Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Happy 10th birthday, WordPress!

Today is the WordPress Day.  Thousands and thousands of people gather in hundreds of cities and towns all over the world to celebrate WordPress’s 10th birthday.  In 10 years, WordPress went from just another PHP application for bloggers to a feature-rich platform that runs a huge chunk of the Web.  WordPress came a long way, grew and matured.  As did the community (of which I am a proud member) that developed, designed, translated, documented, optimized, argued, sponsored, tested, troubleshooted, and generally improved the system in so many different ways.

wordpress 10 years old

A big thank you goes to each and everyone involved in WordPress.org, Auttomatic and all those gadzillion projects.  But, I also want to specially thank Matt Mullenweg, without who, I think WordPress wouldn’t be the same, if it would be at all.  Thanks man, you are an inspiration to many.  Keep it up and happy birthday.

P.S.: As I was writing this post, I realized that there was no meetup organized in Limassol, so, albeit with a very short notice, let’s get together and have a pint at Alio Olio after work.  I’ll be there from around 5:30 until whatever.  Here is a quick link to Meetup event.

On Google’s Transparency Report

While catching up with my RSS feeds, I saw the latest Google Transparency Report from the end of last month.  The summary of the report basically says that the number of governmental requests to remove content from Google is raising quite rapidly.

transparency report 2013

There are also some clarifications of why that might be:

  • There was a sharp increase in requests from Brazil, where we received 697 requests to remove content from our platforms (of which 640 were court orders—meaning we received an average of 3.5 court orders per day during this time period), up from 191 during the first half of the year. The big reason for the spike was the municipal elections, which took place last fall. Nearly half of the total requests—316 to be exact—called for the removal of 756 pieces of content related to alleged violations of the Brazilian Electoral Code, which forbids defamation and commentary that offends candidates. We’re appealing many of these cases, on the basis that the content is protected by freedom of expression under the Brazilian Constitution.
  • Another place where we saw an increase was from Russia, where a new law took effect last fall. In the first half of 2012, we received six requests, the most we had ever received in any given six-month period from Russia. But in the second half of the year, we received 114 requests to remove content—107 of them citing this new law.
  • During this period, we received inquiries from 20 countries regarding YouTube videos containing clips of the movie “Innocence of Muslims.” While the videos were within our Community Guidelines, we restricted videos from view in several countries in accordance with local law after receiving formal legal complaints. We also temporarily restricted videos from view in Egypt and Libya due to the particularly difficult circumstances there.

One thing that I am missing is a correlation to the actual size of the Google index.  I mean, I of course understand that it is incomparably larger than all these requests combined, but I keep thinking that the more content you’ll index, the more removal requests you’ll get.  So, I think, it would be interesting to see the correlation in growth of removal requests to the growth of the Google’s global index.

Read the Docs – create, host, and browse documentation

Read the Docs – create, host, and browse documentation

Read the Docs hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar. We support webhooks so your docs get built when you commit code. There’s also support for versioning so you can build docs from tags and branches of your code in your repository.

Happy 8th birthday, YouTube!

YouTube is one of those services that feels like it was here forever.  In digital years it might have been.  But in human years, it’s a few month younger than my son.  YouTube blog reminds us that it was launched in May of 2005.

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

Millions of partners are creating content for YouTube and more than 1,000 companies worldwide have mandated a one-hour mid-day break to watch nothing but funny YouTube videos. Well, we made that last stat up, but that would be cool (the other stats are true).

Happy birthday, YouTube!  You are awesome.  Keep it up.

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google’s big fix for its messaging mess

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google’s big fix for its messaging mess

How Google built its new messaging platform for Gmail, Android, iOS, and Chrome… and what took so long