Because this would just be cheating:

exclude = (the nearest book)

WordCamp Australia 2008 will be held in Sydney at the end of the month, right before OSDC… and I intend to celebrate my first WordCamp by giving a talk!

Yes, I will dimly glow next to such bright stars in the universe of WordPress as Matt Mullenweg and Jane Wells (who is kicking butt with the WordPress 2.7 admin redesign), as I present an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the recently launched Australian über-blog-network, Crikey Blogs.

WordPress lovers and the blog-curious should come along and join the fun!

I filed a bug and test case regarding the problem (which will hopefully be be fixed with an official update, given that Hardy is an LTS release), but here’s a quick guide to work around the problem in the mean time. Thanks to Andrew “ajmitch” Mitchell for pointing me in the right direction!

1. Grab and unpack the timezonedb extension tarball from PECL.
2. apt-get install php5-dev
3. phpize
4. ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5
5. make
6. sudo cp modules/timezonedb.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613/
   Note: The precise name of the final directory might be different. For instance, on hardy-i386 it will be 20060613+lfs.
7. sudo vi /etc/php/conf.d/timezonedb.ini
Yes, this is a new file. Content: extension=timezonedb.so
8. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Now your PHP has the very latest timezone data up its sleeve, so you can rest easy knowing that your web visitors won’t think you’re a Queenslander.

Zing!

Update: The php5-timezonedb extension was added to Debian, but removed from intrepid… seems it was because intrepid’s php5 has a patch to use the system tzdata. It would be awesome to get that patch into hardy!

Update: Uh, what about make…?

“No Twitter sex for you” by ChipX86.

Flickr Photo Album makes it easy to use Flickr images in your blog, and the latest version integrates really nicely with the new “add media” user experience in WordPress 2.6 — it adds a Flickr icon to the toolbar, and pops up a great user interface for finding images to use (from your stream, from albums, from search results against those and all CC-BY images, etc).

Now for some celebratory Flickr-inspired imagery as tribute…

Update: Boh, looks like the caption shortcode is not working. That’s Balloons by orphanjones (linked), and hopefully the caption will make this comment redundant soon.

• WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user)

  It’s hard to make recommendations related to WordPress without mentioning the project itself, and its twisted sister, WordPress MU. Both are improving in leaps and bounds, and it’s a pleasure finding all the cool new things as I track their development trunks. WordPress 2.6 is the latest major release, with lots of cool new goodies… Donncha is rapidly catching up to those changes with WordPress MU. I wrote nice things about them on my Projects that make GNOME rock! post, too.

• Sandbox

  I am a minimalist at heart, but with a fondness for cleverly expressive minimalism, so the Sandbox theme blows my mind. If you just look at the theme on the surface, it seems like a very boring, no-frills blob of unstyled HTML. But the genius lays waiting beneath the surface, in the highly evolved markup. Cunningly generated classes deliver extraordinary flexibility to a designer working with CSS. Just look at the body and div.post tags to get a good idea of what you can do. Be the signal is 100% Sandbox + custom CSS, with no added ingredients… and it changes colour every hour!

• Akismet & Bad Behavior

  The one-two punch in my anti-blog-spam regime. Bad Behavior protects against abusive hosts and patterns of use, while Akismet does content filtering. As such, with an MTA analogy, they’re like a great combo of solid Postfix policy as front-line defense, plus DSPAM content filtering. Like my mailservers, I might not run both in every situation, but it’s great that they’re both available to protect the innocent.

• Twitter Tools

  Keeps my tweeps up to date with my blog, and lets my blog readers (bleeps?) know that I use Twitter and what I’m up to. I don’t use the daily blog archive feature, but lots of people enjoy that… despite it being one of the latest controversial content issues on Planets. I really ought to add identi.ca (or most likely “generic Twitter-style API”) support and see if Alex accepts the patch…

• OpenID

  It’s great that companies and sites like Sun, AOL and MySpace are becoming OpenID providers, but the web really needs more consumers. So pretty much every WordPress blog I set up has Will Norris’ WP-OpenID plugin installed. A while back I hacked it up to work with WordPress MU (always on, in mu-plugins), which was great for GNOME Blogs. I need to update that to the latest versions and see if Will might accept a nicer patch than the last one.

• Typogrify

  As a card-carrying Font Fascist, it delights me that so many folks are working hard to improve typography on the web. I know that sounds a bit like “folks are working hard to improve oxygen on the moon”, but we’ll get there. Typogrify filters your posts to provide some cute ways of draining your own swamp, such as adding helpful markup to improve styleability of things like allcaps words, initial quotes, etc.

• My own cheesy plugins

  I’ve only managed to upload a few of my custom plugins to the WordPress Extend repository (which is a fantastic way to manage plugins for a widely-used platform, by the way), and thus far they’re kinda simple and cheesy.

  • @reply automagically adds Twitter-style replying to your comments.
  • Bug Links adds stylish links to common FOSS bug tracking systems — this was mainly written for GNOME Blogs, so I’m particularly happy that Thomas uses it regularly for his very cool metacity blog.
  • OpenSearch* adds OpenSearch discovery to your WordPress site, so users can add your site to their search dropdown (in, say, Firefox). I need to improve it further to support the whole OpenSearch specification.
  • Tango Smilies makes your emoticons not look like arse!

Thanks, of course, to all of the developers and contributors to these projects.

Pia will land in Niue next week, as one member of an elite team tasked with kickstarting the world’s first 100% saturation deployment of OLPCs. Of course, it helps that Niue is a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific!

Here’s the script if anyone else wants to play (it also demonstrates how to post to twitter with wget, which may be handy for other automation projects):

#!/bin/sh
MB_POST="http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml
  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"

MB_USER=state your username
MB_PASS=state your password

IZ="$(find Maildir/cur/ Maildir/new/ -type f | wc -l)"
if [ $IZ -gt 0 ]; then
  IZ="$IZ"
else
  IZ="ZERO"
fi
IZ="inbox zero status: $IZ"

for MB_HTTP in $MB_POST; do
  wget -qO- --delete-after \
    --user="$MB_USER" --password="$MB_PASS" \
    --post-data "status=$IZ" $MB_HTTP > /dev/null
done

Update: Fixed script to use any Twitter-style microblog API, and included example URL from identi.ca. Go freedom!

Update: Even better, just post to all of them at once! Also fixed anchor… Despite switching to the visual editor weeks ago, I’m still not 100% used to the convenience of it.