In the meantime, you can get Mikkel’s version here: QuickPost for WordPress with tags and the option to disable comments at blog.detersmart.dk

Alex King and his team over at Crowd Favorites has been working with the Yahoo and the Yahoo Shortcuts team to create an awesome WordPress Plugin. For those who don’t know, Alex King is an awesome plugin developer and has been working with the WordPress team since its inception.

Yahoo Shortcuts basically looks for key terms and provides shortcuts to content that might be relevant. Examples would be maps, stock tickers, and photos. By using the Shortcuts API, Alex was able to filter the content of a post through these shortcuts to allow the author to include some of this rich content in their post.

I’m using it on this post and it picked up Yahoo Shortcuts and WordPress and linked them to their respective sites. If I reference that Alex is located in Denver, CO, it will pick that location up and provide a map. It also found a few images of Denver from Flickr, one of which I included in this post. All the images it pulls from Flickr are creative commons and the attribute is added as needed to the photos.

The plugin is beta and has a few quirks. First, I couldn’t use it in Safari (this post was done in Firefox). I’m sure this has more to do with the version of TinyMCE included in WordPress and it’s poor support for Safari. Second, when I went to review the post in the shortcuts editor screen, I saw a few foreach errors related to flickr (I think it was the comma in Denver, CO). And overall, it’s slow.
Despite these issues, if you are looking for ways to spruce up your blog posts, I recommend this plugin. It’s only going to get better. And congrats to Alex and his team on working on such a great project.

You can download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yahoo-shortcuts/

Check out Alex’s post about it here: http://alexking.org/blog/2007/12/13/yahoo-shortcuts

Also, Alex and Jeremy Zawodny did a screencast demo of the plugin here: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=5251111

-Rewrote the bookmarklet javascript
-Fixed the photo bug with flickr
-Made the photos tab the default when on flickr
-Made photos linkable by adding a url. Leave it blank to prevent the link.
-Got the WordPress svn to show the correct version number

This plugin also gave me the opportunity to mess around with jquery. jquery is an awesome JavaScript library that makes JavaScript, DHTML, and AJAX so easy, it’s fun to write. I used it for the tabs along the top of the bookmarklet popup and for the image preview. It added a few extra files to my plugin but the file size is still very very small.

BTW, today, I’ve fixed my first WordPress plugin bug – 7 days after posting it.

Matt is very transparent and, from what I’ve seen in all the videos of his presentations as well as our email communications, a very nice guy. He runs his own blog at photomatt.net. Enjoy:

1. You created one of the most popular blog software applications in the world. What was the motivation?

Like many open source projects, I really just wanted something that I would personally enjoy using.

2. What possessed you to give it away for free? Do you regret that choice?

Not for a second. I’ve benefited so much from open source software and the generosity of others in my life, releasing my own work under the GPL feels very natural, and is the rule rather than the exception.

3. Why PHP? How has PHP scaled for you in regards to wordpress.com? Have you found anything particularly challenging?

PHP is great. There are small inconsistencies in the syntax and arguments sometimes, but given all the advantages I really can’t imagine doing a web app like WordPress or Akismet in anything else. It’s been very easy and cheap to scale, as has MySQL.

4. Recently a blogger posted a very negative comment about you, which he has since taken down. You posted the comment verbatim on your blog without any response or commentary. What was your rationale for this? Where does your obvious sense of openness and transparency come from?

In hindsight it probably would have been better to just ignore the blog post, I was just shocked by how out of touch with reality some of the assertions were.

Openness and transparency follows pretty naturally from open source, but most of all I just find it easier than not being open.

5. You are super young. What’s next for Matt Mullenweg?

My general approach to life is just to experiment, fail fast, and run with what sticks. As Automattic grows I think there will be alot more room for experimental projects outside of WordPress.com and Akismet, so
I’m looking forward to breaking new ground.

This week at my blog, Disneyfrontier.com, I switched from the Blogger software to WordPress (read why blogger sucks here). As I posted earlier, I have been playing with Drupal on this blog. I decided to go with WordPress on Disney Frontier for a few reasons:

• WordPress 2.0.3 has an awesome utility to import from Blogger into WordPress. This is part of the default install and easily pulled the posts and the comments over.
• Drupal seems to be running slow on this site. I think this may be GoDaddy’s fault but Disney Frontier is also hosted on GoDaddy. I have contemplated finding a new host but haven’t made any decisions yet.
• I wanted to further investigate WordPress. The last time I used it was version 1.5 and I didn’t do the install or the configuration for that blog.

What I found was that install was a snap. It was easier than Drupal only by the fact that it handled the database setup for me…after I created the database. With Drupal, I had to do a manual import of the SQL to create the tables. Not hard at all for Drupal but not as convenient. I also found there are a bazillion more themes for WordPress than there are for Drupal.

Drupal does seem to be more flexible and have a ton more potential in terms of plugins modules. However, it is a little over kill for that particular blog.

So as of now, here is how my blogs layout:

• http://www.thekenzers.com – Blogger hosted at GoDaddy
• http://www.thekenzers.com/joshkenzer – Drupal hosted at GoDaddy
• http://www.disneyfrontier.com/ – WordPress 2.0.3 hosted at GoDaddy
• http://twelvehorses.typepad.com/ – Hosted Typepad
• http://blog.thna.net – WordPress 2.0.3 Private Corporate Blog

Technorati : Blogger, Drupal, Typepad, WordPress