The long waiting period’s finally come to an end. As you might have seen already Matthew Mullenweg announced yesterday that WordPress now has a brand-spanking new plugins directory where you can browse, download, rate, and comment on all your favorite plugins.

The front plugins page lists the most popular, newest, recently updated plugins along with a featured plugin on top. The sub-section provides easy access to whatever you’re looking for through the neatly organized tag cloud (keywords) sorted by number of available plugins (I think).

Through the WordPress “Dashboard” feed update any developer can now reach millions of people by contributing and keep his/hers plugins updated on regular basis. I believe this is one of the best marketing stunts ever as it really works both ways. The developer gets massive traffic (great for SEO) and WordPress gets even more people involved with their continuously growing blogging platform.

I believe I shall now start creating and contributing my very own plugins…

This tutorial explains how to create a collapsible DIV with JavaScript and CSS. A simple trick that needs to be used more often. Just as I thought I’d publish a link to the tutorial it appears that the website (WordPress in particular) is experiencing extreme difficulties. When this is sorted however you’ll be able to read all about how to create a collapsible DIV.

In the meanwhile you might want to check out some other cool show/hide CSS/JS tricks.

Read more

Which one would you like?

Lately when I’ve paid my favourite discussion boards a visit they all seam to be flooded with SPAM. As a result I’ve now more or less stopped visiting them and most certainly lost interest due to the fact that they appear messy and that proper information is hard to find/get.

Earlier when you got notified about a response there would actually be someone trying to help, or give a related comment. Now all you get is highly irrelevant information about some obscure stock or a pill for specific purposes.

Turning the discussion boards (forums) to “members only” with insane security measures doesn’t quiet work as intended in my mind as information no longer are shared with the public. Therefore it puzzles me that the developers haven’t come up with something similar to the comment filtering in WordPress (Akismet). I for one can sit back and relax while my comment feature is wide open knowing that SPAM will be treated as SPAM and never displayed.

Web 2.0 and the websites that came out of it has also provided new ways of forwarding/sharing information and displaying it much nicer, leaving the rest left way behind. As a consequence I believe that without some drastic measures the good old discussion board are digging its grave faster and faster.

I had a look at the Alexa ratings for the 2 most popular software developers, but there’s no obvious trend except that they both seam to have fallen slightly during the first quarter this year (phpBB, vbulletin).

I would very much like to get your opinion on this as I’m currently seriously thinking of removing my old phpBB support forum off the site for good.

Applications and websites that have provided bandwidth speed tests have been around for ages, but Speedtest.net takes the concept a step further. With a ultra cool “Web2.0ish” interface you’ll get your upload and download speed displayed on your screen based on a connection with a remote server of your own choice.