It is a new year and I hope to make it a better one. With that in mind, here are a few of the things I hope to accomplish in 2010. Not all are directly relevant to web development, but so be it.

1. Post More Often

   Look! The least original resolution in the age of blogging! Even so. There are many times I think of something that would make a good post and never get around to writing it. Sometimes other things come up. Other times, someone else has written something similar and I don’t want to be redundant. But much of the time, I get distracted and either forget the idea entirely or wait too long and the moment passes.

   Not every post has to be a winner and certainly most of mine are not, but as the misquotation goes “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” If I put more of my ideas into writing and write more often, several things should happen. First, the occasional winning idea is more likely to make it past my fingertips and onto this or another site. Second, my writing muscles should become more limber. Writing begets writing and makes each successive piece easier to put into words. Third, I hope this will help me find more of a voice on this site. This has long been a problem for me. I am not a particularly formal person. In fact, I am probably a bit too casual. Unfortunately, whether from spending too long in academia and then too long in corporate land, or from spending too little time practicing the craft of writing in recent years, I find that my writing can be formal to the point of stiffness. I would prefer that whatever personality I may possess show through a bit and perhaps help me express my ideas more clearly. Of course, none of that has happened here, but one can hope.

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WordPress 2.9 isn’t quite out yet, although it looks like it might make it before the end of the year. Even so, many of us are playing with the betas and seeing what the new features can do. One of the features that usually gets a mention but little else is custom post types.

Post types are not new in 2.9. The post table in WordPress has had a post_type field since 2.0 which was released way back in 2005. Posts and pages are the same thing internally, but have a different value in the post_type field. This affects how they are treated by loop queries, so you don’t get pages on your archive and category pages, etc. In addition the post_type field can mark an object as a revision or an attachment.

So, today there are only four recognized values for post_type: post, page, revision, and attachment. There is no reason you couldn’t use other values, and some plugins may, but the core WordPress code will ignore those entries.

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The last week has seen two major failures on the Internet. The most important difference between the two failures is not what failed or why it failed or how it failed, but how the organizations handled those failures.

Last Tuesday, Google’s web-based Gmail service was out for about 100 minutes. 100 minutes is a long time on the Internet, and an eternity when you consider that there are 150 million Gmail users. That is a lot of people unable to check their mail. Google identified the problem quickly, but it took them the better part of two hours to get the solution deployed.

Also in the last week, a worm has been wandering the Internet attempting to break into WordPress-based sites, and has succeeded in a number of cases, including Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer.com.

Google and WordPress.org both had egg on their face, but only one of them handled it well.

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A few months ago, Google made a fairly fundamental change to how AdSense works. The change was a move to what Google calls ‘Interest-Based Advertising’ (IBA), which is advertising with targeting based on a user’s interests (duh). This might sound like not much of a big deal. After all, AdSense ads always targeted on web page contents and people tend to look at pages they are interested in. If you’re at a sports site, you’ll probably see sports ads. If you’re surfing a political site, you’ll probably see political ads. No big deal, right?

Yes and no. That is an accurate description of the old AdSense, but IBA changed the focus from the page to the person. Google serves ads everywhere so they know a lot about where you go on the web. From that, they make a guess (a good one) about what you are interested in, generally. IBA uses this interest information as the core of targeting rather than the content of the sites. So, you might see the same old ads, but you might also see political ads on your sports sites and vice versa.

Kind of cool, right? But also kind of unsettling. I mean, how well does Google know you?

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