Monthly Archives: June 2010

WordPress 3.0: The Beginning of WordPress Tumbleblogs?

A lot of people enjoy using the easy to use Tumblr service as a way to save and share links, quotes, videos, pictures, etc.. These “tumbleblogs,” as they are called, are a neat idea. It’s a similar concept to Twitter, posting quick updates instead of full-length blog posts. Out of the box, WordPress can be (and is) used in this manner. You don’t get the easy-to-use multimedia posting interface like Tumblr, though. Or the different styling for each type of post, either.

WordPress 3.0 has improved support for custom post types, which would make it very easy for someone to build Tumblr-like functionality into WordPress by way of a plugin.

Here’s a business idea for anyone enterprising enough to make it happen: Build a plugin that extends WordPress with Tumblr-style functionality. Add hooks and functions that themes could take advantage of. Give the plugin away for free, licensed under the GPL of course. Once that’s out of the way, you build a business selling themes that make use of the plugin. The plugin provides the framework, and then you can sell some low-cost themes that utilize the framework.

Lazy-Loading Images

You may have noticed that a lot of large blogs, like Smashing Magazine and the TUTS+ network, are “lazy-loading” images in their posts. Sometimes, as you scroll through a post full of images, you might catch an image fading in just as it comes…

iPhone 4 Gets a 326ppi Screen: What Does this Mean for Web Design?

The new iPhone 4’s screen may be the same size as its predecessor’s, but the resolution is much higher. 326 pixels per inch, versus the 160ppi of the previous models. (This works out to pixel dimensions of 960×640 for the new model and 320×480…

Lord of the Rings Online to Switch to “Freemium” Model

I’ve always been a fan of the “freemium” business model, particularly in video games. I previously mentioned how Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online saw a 500% increase in revenue after switching to a free-plus-paid-extras approach. I play DDO a bit, and I really like…

No Support Linux Hosting

We ignore the support questions and pass the savings on to you. Not lazy. Efficient. That’s the slogan for No Support Linux Hosting, a company providing ridiculously cheap web hosting. You pay $1 per month for shared hosting with 1GB of disk space, a…

BlogBuzz June 19, 2010

WordPress 3.0 Now Available

Just yesterday WordPress 3.0 was finally made available. Featuring the new default “Twenty Ten” theme and the long-awaited (by some) merging of WordPress and WordPress MU. The interface, also, has had some cosmetic changes. Everything is still in the same place, but it’s all…

Sauerbraten: The Open Source FPS Game

Need a break from webmastering? How about a game of Sauerbraten? It’s an open source First Person Shooter game with graphics and gameplay along the lines of Quake. There is very little singleplayer functionality, but the various online (or LAN) multiplayer modes are a…

CSS Selector Efficiency

Here’s a fun (and slightly puzzling) fact: CSS selectors are parsed from right-to-left instead of from left-to-right when the browser renders a page. This means that when you have a selector like .navigation a { color: red; }, the browser first searches for a…

BlogBuzz June 12, 2010