It looks like WordPress 2.5 is out today, and despite the crappy release notes, it looks like an interesting release. In this release: a new admin panel, built-in gallery, better upload tools, avatars, improved sidebars, improved security, and API cleanup. And, they’ve added “shortcode” to the base engine, a replacement for my SimpleLinks syntax.

Knuth writes, Wanted: A Name For High-Tech Grief. My vote: fragged¹.

1. Succinct, and a geek reference to Doom/Quake ↩

I’ve been working on a handful of web apps in my spare time. Nothing amazing, nothing revolutionary, just simple, fun tools. And while I’ve shown off a few of the logos, I haven’t written about the applications or their design. I’m not sure if I hate giving up the ideas (as if ideas were golden), or if I’m wary of not finishing them (free time is a commodity, and new ideas hit me regularly).

Well, fuck that. I need to write more. The lack of writing is a sign that work is getting under my skin, or that I’m getting lazy, complacent with life in zombie land. Zombie life sucks: it’s undisciplined and it’s uninteresting: far from my normal inspiration. And inspiration is fun.

Thwarter

One of my most tangent projects is for a Z-machine replacement of sorts. It’s working out to be a text-adventure tool that obsesses over making writing the games about the writing (and playing the games about reading). Infocom’s Z-machine was fun, but it wasn’t a writing tool (it was a programming language). Confusing the two limits both who becomes authors, and how much writing they do. And including the potential for multiple players (and/or authors) makes it damn-near freakin’ cool.

I’ve completed the “language” design for this one (it’s all table-based, edited like a wiki), and have a few basic prototypes done. This weekend I moved on to the UI design, something that I’ve been doing in Inkscape and the Gimp (an incredible pair of tools). The next step is to settle on a first approach and grind my way to a working demo. I have an unfortunate fixed-deadline work project this summer, which will likely eat into my spare time, so I don’t expect to have a useful prototype done until the late fall at best.

Elsewhere

I’m in the midst of a few other projects, interleaved with life, work, and art. I have a simple TODO tool in the oven, to tame my never ending stream of ideas, and a number of other things at varying stages of completion.

I’m learning to cull my growing queue of ideas too. Part of the trick is to let things percolate for a while, and see if they stick to the mental wall of, well, stickiness. Good ideas keep coming back to you, and the rest just evaporate by themselves. There are other heuristics too, but that’s a topic for another post.

Free domains!

Speaking of culling, my domain portfolio needs some cleanup. I’m giving away the following domains to a good home (for non-profit use), or for a reasonable fee (for non-evil commercial interests):

• aggregatorator.com
• cheatsheetbuilder.com
• sixwords.org
• gr8tr.com
• feedr8r.com
• gatorator.com
• justaskoldguy.com
• cookbookr.com

One per person; first come, first served (friends first); highest bidder, and so on.

A reddit-like site about YCombinator news, staring mostly startup and web2.0 stuff.

Some burnout prevention tips from mit.edu.

Newsforge brings us: What to watch out for when writing portable shell scripts. Missing from the script: dealing with space-laden filenames (IFS=$'\n').

Some Tricks of the trade, a surprisingly funny list of useful tidbits for various trades.  A choice quote:

And when doing botanical work in South America, steer clear of the monkeys: They will throw sticks at you with surprising accuracy.

An interesting multi-page interview with John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead.

John Carmack talks about his experience developing Java applications for cell phones.

Some Cringley tin-foilisms about what Google is up to these days.