Data Circle

Amazon.com has added several listings to enable customers to pre-order their copies of the next Windows release, codenamed Vista, even though a definite release date for the software has not yet been set (business releases are supposed to be available from November with consumer versions coming out in January, though those dates may slip again).

The interesting thing about this move is that Amazon generally doesn’t change the price of items once they’re available for pre-order, so these listings are a good indication of how much Vista will retail for once it’s finally released. As far as I can tell, only the US site has Vista listed for pre-ordering, although if you’re a UK customer then you can sign up to be emailed once it’s available on Amazon.co.uk as well.

Further reading

• Amazon begins taking Vista orders
• Amazon Begins Selling Windows Vista

I’m not sure whether it’s just me or not, but Akismet doesn’t seem to be catching any of my comment spams at the moment, and I’m getting connection refused errors when trying to connect to the service. I’ve had about 300 spams get through already and there seems to be no sign of them slowing down.

If anyone knows of a generic spam catcher that has a WordPress plugin but can also easily be accessed from other PHP scripts (Rogue Tory gets an awful lot of comment spam and it’s running a custom blog system that I wrote), please let me know.

Update: The guys at Akismet have posted about the downtime, it’s great to see such a quick response from what is mostly a free service, and on a bank holiday weekend too.

Dell, the American company which manufactures more computers than anyone else in the world, has announced that it is recalling over four million of its laptop batteries because they pose a fire risk due to the possibility of them overheating. Although only six laptops have been reported to have experienced these effects, Dell is recommending that all customers with machines that may be affected return their batteries for a replacement. In the meantime, it is still possible to run the laptops from the mains power even though the battery has been removed.

Personally, I find it quite worrying how many product recalls the computer industry seems to issue, particularly when it comes to batteries. There have been a number of high profile recalls in recent years from various manufacturers, including Dell and Apple. I suspect that a lot of these recalls are due to cautiousness on the part of the manufacturers—after all, one big lawsuit as the result of a fire started by a faulty battery could cost the company more in monetary terms and bad publicity than a recall would—but I would have also thought that more stringent procedures would be put in place to ensure that these problems are not repeated. On the other hand, it might just be the case that manufacturers have got better at detecting defects in batteries and so they are recalling batteries because of problems that would not have been noticed two years ago.

If you want to know if your laptop is affected and how to return it for a replacement, there is a Dell battery program site dedicated to the issue.

Further coverage

• Dell recalls 4m laptop batteries
• Dell Recalls 4.1 Million Laptop Batteries
• Exploding laptops prompt Dell safety recall

The news all over the web today (apart from the Apple announcements, which I’ll get to later today I hope) is that Fox Interactive and Google have signed a $900 million deal for the provision of search and advertising technologies across most of Fox’s sites, including of course the hideous but popular MySpace.

The question is, how good a deal is this for News Corporation and Google? From Murdoch’s perspective, it gives him a large injection of cash, possibly enough to buy up another web property such as YouTube. Speculation over such an acquisition have been doing the rounds for some time, but the sticking point appeared to be how to finance the deal—now Murdoch has the money to potentially buy up a few more sites using cash rather than shares.

From Google’s point of view, they must obviously think that there is more than $900 million of advertising revenue in the deal. The other possible reason is to convert MySpace users from MSN or Yahoo—after all, if a site you visit every day uses one search engine are you really going to bother using another one for your other web searches? Overall, however, I think this is a better deal for News Corp than it is for Google, as I believe the latter will struggle to generate advertising revenues from MySpace where I suspect click-through rates are rather low. On the other hand, it would appear from some of the reports that the deal is based on revenue sharing, so perhaps it’s not quite as big a gamble for Google as it would first appear.

Further coverage

• Official News Corp press release
• Fox: $1 billion Search Deal with Google
• Google will power Fox Interactive search and advertising through 2010
• Google signs $900m News Corp deal
• News Corp, Google Deal Deconstructed

WordPress.com, the popular site for hosting your blog if you want to run WordPress but don’t feel like installing it yourself, has recently announced paid upgrade options in the form of custom CSS, in which you can edit the themes provided to you by the site or even create your own new ones.

They’re also currently testing domain mapping, which is a feature that I think many people would like to see. It’s also important from a competitive point of view, as you can use Blogger on your own domain and TypePad also offers this feature. I’m actually surprised that this wasn’t the first feature to be implemented as I would have thought it was the most requested feature, but I suppose it might require more behind the scenes work than things such as custom CSS.

As well as the two upgrade options already mentioned, there’s also a post for discussing paid upgrade ideas, so if there’s something else that you’d like to see and are willing to pay for then it might be a good idea to add a comment there and see if it makes it onto WordPress.com at some point.

The only problem I see with all these paid upgrade options is that they could add up to rather a lot of cash if you wanted several of them. It could end up being the case that if you need more than one or two of the features then it will be cheaper to buy a budget hosting account instead and install WordPress on that. Having said that, WordPress.com does offer you the advantage of not having to upgrade your software whenever a new version is released, which I suspect is a major selling point for many non-technical people who want to have a blog without worrying about the underlying software.

Further coverage

• WordPress.com adds paid upgrades
• Big Day
• WordPress.com adds Private Blogs and Custom CSS Upgrades

I’ve finally got around to upgrading the WordPress installation for Data Circle from version 1.5.2 to 2.0.4. I was surprised by how simple the whole process was, although I cut a few corners because I knew what I was doing for the most part and I had the advantage of being able to download WordPress directly to my server rather than saving it to my desktop and then uploading via FTP. For the most part it was just a matter of installing all the new files and then copying back my config file and .htaccess rules for mod_rewrite.

The Akismet plugin is great, all I had to do was enter my API key and click ‘activate’, and someone else takes care of the rest. Not only does it catch the majority of my comment spam, there’s also the option to train the filter so that if it mistakenly flags a legitimate comment as spam you can alert Akismet of this, and likewise if it misses an obvious spam (which it occasionally does, at least on Rogue Tory) you can flag this as well.

The dashboard has also been improved and everything seems easier to find. I’m not keen on the visual rich editor myself, but you can turn that off easily so it’s not too much of a problem. The fact that you can properly preview entries without having to publish a post is also a highly useful feature.

I remember the first time I tried WordPress, it was around version 1.2 and I was unimpressed to say the least, which resulted in me writing my own blogging software for my personal blog. It’s really come along since then though, and with the release of version 2 I think it beats all other software hands down if you just want a weblog (as opposed to the likes of Drupal as a CMS, which has more features but is overkill for something like Data Circle). Now I wouldn’t think of using anything else for any of my blogs, with the exception of perhaps my personal site where I like to write things myself for various reasons.

Theme wise, I’m still looking for a design that I’m happy with, so for the moment I’ve switched back to the WordPress default. I’ll have a play with the various themes offered by Wordpress.com over the weekend and see if any of them take my fancy. I’m looking for something fairly clean and minimalistic, preferably with a technology theme, so if anyone has any ideas of ones which would be good for the site please let me know.

Anyway, hopefully now that I’ve got all the backend stuff sorted and I’m not spending forever trying to keep up with comment spam (there were over 30,000 pending comments in the database when I upgraded, and more than 10,000 other comments which I’d previously marked as spam), I’ll be able to update the site on a more regular basis. I’ve already got one idea for an article that I hope to get written tonight, and I’m sure I’ll get another couple done by the middle of next week.

As always, if you’re interested in writing for Data Circle just give me a shout and I’ll get you set up.