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SimplePie Almost Dies
Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the […]

Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the project and what free time he has is spent on the HTML 5 specification and Tolerant HTTP Parsing specification. However, a couple of the modules that deal with the SimplePie API will be maintained.

Despite Geoffrey leaving his development duties, he has left himself open to take more of a consulting role with the 1.x SP code base.

The good news? Ryan, the other developer for SimplePie has responded by stating:

1) SimplePie is NOT stopping development. I have big plans for where I want to take SimplePie, and those can’t happen if SimplePie is dead. In posts over the past few months, I’ve talked about where I want SimplePie to go, and that is still the plan, although it may take a little longer.

2) Over the past 3.5 years, SimplePie and it’s community have grown larger than Geoffrey and I could properly handle. It’s certainly larger than I alone can handle. Geoffrey and I will be looking for people in the SimplePie community to get involved with development, support, and other various aspects of the project.

3) I’m expecting to release SimplePie 1.1 in a matter of days. We also have a MySQL-capable branch that was likely to be 1.2, and will now definitely be 1.2. SimplePie 1.5/2.0 are no longer on any kind of timeline, as we need to get new people involved and up to speed first before we really plan those releases out.

As soon Geoffrey and I have time to work out more of the details, we’ll be sure to let you know.

I currently use the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which provides WordPress bloggers the ability to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds to your blog. It works wonderfully well and is the plugin that powers my link blog. I really hope development continues for SimplePie as it would be a real downer if the project were to disappear.

Do you use SimplePie? If so, be sure to let me know your thoughts on the plugin.

Top Consumer Technology Trends for 2008
Yesterday we looked at the 2008 technology spending market from the small business side. To be charitable, things look “iffy” for IT spending — at least during the first six months of the year. Now it appears that, from the technology side of the market, 2008 could be a mixed bag, products-and-services-wise. One example of that comes from the consumer technology industry analysts from The NPD Group. In a new report released today, key firm analysts say that 2008 could be a year of transition for the consumer technology market. Topping the list of key issues are the impending analog…

Trojan droppers are kicking worm butt
Kaspersky Lab has published its list of the most prevalent viruses for the end of 2007, and although an email worm retains the top spot the more interesting stuff is happening immediately below it in the rankings of shame. Specifically, the second, fourth and seventh places which are all occupied by variants of the Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Diehard. The .dc modification of this Trojan dropper only appeared for the very first time on 21st December, yet on some days in December it proved virulent enough to account for some 80% of all the malicious traffic seen in email by Kaspersky users….

Building your business using goal setting
Welcome back to the Web Pro Business blog for 2008, I hope you had a relaxing and safe festive break. I had the pleasure and honor to be asked to write an article for SitePoint during December, which you can read over here. In the article, I made ten suggestions for goals to achieve during 2008, […]

Welcome back to the Web Pro Business blog for 2008, I hope you had a relaxing and safe festive break.

I had the pleasure and honor to be asked to write an article for SitePoint during December, which you can read over here. In the article, I made ten suggestions for goals to achieve during 2008, which would help your business grow.

Now, even if you haven’t taken the plunge into full time freelance or business owner status yet, these ten resolutions (also available as a single page A4 or Letter sized PDF to print) will help you get to this stage.

I’m hoping to elaborate on a few points which I made in this article over the next few posts. Firstly, let’s start with goal setting.

Most images of goal setting conjure up thoughts of sports cars, huge homes and swimming in a pool of money, however these are probably slightly grandiose for what I am suggesting. Let’s break this down to medium-long term goals, shorter term goals and actions which belong to goals.

Let’s say you are like many folk who have commented on my previous posts, and haven’t yet taken the dive into self employment. What would your longer term goal be? To be self employed. What are some shorter term goals which will provide stepping stones to this point?

Well, here are a few possible goals;

1. Save up some emergency money in the bank
2. Write a business plan
3. Work on a few projects during weekends and nights
4. Create a business name

Now, the first one is easy - let’s say we need to save two months worth of minimum wages within the next six months. The actions that belong to this goal could include ‘Put 10% of weekly wage into special account’ or ‘Cut down on takeaway dinners for next few months’.

Now, actions towards writing that business plan could include ‘Find example business plans or business plan software’ and ‘Set aside time to speak to self employed friends about their plans (if any!)’.

If you make the effort to write these down, print them out and stick them somewhere you’ll regularly read them, then through repetitive reminders, goal setting may indeed become a habit and an effective way to journey towards your vision of where you’d like to be.

Let me suggest that you write some goals down right now and then revisit them in three months time, to see how you’ve progressed. I encourage you to let me know how you’ve used goal setting before, in the comments area below.

Good luck!

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

Advanced WordPress Help Sheet
The Advanced WordPress Help Sheet: Michael has put together another PDF Help sheet for WordPress, this time with advanced tips and tricks to use various WordPress functions within your theme. This includes various code snippets from Styling Different Categories to Dynamic Page Titles. He says that this is the first of a few others that […]

The Advanced WordPress Help Sheet: Michael has put together another PDF Help sheet for WordPress, this time with advanced tips and tricks to use various WordPress functions within your theme. This includes various code snippets from Styling Different Categories to Dynamic Page Titles. He says that this is the first of a few others that he will be putting together and is up for suggestions and ideas. Also check out Michael’s other WordPress Help Sheet from the past. Via Email.