I’m attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008 (photos are flowing here, more stuff on twitter) organized by my friend Stefanos in the magnificent island of Ios. Attendance is not excessive in size, but mood and atmosphere are pretty excellent and today alone I had the chance and priviledge to share some ouzo with Boris and Patrick (the latter one is also a speaker to the forthcoming Open Coffee Athens Meeting XII, next Tuesday June 3rd), jog throughout the Mylopotas Beach with Tim Ferriss (I can assure you that his writings are truly real, the guy is awesome and has managed to learn tons of greek in half a day) and chat with his own majesty Matt Mullenweg on the experiences of A Course by Blog.
Among the talks that took place earlier today, greek blog/podfather Panayiotis Vryonis shared his humble story on the Web, but I was almost excited with the presentation of teh dutch guy Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. Through narrating his personal lifetime, Boris brought into surface an insightful parallelism. The fundamental properties of what we considered as of ‘god nature’, he argued, is being omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and immortal. But, exactly these very properties are fully implemented by The Web! Boris’ delivery was excellent and I do confess my excitement on the thought of democratizing -at last- the concept of ‘G0d’ via the internet. Implications vary from practical to deeply philosophical levels, I may return to these thoughts of mine on a later post.
After Boris and Tim, sharing -as usual- some tips on efficient blogging policies, Matt went on stage to present -among others- some new features of the forthcoming WordPress 2.6. To my partial knowledge and short updates, some of these features weren’t announced anywhere else before (and Matt validated my feeling on a later discussion by the pool), so I think these new features would be of interest to you :) Here you are:
- WP will support Google Gears, to bring your blog into the desktop and enable the offline WP experience. Moreover, you’ll never lose any data again when losing internet connection, etc.
- A ‘Turbo’ button will be available to speed up page load by optimizing javascripts and css. Early data reveal a 6x increase in performance
- WP 2.6 will get wiki capabilities!
- New post categories ala Tumblr will be added (photo/quote/video, added to the current text default one)
- bulk uploads of photos and collective tagging will be enabled
Moreover, Matt promised no other major redesign but small changes on administration user interface from now on, among them the categories box will be restored back in their older place, up in right column. He also demonstrated a home-grown feature of using WP as mail inbox, in a full-fledged talk that left nobody dissapointed (as far as I know, videos of the speech will soon be available on the camp’s website). And I do need to also describe his willingness to answer every single question with his ever-ending smile and fully humility… Respect and keep up Matt!