X-hacker: If you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.

(Thanks Matt, but for now I’m happy where I am. ;) )

I think this is a very, very clever way of getting talent to join your company. You immediately know that the people who saw this is technical. Well, at least until someone blog about it and the cat’s out the bag :P

Just remember kids! Finding headers like these is not a guarantee you’ll get the job.

The good news is that all is good on Afrigator now. All blogs that are using some form of Pubsubhubbub service will be realtime in no time.

If you’re running on WordPress (not WordPress.com) and you have not yet installed PuSHPress, please do so soon!

If you are using WordPress.com (i.e. yourname.wordpress.com) your good to go. If you run your own installation of WordPress, I strongly suggest that you install the PuSHPress plugin. Why? Here is a good couple of reasons:

1. It get you more exposure. Your latest post would be published immediately. This results in your content being distributed as they’re published instead of hours later.

2. It saves you bandwidth. We don’t need to check your entire feed every hour. We sit back and wait until you publish a blog post.

3. We’re not the only ones doing it. Other services and aggregators also uses Pubsubhubbub. Services like Friendfeed, etc. Which means you’ll save even MORE bandwidth and your content would be even more realtime.

Okay, I’m still having issues with Blogspot blogs. They use a Google Appspot application to enable the realtime publishing of their feeds. However, when I try to subscribe at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com it always returns a 500 Internal Server Error and I’m not sure why. I tried setting various headers as I thought that maybe it is because I’m using a Python script to subscribe, but to no avail. I checked using the service Hurl and that works every time without fail. I’m a bit frustrated and lost. If anyone have any ideas, I’d welcome it.

A lot of services uses it nowadays and it is gaining traction. If you’re on blogger/blogspot or wordpress.com you needn’t worry about it as they have already enabled it for those platforms. If you are on a self hosted wordpress blog, I suggest you check out the awesome wordpress plugin called PuSHPress. Install it now! It would be worth it ;)

Oh and here is a video explaining it in a cool way.

Note: I’m going to churn quite a bit of posts to test our Afrigator implementation of Pubsubhubbub.

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!

Well, dude, sorry to hear about your shit! Have a nice life, or should I say death? Anyway, R.I.P. and Feliz Navidad.

I’ll admit to this: It won’t be a mainstream model any day soon. It is a little harder than I initially thought and I do all the post markups by hand. People without fair HTML and CSS knowledge will not cope at all. We can always work on some WordPress plugins to streamline the process!

As for this blog, I’ll do it the way Nic has done it. Using the simple, quick to publish Prologue2 theme to do Twitter-like updates. I do like that. Also, I’m changing the flow in that random pics and photos won’t go to pic.stii.co.za anymore, but everything gets drawn here. One blog to rule them all!

I’ve spent enough time musing and fuming about this. Everyone for himself and the devil for us all. Enjoy it, else you’re not doing it right!

Why then do we stick with our same old boring templates post after post? Can you imagine you buy your favorite glossy magazine and page through it only to see every single page looks exactly the same? Yes, you may argue “…but print is dead!”. Newsflash! Our medium is boring. I’ll rather be dying than be boring. So why do we refuse to draw on years of research on design? When we were still based in Media City in Cape Town amongst the magazines I talked to a couple of the editors and I basically wanted to know how they design their look and feel? It turns out that it is a science. You may think they only take a bunch of words, slap in a bunch of good looking pictures and BAM! Print it, ship it. No, not quite… A lot of thought goes into the design and layout of individual articles. I’m sure not all magazines take that approach, but basically the good ones do.

Don’t get me wrong. I think theme designers out there do a great job at making themes unique and very pretty. Awesome job guys! It is just that if you read it regularly, it becomes boring. Have a look at Dustin Curtis‘ blog. That is an amazing way of doing articles on a blog! It is definitely a step in the right direction.

Have a look at some of his posts and you’ll get the idea. The post is the main focus, as it SHOULD be. No sidebar. There should not be one IMHO. Looking at my stats (not that I think that is anything to go by) a very small amount of clicks goes to sidebar links. VERY SMALL. So what is the point? No, point. Yes, it sucks at the moment, but even before this crappy design it had very little clicks.

Now people that know me would agree that I’m a crap designer. Doing posts like Dustin’s would require that you not only put thought into your writing, but also your post layout and design! What a bloody mission, I’ll admit, but it may well be a worthwhile mission. Lets try and see.

I realised that I just fell for their stupid tactic. Ugh, dumb! I should have known to simply trust Akismet. It has never let me down before, why would it now?

Here is a comparison between the two comments. One legitimate, the other fake. If only these spammers would stop doing shady stuff and start applying their immense creativity and skills to real business… Too much hard work I suppose!

This time round I won’t take any old theme out there and mould it to fit me. I’ll roll my own. I also have a few ideas for plugins which I’d like to throw out there, but patience is a virtue people. With me, you’ll have to have an incredible amount of patience…