stuart test blog

Photo sharing site, Zooomr, are apparently giving away Pro accounts to bloggers who display one or more of their Zooomr photos on their blog. I checked out the site this morning and it definitely has a lot going for it, but there are also a few things I didn’t like about it. I particularly didn’t like the log in system – instead of just signing up and creating an account, you get redirected to a 3rd party site to set up an OpenID account. You can also sign in using a Google account or a few others too, but this seems to be an overly complex system for just creating an account. I’m not going to do much with my account until next week as they are planning to implement a lot of changes during the upcoming week, so I’ll check it out after that and see if it gives my Flickr Pro account a run for it’s money. In the meantime, here’s a Zooomr photo I took of the sunrise over Wellington, NZ.

Sunrise over WellingtonHosted on Zooomr

The news just in is Joanne Colan will be taking over from Amanda Congdon as the new presenter of Rocketboom. Joanne previously worked as a presenter for MTV Europe. I used to watch MTV Europe 8 years ago when I lived in South Africa, and If this is the same presenter that I’m thinking of, then I’m looking forward to downloading the new Rocketboom episodes!

Techmeme: BREAKING: New Rocketboom Girl Chosen, Looks Strangely Like Old One (huffingtonpost.com)

Let the blog-mobs begin…

The blogging community loves a controversy, especially if it involves ‘one of their own’. Amanda Congdon from RocketBoom, has left the show suddenly after some disagreements with her business partner and majority shareholder of RocketBoom, Andrew Baron.

Depending on who’s blog you read first, you’ll probably get different sides of the story, so best to follow the discussion on Techmeme.

Update: I don’t think Amanda will find it hard to get more work, especially with an offer like this!

Interesting controversy stirring up at the moment is how eBay have banned their sellers from using Google Checkout. Their excuse is that it’s an untested and potentially unsafe product, but Google have a long history of making/receiving payments with their Adsense products and more recently their video portal. Populary opinon is that eBay is afraid of the competition that Google Checkout gives eBay’s own payment system, PayPal. This is despite the obvious fact that Google Checkout and PayPal are very different products, althoguh their is a bit of overlap.

eBay also recently banned RapLeaf which provides a commenting and rating system for buyers and sellers on ecommerce sites. Again, the popular opinon was that eBay banned it because it competed with their own rating systems which is just ridiculous.

I just finished creating my first plugin for WPMU. This plugin allows to set the file upload limits on a blog-by-blog basis.

See this forum for more details: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1378.

Download the file here: upload-space-plugin.zip, and place it in your mu-plugins folder.

UPDATE: I’ve just created a screenshot of the interface below, you can get to this screen by going to ‘Site Admin’ –> ‘Blogs’ –> edit blog.

Part of my feed reading this morning lead me to sign up with Yahoo! Mail so that I could test out their new beta mail product. So I signed up with a Yahoo! NZ address of stuart.maxwell@yahoo.co.nz but this didn't allow me to switch over to the new beta. I changed my location to UK, and noticed the link to test out the new Mail beta.

The beta is seriously cool, and makes Windows Live Mail look like the project of a pre-school coder. The interface is the closest to a full desktop application that I've seen for a while (the pre-alpha Roundcube Mail is similar to this too.) Everything is snappy – changing between mail folders, or opening and closing emails all happens quickly with no visible signs of waiting. Compare this to the constant "working on your request" messages you get while using Windows Live Mail (not to mention the "Windows Live Mail wasn't able to complete this request" messages with WLM too!)

There's also a snazzy button that lets you add a contact to your addressbook with one click from an email you've received. This won't make me switch email addresses as I still prefer the simpler, quicker interface you get with Gmail, but this is definitely a big contender for top dog in the email contests. Both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail put Microsoft's effort to shame. Let's hope that Microsoft takes a hard, long look at the competition out there and makes some big changes.    

I’ve put in a couple of big updates to the Blogtown NZ site. I implemented the memcached cacheing daemon and enabled caching using the WordPress memcached plugin. I also updated to the latest nightly which fixes a lot of the bugs that have been lurking around.

If you’re keen on setting up your Blogtown NZ blog, visit this the site here: http://blogtown.co.nz/wp-signup.php

Several sites are reporting that a Microsoft France site was hacked and defaced. The site is currently down so it appears as though Microsoft have taken it offline to firefight.

A mirror of the defaced site can be found here: zone-h.org.

My latest blogging venture is to create a site listing all of the blogs that are based in New Zealand.

I’ve created the NZ Blogs site on Blogtown NZ which is the free, blogging service that I’ve set up to make it easy for New Zealanders to start their own, local blog.

I can’t track down all the blogs myself, so there’s a submission form on the site which allows you to submit your own blog, or the blog of someone else you know in NZ.

I’m going to try to make a WordPress Widget at some point that will allow you to easily link to it, but for the time being you can find all the blogs and a nice OPML file on the home page over on the NZ Blogs site.

UPDATE! Check out the Recent Posts page which lists the 20 most recent posts from all blogs – you may find something interesting there.

I stumbled across this site recently via Tim Haines’s blog – fivepointsix.co.nz is a new photo sharing site based in New Zealand. I’m always interested in local offerings of services that are usually only available overseas – Zoomin is another good example of a great NZ site.

I’m not too sure about the fivepointsix site though, it doesn’t seem to have any advantages over any of the other free, photo sharing sites. You’re only allowed to store 50 photos and they can’t be over 2MB each. I was most interested in the storage facilities because any locally based site will suffer from the economies of scale and probably won’t be able to offer unlimited storage like most other international sites.

But there are some cool features, and from reading the News section, it appears as though more and more features are being added every day. One of the nice features is the ability to have open galleries where several people can contribute to one album – good idea for parties and functions where there are lots of people with digital cameras.

I didn’t like the fact that nowhere on the site is there an email address or contact details of the owner or webmaster. I was keen to pose some questions to the creators but could find no way to contact them. There’s no advertising on the site, which is nice, but it makes you wonder what their business model is, or whether the site is just someone’s part-time hobby?

Links:

• fivepointsix
• Tim Haines’s blog post mentioning the site