Here’s my little weekend¹ project:

ismyblogworking.com

It’s much like downforeveryoneorjustme.com — which I very much like — but designed to provide a bit more information when things go wrong.

I’ll expand it over time to check more blog-specific things like feed status.

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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)