In this episode, David Peralty and a few others join me to talk about the news of the week. Most of the news stories deal with Automattic owned services such as IntenseDebate and Polldaddy rather than WordPress. One of the discussion points focused on why Gravatar has not yet made it mainstream. While the audio quality is not so great in this episode, I hope you’ll be able to listen through it for this particular conversation.
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios would like to announce the launch of their new project, WPClassroom.com! WPClassroom.com is dedicated to providing high quality professional WordPress training using the most powerful online training software powered by Cisco WebEx. Reserve your seat today at WPClassroom.com! By the way, use the coupon code wptavern when sigining up and that will take off $5.00 on the first class on September 9th.
Stories Discussed:
Gravatar.com Gets A Facelift
Why isn’t Gravatar Main Stream Yet?
Open Source CMS Awards
IntenseDebate Future Features
WP E Commerce Integration With IntenseDebate
PollDaddy Style Editor
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Last weeks poll question was: Do you think the Codex is the future of documentation for WordPress?
Out of a total of 45 votes, 23 of you said Yes, 20 of you said No while 2 of you wanted to know what is a Codex.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Have You Enjoyed Your Stay At The Tavern So Far?
Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – IRCLogs.wordpress.org – Enables you to see the log file for the bbPress, BuddyPress development, WordPress development, WordPress, and WPMU IRC channels. The log file page also provides a nifty bar of options at the top where you can easily switch channel logs, view log files from the past few months, or perform a search. So if you can’t catch those WordPress developer chats on Thursdays, this is the place to go to read the log file of the meeting.
David – Widget Context Plugin – Kaspars – http://konstruktors.com/blog/
Last Weeks WordPress Trivia Question:
What is the name of the new part time employee Automattic recently hired? (by the way, John is full time)
WordPress Trivia Answer:
John Godley
This Weeks Trivia Question
In a recent interview, Matt was asked if he were to start another project, along the same lines as WordPress but had nothing to do with blogging, what would it be?
Announcements:
On Thursday August 27th at 2PM Eastern Daylight Time, we’ll be interviewing Adii of WooThemes. The special date and time is due to Adiis geographic location.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Friday August 28th, 2009 8P.M. EST
Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe
Length Of Episode: 51 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode69.mp3
Listen To Episode #69:
I really like Gravatar, it is one less thing for me to worry about!
If I have users uploading their own avatars or other files, then I need to make sure that I’m backing that up in addition to my database and the files that I am uploading. In the past I have had to go digging to save my user’s avatars after a migration or upgrade, and if I can avoid that headache, why not?
One of the values that I think Gravatar adds is that it does it well. Sure it would be easy to provide the basic functionality of avatars on your own server. But fancy sites like Facebook have spoiled users into expecting that they can upload a high rez file and have it compress on the fly, or crop their headshot from a a group photo. So Gravatar helps provide users with the functionality that they are probably used to.
But I think that the biggest advantage of Gravatar is that it reduces friction. I think most people that are on the Net a lot get pretty apathetic about creating yet another user account and avoid doing so when they can. So the quicker that I can get a user signed up or better yet interacting right away without signing up, the better.
I am sure that Automattic is very reluctant to let a simple service like Gravatar become bloated, but I’d love if it included a bit more data, so that I didn’t have to provide my website, social, and chat info every time. I don’t even need the grail of a unified login ID everywhere, that kinda scares me anyways, but a simple digital driver’s license or student ID that contained my avatar, contact info, and a few other pertinent details would be excellent.
In the SitePoint Forums, Matt said if he were to start another project, it might involve “synchronization, or some sort of contextual text analysis for grammar
and spell-checking. Maybe something with anti-spam again like Akismet.”
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4347107&postcount=20