Yep, that official WordPress App for the iPhone and iPod Touch that I mentioned earlier is now available!

You can download it right here. I’m off to do it myself!

I just thought I’d give a little status update on my usage of Defensio.

Since March 23rd, Defensio has caught over 250000 spams on my blog. Here’s the breakdown:

• 250841 spam
• 608 legitimate comments
• 89 false negatives (undetected spam)
• 52 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

Seems WordPress 2.6 reworked the CSS and such for the widgets page in order to fix the issues that had been occurring with widgets not dropping into the right order. However that means the widget editor screen of my plugin is now broken and it was now just pointed out to me.

I’ll try to update as soon as I can and eventually see if I can just resort to making it so you edit the dashboard via Design -> Widgets like I should have done in the first place.

WordPress 2.6 was released today and features lots of great new features (see following video). Unlike WordPress 2.0.x (2.0.11 currently) but like the 2.1.x, 2.2.x, and 2.3.x branches, the 2.5.x branch is now unsupported and will not be updated with new security patches. You should not put off updating. There is nothing to be scared of and it is unlikely any of your plugins or your theme will break. So do yourself a favor and upgrade!

One of those features is the default Gravatar picker I helped write. If you are a theme developer and wish to add your own default Gravatar to the list, check out my previous post.

Thought I’d share a little bit of code I use to easily translate any webpage I’m viewing into English in one click.

Open your Bookmarks and add a new Bookmark to the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder in Firefox (sorry IE users, you’re on your own). Name it anything (I did “Translate”) and for the location, enter this:

javascript:void(location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u='+location.href)

That should make a new button show up in your toolbar and when you click it, it will take you to Google and translate the website into English.

As awesome as WPhone is, it is now officially obsolete thanks to the official iPhone app. It will be available for free from the Apple store and it will of course even be open-source!

I know what I’m installing on my iPod Touch!

Yep, right now Defensio’s spam checking servers are down yet again. Luckily the Defensio plugin sticks them in the moderation queue, but that means legitimate comments are getting stuck there too. Seems like at least once a month they have downtime issues. :(

325 comments in my moderation queue and counting…

Just incase anyone’s wondering: HDMI is noticeably better quality than component even though they are both HD. I had figured since VGA isn’t noticeably better than DVI, the same would apply to HDMI and component, but this just isn’t the case.

All this came about because my monitor only has one HDMI input which is normally used by my computer, but I wanted to hook up my PS3 as well. So I bought a cheap HDMI switch off Newegg, but my monitor would drop the signal from time to time (I’m guessing loose cable connections on the back of the switch) and that’s just not something that you want in the middle of a video game. So, I decided to use the component inputs on my monitor for my PS3. I got the new cables for my PS3 the other day and finally hooked them up and I can indeed tell the difference. Sure, it’s technically 1080p still, but the fine detail just isn’t there. The screen is also noticeably darker. I guess I’ll go back to my switch or just manually switch out my cables (ugh).

So yeah, incase anyone’s wondering whether to hook something up to their HDTV with either HDMI or component cables, without a doubt use HDMI. Don’t learn the hard way like I did.

Description from National Geographic:

May 6, 2008—After 9,000 years of silence, Chile’s Chaitén volcano (pictured on May 3) is erupting with lava, ash—and lightning.

Since the volcano awoke on May 2, it has continued erupting intermittently, blanketing the area in ash and forcing more than 4,000 people to flee.

The mingling of lightning and ash seen above may be a “dirty thunderstorm.”

The little-understood storms may be sparked when rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collide to produce static charges—just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms.

Found via DD32’s blog.

WordPress 2.6 beta 1 is out. See Ryan’s blog for list of major changes.

This release contains the new default Gravatar options I coded and blogged about earlier.