WordPress Bug Hunt Day

WordPress development team is organizing a Bug Hunt Day on July 4th, 2006 (via BloggingPro). They are asking for help from anyone, who is willing. If you can install WordPress, you are already good enough. If you know the source code inside out – even better. The even will take place on IRC, as usual, and will continue for 24 hours straight. Feel free to chime in when you feel like it.

I’ve marked my calendar and will try to jump in and see how I can be helpful. C’mon my blogging friends, together we can make WordPress even better!

Salsa bit

My mother has been talking loads about Salsa lately. She’s been taking some classes and was wondering how things are with Salsa here in Cyprus. I myself am not a big fan of dancing. I did about three years of ball dancing back in elementary school. It was long ago, but I don’t miss it one bit.

Anyway, my mom persuaded me to visit one of the Salsa clubs in Limassol, just to see what’s going on there. I asked a few people and was surprised to find out that a couple of my friends are frequently visiting Los Amigos club. So, we agreed to go together on Friday night.

I was more than impressed.

The place was excellent – with all the dancing being outdoors, but on the inside of the building. It’s one of those old places in the downtown, where they have a huge hole in the roof in the middle of the room, with trees growing through. Everything is decorated in style but without too much of a show off. All makes a nice impression.

Non-stop Latin music was good, but the quality of sound setup was mediocre at best. Maybe it was just on this day, I don’t know.

But sound didn’t matter anymore when I saw people dancing. Los Amigos turned out to be one of those places, where people who know what they are doing come to practice. I literally couldn’t take my eyes off the stage for two hours. It’s been a long time since I saw something this beautiful.

Something tells me that I’ll be coming back. I don’t want to dance, or even learn how to dance, but I want to see more of that. Believe it or not, during those two hours that I spent there, I barely talked with anyone and had only one pint of beer. That’s how fullfilling the exprience was – I needed nor wanted nothing else.

By the way, if you are interested in Salsa or other Latin dancing, there is a lot of information at Latin Dance Cyprus website – places, events, people, etc.

Bloglines is self improving with Publisher Tools

The “freedbacking” thing must have worked or something, because Bloglines started to improve. I’ve been monitoring the blogosphere and surely quite a few people mentioned the much needed publisher tools.

From now on, all those people who have RSS feeds can claim them in Bloglines and do some management and maintenance. For now, we can get rid of dups with the newly released Publisher Tools. Hopefully, the set of tools will grow with time.

And improve too. I’ve tried to claim a couple of my feeds, but it didn’t worked quite yet. My LiveJournal feed wasn’t found in the database, and the feed from this site caused an Internal Server Error. I’m sure those are just a couple of tiny bugs that will be ironed out in a day or two.

Overall, a good move, which is surely appreciated. At least, by yours truly.

Update: I was amazed this morning to find in my inbox an email from the Bloglines engineer acknowledging one abovementioned problem and requesting more information about another. Good work!

Google thingies

I am staying a bit off the technology news recently, so I don’t know how widely these two news have been pushed around. But I discovered both of them only today, so I thought maybe I am not the only one out there.

Google has recently released two new tools that are really worth mentioning – Google Account Authentication (discovered via O’Reilly Radar post) and Checkout (discovered via Slashdot article), which is a competitor to PayPal.

I gladly welcome both of them.

Google Account Authentication will help people build websites that won’t require registration and Yet Another Login ™. Users will be able to use their Google accounts. Of course, I understand those who worry about their privacy. Google will know about all the websites you are visiting, how often, from where, and so on. But I personally don’t care.

Checkout service also gives me hopes. PayPal does a good job, but it doesn’t scale very well beyond the USA. There are all sorts of limits both paying and getting paid. Google is a very global company. It understand the needs and wants of the global community and has great potention for problem solving.

With all the privacy worries in the air, I am glad that Google are pushing themselves and the technology arena forward. I respect the company and like most of their products. Keep it up guys!