So I added Akismet as part of the WordPress 2.0 upgrade process.

So far, the service has trapped over 200 spam comments.

Very nice.

I finally got around to upgrading to WP 2.0.

I avoided upgrading for awhile, on the grounds that it would take too much time. Hah. If you discount the 2 minutes it took to backup MYSQL, and the 10 minutes it took to download and archive my old installation, the entire upgrade process took about 75 seconds.

Quick likes/dislikes.

+ Eaaaaaaaaasy upgrade. Painless and perfect.

+ Akismet looks good. I even created a dummy WordPress.com blog just so I could get an Akismet key.

+ Nicer default fonts for editing :-)

- Defaults to a WYSIWIG editor. I hate those things. But very easy to turn off.

- Like Drupal 4.7, there’s a lot of unnecessary AJAX-y type interface stuff on the edit panel. Yes, it’s cool to show/hide metadata options. But I prefer to be able to see all options by default. Let me turn things off rather than have to hunt to find features. Use of collapsable forms reminds me of an old, bad trend.

Well, minor gripes aside, color me impressed.

I’ve spent the last week running some proof-of-concept tests for features in our new (semi-secret) Drupal project. Nothing I can link to here. I did solve an interesting problem with importing users from an existing registration system and requiring them to reactivate their accounts.

I also wrote a hack to path aliasing behavior in Drupal 4.6.5. I want to use Pathauto to map taxonomy categories but not nodes. The problem that I encountered is that Drupal’s l() function always looks for url_alias entries. I rewrote that lookup function to only work in the event that the given $path variable starts with “taxonomy” — in one test, it cut queries for a page from 320+ down to 150. Nice little performance bump.

It lloks as though performance optimizing Drupal may be my next big project.

No free wifi in the airport ?!? so I am writing now to post later.

Travel tip: if the airport offers a spa, get a maggage. I spent my last Canadian cash on two magazines (I have a 12-hour trip) and one 15-minute massage.

I should have had Kim (the masseuse) do nothing but hands and forearms. For all you programmers and heavy bloggers: it really helps.

So at least I’m fairly relaxed for this trip. Doesn’t look like any delays, though I hear there is snow in the Midweat. (We’ll know by the time I post this.)

Vancouver is a greaaaaaat city. Need to come back for pure vacation. As for now, I am ex-haus-ted. Dead on my (very sore) feet.

So, Roland took a ton of photos during MooseCamp, and I get to be in some of them.

This is the best one:

It’s me pointing at the chart of self-interest. Here’s the slide:

The argument point here is that newspapers have been focused at the edges of this ’self-interest map.’ People care about themselves, their familes, their communities.

After a vicious day of travel — one technical delay meant a missed flight, 4-hour holdover in Chicago, and a total travel time of 17 hours to get to Vancouver — Sunday was great.

Van is supposed to be cold and raining; but the rain isn’t here now. Spent the day wandering around downtown, with the bulk of it in Chinatown (which is huge). Apparently, 30% of Vancouver is Chinese. By my count, non-Chinese accounted for about 1 in 50 of the people in Chinatown; which meant that it wasn’t a tourist trap, but a vital community that we dropped in on for a day.

Had a great lunch at a random place with no English name. Handmade potstickers and hearty noodle soup. Only “guests” in the place, as everyone else was local. (Will find some photos later).

Really tired; about to go out and hit the art world today. Conference starts on Tuesday. Looking forward to it,

Saw a bizzre coincidence on Canadian TV last night: the editors of local Vancouver newspapers talking about the future. The Sun’s editor was out of touch, but in a good way. His main concern was the death of advertising-supported investigative journalism. He has a real point, but I think ad-supported reporting will thrive in the future. It’s just going to take awhile to get the new systems in place. One of the other panelists said, flat out, that such changes won’t happen until “quite a few newsroom leaders are replaced.” Heh heh. Then the local alt-weekly guy whined that target publications by the Sun were killing his business. Boo hoo.

Good point made about the difficulty / necessity of bringing as many voices into the conversation as possible — especially in a place as diverse as Vancouver.

Oh, and the SuperBowl was yesterday. Watched first half in a pub; second half in the hotel. Steelers won easily (as I thought they would). Seattle never really showed up. And where was Shaun Alexander?