This has been languishing in my development folder for a while now. Rather than wait till I have time time to finish the last 10%, here is tw-asides v0.9 version 1.0.

tw-asides is an asides widget for WordPress. It lets you publish short posts that appear in your sidebar rather than in the main content column.

Some themes offer a similar feature already, but this one should work with any theme that supports widgets.

To use it, in brief:

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WordPress 2.5 is out, along with a new design for the admin UI and wordpress.org web site.

One little detail Textpattern folks might recognise: the Shortcode API, a new library for building simple [template] tags for post content, which is very similar to the txp template parser.

No prizes for guessing which Automattician snuck that one in.

1. I’ll be at WordCamp Melbourne tomorrow, talking about WordPress.com.

2. I’m now officially a Mac user. Writing this on a shiny new MacBook.

Angus and Robertson have announced their intention to stop selling books from small and mid sized publishers, unless those publishers agree to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege.

The response from Michael Rakusin of Tower Books makes me want to rush out and buy a bunch of their books – from anywhere but A&R.

Many thanks to Charlie Rimmer of Angus and Robertson: you’ve saved me the trouble of ever again wasting my time in an A&R store.

(via nielsenhayden.com and boingboing)

Matt takes issue with the push for PHP 5. He makes the point that PHP 5 offers no real advantages over PHP 4. I won’t argue with that, but I can’t resist suggesting some things that could have offered a compelling reason for developers to upgrade, had they been implemented in PHP 5, 6, or whatever:

Namespaces

It’s 2007 and we’re still stuck with one enormous big list of functions in a single global namespace. A typical production PHP installation on a shared web server has 1000-4000 built-in functions in the global namespace, many with inconsistent or contradictory naming conventions (count_chars vs str_word_count vs strlen, for example).

This could have been fixed in a relatively simple manner: just prefix each function name with its module name, much like python does – so we’d have array.walk() instead of array_walk(). Forget objects and instances, just a simple prefix (basically, treat modules like singleton objects, automatically instantiated by PHP). To preserve backwards compatibility, offer an amnesty mode that permits global function names to be used for functions that existed in previous versions.

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