that needs to be inserted before END WordPress is:
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

After inserting that code, WordPress 2.5 should work in Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7.0
Make sure that you edit the same code above for Firefox. The .htaccess file needs to be edited along with the other following files.

In the file, ” root folder /wp-admin/includes/media.php “, there is a comma that throws off the photo upload tool. Here is the code that throws it off.

file_queue_error_handler : fileQueueError,
file_dialog_complete_handler : fileDialogComplete,

debug: false,
});

See that comma after debug: false? Delete it.

One more file has to be manipulated for Wordpress 2.5 to work in IE.

In the file, root folder /wp-includes/js/swfupload/handlers.js
There is a line of code that says:

.animate({minHeight:0,height:36,}, 400, null, function(){jQuery(this).children(’.describe’).remove()})

See that comma after height:36? Delete that comma! Make sure to save both files after deleting the commas and then Wordpress 2.5 should be fully functional in both IE and Firefox. I literally figured this out 5 minutes ago. Let me know if it works for you.

Information Source:
[1] WordPress ticket

I’ve been using WordPress for about 4 years now.  Every time WordPress releases an update, it’s exciting.  I feel this way because I have no problem saying that WordPress is the most influential and powerful open-source platform of our time.  I feel that it has a more profound affect on the open source world today than Wikipedia.  Wikipedia’s ‘open-sourceness’ is still controlled by a designated community of moderators whereas WordPress allows it’s users to express their individuality.

Other blogging platforms cannot be compared to WordPress.  I used Xanga for a while but it seems like that blog platform company has their own agenda.  After Google acquired, Blogger, it seems like not many additions were made.  Blogger is bland compared to WordPress.  You can modify the hell out of your WordPress look & feel to fit your personality.

There were a couple of limitations with previous versions of WordPress.  WordPress’ back-ends did not have an easy way to setup photo galleries.  And switching between the Wordpress Visual and Code editor forms were choppy too.  This becomes especially noticeable when embedding Java scripts.  Hopefully new versions of WordPress will address this issue.

On the WordPress blog, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress announced the new features of WordPress 2.5.  These features include:
“A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times.”

The most exciting part in the list above is the multi-file upload and galleries.  As an obsessive blogger, my hope is that WordPress will have the same abilities that Engadget’s content management system (CMS) has.  The rate that Engadget creates photo galleries makes it seem easy.  See what I’m referring to [here].

WordPress’ parent company is Automattic.  For previous Automattic coverage, refer to http://pulse2.com/category/automattic/.

Automattic is the parent company of Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.  Wordpress.org is an open source blogging platform and Wordpress.com is the blogging community platform.  Automattic has officially received $29.5 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Ventures, and the New York Times [source: NYT].

Some Wordpress.org competitors include Blogger and TypePad.  Wordpress.com competitors include Xanga and LiveJournal.   Automattic raised $1.1 million two years ago as well.  Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic stated that the funding would go towards building additional services.

The New York Times Company has been using the Wordpress platform for their subsidiaries for quite some time.  About.com, a New York Times Company subsidiary is based on the Wordpress platform.  And NYT has more than 50 blogs that are powered by Wordpress as well.

Wordpress also recently gave their users on Wordpress.com a major step-up in terms of storage capacity.  Wordpress users only had 50MB up until recently, but now they 3GB each.  Matt Mullenwag, founder of Wordpress hopes that this increase in capacity will encourage their users to prdouce richer media.  Users who have paid for 1GB in the past will get 5GB instead of the free 3GB.

The announcement is also confirmed on Matt Mullenwag’s blog.

Four days ago, I wrote a detailed post about how Wordpress 2.1 and Wordpress 2.1.2 and how it doesn’t work well with the Pulse 2.0 back-end while using Internet Explorer.  Well Wordpress, I have you figured out.  Essentially, I couldn’t even click on the Pulse 2.0 Visual editor when I was logging in from http://www.pulse2.com’s Admin, but it does work when I log into http://pulse2.com’s Admin.  I have no idea why this is the case, but this is just something that I discovered when testing the Admin page tonight.

From now on, I’ll be using Internet Explorer to write my posts again and also to the browse the Net.’
Reasons for this:

• Internet Explorer 7.0 has some significant improvements over Internet Explorer 6.0
• Alexa toolbar
• Viewing fonts and websites with Internet Explorer may take a bit longer to load, but seem to be sharper than Firefox
• Lastly, there are add-ons to make IE 7.0 more Firefox-like listed on the Google Operating System blog.  I’ll be installing them shortly. 

Wordpress development team, I owe you an apology for thinking that the back-end didn’t work for IE.  However, there are still some bugs in the system, but I’m sure you are looking into it.

There are so many blogs out there that run on Wordpress and depend on its user interface and functionality: Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, GigaOM, StartupSquad, Profy and Mashable just to name a few. When new versions of the software are released, you should expect that its major functionalities are bug free. I wish I could say that about Wordpress 2.1 which I have been not too happy with since upgrading. I may be the only one who is having this issue, but the biggest problem is that it does not work with Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0 correctly. Below is a screen shot of the back-end of Wordpress when writing a blog post whether you are TechCrunch or GigaOM and using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

The difference is that when you’re using Internet Explorer, shows up and you can’t even click on the form to write the post. This is a major problem because this forces publishers like myself to switch to Firefox when writing posts. As a developer myself, I understand that ensuring compatibility with Internet Explorer can sometimes be tricky because the browser may not follow W3C standards. But the reality is that Microsoft Internet Explorer still has the largest market-share for Internet browsers.

Sometimes you may end up on computers that will not allow you to install Firefox because you may not have admin privelages. Does that mean I should be stuck not having the ability to update my own blog because of Wordpress flaws? This is a call to all Wordpress developers to integrate Internet Explorer compatibility. I’m certain that the publishing community would appreciate it.

If I were to rank the some of the mainstream blogging platforms from best to worst, it would be Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogger, MSN Spaces, Xanga, Live Journal, and then the social networks that have blogs built-in like MySpace and Facebook Notes. But now there is a new blogging platform gearing up for release called Habari. The name Habari is based on a word that means ‘What’s the news?’ in Swahili. Habari aims to utilize new interface technologies such as PHP 5 and AJAX.

Some of the developers that are involved are Michael Heilemann, Owen Winkler, Abou Alfa, Chris J Davis, Scott Merrill and Rich Bowen, all of whom had a major role in the Wordpress blogging platform development. Heilemann developed a default theme for version 1.5 of Wordpress called Kubrick. Winkler was heavily involved with the development of Wordpress 2.0. Abou Alfa contributed Manji, Rin, and the Shuttle project to Wordpress. Scott Merrill has developed plug-ins for Wordpress in the past. And Rich Bowen has been a contributor for Wordpress development as well.

The release date has not been announced yet, so this means that bloggers can speak up about what they want out of a new blogging platform. On Abou Alfa’s blog, there was a prototype screen shot available of the user interface below:

The Habari project page is located at http://code.google.com/p/habari.