"Calepin reads Markdown-formatted, plain-text files stored in your Dropbox and converts them into blog posts for you." Which is pretty clever.

MarsEdit 3 is out; the headline feature is the WYSIWYG mode, but for me, the headline features are syntax-highlighting, support for Wordpress Pages, and integration with Lightroom's library. Sadly, it's 10.6 only, and my knackered MBP is 10.5... but it's an upgrade I'll be making asap.

"Why would we want to play around with custom fields, or add stupid meta boxes in the Edit Posts page and then teach our clients and/or content managers to use them? Why not just get rid of all those stuff and have them seperately in your main menu, and the meta boxes are customized to match the exact needs of certain post types." Which is exactly how I use Wordpress in commercial installations, and every time I hack around this, I long for proper Top Level Things. This is a great feature, and it's going to make my life considerably easier. Let's hope they don't screw up the 3.0 release.

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again." Ryanair's social media strategy is pretty much on-brand, it seems.

Jolly good - easy to configure and get going, nice templating, and fast, because it's based on a databased index. Also, it looks like it's very actively maintained. Now added to this blog!

Lots of good stuff in here, and, indeed, most of the blogs I started following this year. Somewhat flattered to have snuck in myself. It's a great starting point if you're interested in the games-crit-o-sphere, and nice that representative posts have been pulled out from each blog.

"The comments on this site stand in stark contrast to the childishness and idiocy that flourishes elsewhere on the net. I know it, and I know I’m fortunate in this regard." A nice thank-you note from a really rather good writer and gamesblog.

Simon Wistow with a sensible, insightful post - starting from Andy Baio's remarkable discovery of Milliways - on how the web (and bloggers) need to grow up, and how telling smart people "you don't get the web" isn't actually an answer at all. Bravo.

"Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is driven by PHP and MySQL (with some AJAX thrown in), and has a pimpin’ theme and module engine, so you can personalize it however you want."

"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider. Readers will be able to begin using the service from the end of February." That's an interesting - and savvy - move.

"Recently I took a look at the numerous WordPress blogs I maintain and decided to extract some of the best plugins I use across them." - for once, a decent list, with some stuff I should look into on it.

Quite remarkable, if only for its density and level of detail.

"Zenphoto is an answer to lots of calls for an online gallery solution that just makes sense. After years of bloated software that does everything and your dishes, zenphoto just shows your photos, simply." Looks rather good. Thinking about this.

Katy is blogging again. Hurrah! It looks good, so far.

A detailed explanation of the Wordpress 2.3 implementation of resolving to a single canonical URL.

One of the better looking Wordpress plugins for dumping out Audioscrobbler data.

Wordpress 2.1 is now out. Probably better check this out, then...

I want to write more on this in the future, but essentially: what a load of rot and hyperbole.

I WANT YOU ON THE PHONE BUT I ALSO WANT YOU BLOGGING

Nico Macdonald, mainly on the money, back in August.

if you're writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points -- and doesn't add anything else of substance -- STOP WRITING. Pick a new topic. Move on. There's nothing to see here.

Jeff Jarvis rambling on as ever - some good quotes in it, though

learn is a perl script that outputs english. what better proof of concept than to dump output to a blog?