Read Google wants your WordPress blog—and everything else—in its cloud

Read Now Google Wants To Kill The Mobile Web (Good Riddance)

Read What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM

Read Ceding the Lead

Read Leap Motion + Hologram = The Future of Awesomeness

Read FreedomPop’s New Router Hooks Up Your Home With Free, Wireless Broadband

While WordPress evolves into a CMS from a blogging platform (and it still has a long way to go!) it necessarily looses the simplicity it had as a pure blogging platform. John’s brainchild was to provide something that returned to those first principles.

Now the project is actually coming to life. John and his team have a great introduction and they’re seeking backers through Kickstarter. I’ve pledged.

One big thing that draws me in are the principles that John talks about in the introductory video. One of my constant bugbears around other open source project, WordPress included, is the ownership – structures that often do not reflect the spirit of open source, and we see the impact time and time again.

John is committed to making sure that Ghost is open source and non-profit and that that follows through to the entire eco-system that will surround Ghost.

I can’t wait!

Update: just two hours after this post was published (and a while after I actually wrote it!) I’ve had an e-mail from John O’Nolan along with all the other backers. Ghost is over 120% funded. Phenomenal! It’s got incredible backing – WooThemes, Envato, Seth Godin and many more influential tech folk. This could really be something…

By allowing anyone to inject malicious code into your WordPress site through the standard comments form, this security vulnerability is particularly nasty in it’s simplicity and ease of exploitation.

I’m glad that the security and maintenance measures I take as part of my WordPress maintenance package mean that both the botnet attack and this vulnerability weren’t a concern, but others might not be so lucky.

Make sure you secure your site now, and keep it up to date.

Read Hypercritical: Fear of a WebKit Planet

Whilst listening to The Willing Well III – Apollo II: The Telling Truth by Coheed and Cambria I noticed there were gaps. At first I thought the rip had failed, so I listened to the original MP3 and soon realised that the word “whore” was being cut out. The line goes;

Just come look at what your brother did
To that girl’s precious little whore of a body now

A delightful song, as you can see.

Then today, it happened again… this time the word it stripped out was – shock horror – “die”. Yes, really. The line is;

I hope you die right now

Again, delightful song. Again, Coheed and Cambria but this time the song was Upon Your Dead Body.

Somehow Google thinks that censoring my music is fine. That I shouldn’t listen to music about whores, death and dying.

I realised this probably isn’t some sort of automated censoring as, when  playing favourite tune Make Yourself by Incubus, there was no censoring of these lines;

If you let them fuck you, there will be no foreplay.
If I fuck me, I’ll fuck me in my own way.

Liking my taste in music yet?

So I tried to find out why Google has deemed itself arbiter of taste and decency. Predictably, there was nothing in their help section but a quick Google found plenty of people discovering the same thing (apparently their “matching” feature often matches the ‘clean’ version of songs) and even a solution.

Can I really be arsed (censor that, fuckwits!) to go through every censored song to get rid of those ridiculous gaps though?

Why is Google even doing this? Censoring the word “die” FFS! What am I gonna do, listen to the song and then go on a murderous rampage? Comments are open…

Does Amazon does this? If it weren’t for their foolish reliance on Flash I’d be using their Cloud Player instead…