• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

If it is WordPress we can help (sorry we don’t do MovableType*).  From custom development, installation and support we can make your blog big in Japan ~ big wherever you want…

*we can; however, migrate your MT blog to WordPress!

I think it turned out to be a perfect example of what can be done in a very small amount of time with Yahoo UI and YAHOO.ext. In a day’s worth of work, I have completely transformed the comments system on this site. Around half of that time was spent on the user interface, and the other half modifying WordPress to do the things it needed to do on the backend.

The system looks nice and it speeds up page loads as the comments are posted via Ajax.  NICE!

Here is the new blog.  Here is the new feed.

Toni Schneider is announcing the launch of the Automattic Support Network for enterprise-grade support of WordPress and WordPress MU.

Says Toni:

WordPress is already used to power blogs and sites by several well known large companies, places like the New York Times, CNET, and About.com. In talking to other large corporate users over the past few months, I’ve received the same request over and over: if we could pay you to provide us with enterprise level support for WordPress, we’re ready to deploy it in a big way. We’ve responded by creating the Support Network. It’s loosely modelled after similar offerings from companies like MySQL and Red Hat who provide support subscriptions for open source software.

WordPress is our primary platform, and we’ve been talking with Matt & Toni about serving as one of their recommended professional service providers for integration, development, marketing support and other types of professional services that are adjuncts to the core platform support Automattic will focus on. We are also moving ahead on integrating white-label versions of some of the Big in Japan apps (PodServe, primarily), which we think are an ideal complement to extensible platforms like WordPress.

Check out what the Support Network has to offer.

Update:  Marshall weighs in at TechCrunch.

One of the questions I get all the time is how to measure ROI for social media. (A better question is how do we value return on attention, but, let’s bracket that.) Naturally, you want to know if this stuff is helping you achieve your business objectives. As Hugh correctly points out, blogging’s impact is mostly indirect. And it’s also a long-haul thing. You have to stick with it to build your tribe. Some of the metrics we look at are readership, feed subscribers, comments, links, inquiries, leads, partners and so on.
That said, sometimes the gains are so immediate and direct you sort of get slapped in the face. Exhibit A: the blog for the as-yet-unreleased open source ticketing system called SimpleTicket. SimpleTicket was developed by Architel, who started blogging about it on their own site. Soon, they were getting so many inquiries for the code & questions about the project, that they needed to launch a blog just to more efficiently communicate with this growing community. So, we put together another WordPress-driven site for SimpleTicket, and they started blogging the project progress there.

Results to date:

• A new crackerjack employee for Architel, who found them (and thought they were cool) because of SimpleTicket
• Over $75,000 in annual billings from new clients who hired Architel after discovering them through SimpleTicket
• Immediate improvements to the base code for the project; questions answered
• An international group of beta testers ready for the code release on the 28th

Again, the impact of blogging & social media is often indirect, but these are some pretty good results for a blog that is just a few weeks old.

Technorati Tags: architel, hugh+macleod, simpleticket

The term TrackBack was introduced by Six Apart which introduced a mechanism in their blogging server, Movable Type, that works by sending a ‘ping‘ between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert. The blog receiving the ping typically displays the TrackBack information below a blog entry. This usually includes a summary of what has been written on the target blog, together with a URL and the name of the blog. The Referer field in the HTTP protocol was originally intended as a means of supporting features similar to those TrackBack offers.

Tom Coates has answered the question here.  Another beginner’s guide can be found here.  The official specification can be found here.  Trackback issues relative to WordPress can be found here.  Good luck!

Architel is a boutique IT support company located in Dallas, Texas that supports small businesses (20-100) employees.  Their unique IT service delivery model (one flat-monthly-fee for all-you-can-eat support) aligns the interests of the small business owner and Architel.  The company was a pioneer in this space and is now a pioneer in the ‘blog as corporate website’ meme.  Here are screenshots or just visit the site yourself here @ architel.com.

The site was entered in the website design contest at SXSW conference and we are crossing our fingers that the judges will enjoy the tight integration between the blog CMS and Dan’s xhtml and css.  What do you think about our work? 

"I know that tagging my posts has led to increased traffic from Technorati and other search tools that support tags. Granted it is very easy for me include them in my posts."