For nearly 3 years now, all my online activities including this blog have been hosted at DreamHost. Nearly 3 years of overall positive experience then, otherwise I'd be obviously somewhere else :)

The reason of this post is that I've just received five DreamHost invitation codes, that are worth the following:

• 4 times the normal disk and bandwidth (that is: a ridiculous 2TB disk and 20TB bandwidth)
• $150 off the five-year plan
• $200 off the ten-year plan
• … and a nice incentive for me (because, yes, Dreamhost's promotional stuff is another feature I love and a reason why I recommend them)

So, if anyone want to sign up(aff. link) with them and become a happy co-hostee of planetOzh, feel free to use one of these 12-digit codes:
145273429970
407283541102
885924571160
531143567587
847528798894
(each one can be used once, so if you plan to use any, do it now)

And if anyone is not willing to sign up with Dreamhost, just ignore this post :)

If you're about to spend some holiday time this summer visiting Paris, I suggest you visit my friend Michelle's site, Gadabout Paris. This west coast American moved to Paris a few years ago and thought it would be nice to share her discoveries with the world: exciting places, things to see, things to do, restaurants not to miss, everything goes through her podcasting mic directly to your iPod.

What I like about Michelle's (and her staff) articles is that she's really doing her homework. For instance, in a recent article about a Paris urban art walking tour, you'll find explanations, photos, and even a Google Map of the walk.

All in all, a really enjoyable site about things that are not your typical tourist tour. By the way, Michelle: I'll be soon in Paris again, is the couch still free? :)

WordPress MU is a hacked version of WordPress that can manage several blogs from a single install. Basically, most of the things (plugins and themes) made for WP work for WPMU (don't take this as a golden rule though)

Today on wp-hackers' mailing list, Donncha posted an interesting message about two fundamental differences between WP and WPMU, regarding plugins and user roles.

The main difference between WP and MU for plugins is where the plugin lives. There is a plugins folder still, but there's also an mu-plugins folder too. Any file in mu-plugins will be included/loaded on every request.

Also, almost every user on an MU site is untrusted, even admins. The only people who should have access to edit css or html in your plugin are site admins. You can check if the current user is one by using the is_site_admin() function, any time after init.

I wasn't aware of this, being relatively WPMU ignorant in general, so I thought I might emphasize this Donnchaism for anyone else in my case :)

Increasing the number of your subscribers is (or should be!) one of any blogger's goal. You write to be hopefully read, and your subscribers are people you are sure do read you. Now, what about increasing effortlessly your loyal readership by (at least) 20%?

Twitter is a fun little tool I've never really found any need for. I actually use it in various ways, like receiving twice a day an SMS with current prices of a few stocks I follow, but this is more of a gadget to impress my tech-unsavvy friends than something I need.

A little more than one year ago, I started to send my blog updates to my Twitter account as another "fun use of no need", and quickly literally forgot about it. A little more than one month ago, I remembered about it, and made a short announcement that this blog updates were twittered. As a result, my Twitter account just got past 100 followers (wooweee!) which can be considered as a bonus over my regular RSS readers.

So, basically my point is: even if you don't use Twitter yourself, don't neglect people who do. There are a lot of easy ways to broadcast your blog posts through Twitter: Twitterfeed, a free service I've been using for more than a year now, and of course a variety of WordPress Plugins.

Easy + potentially fun + obviously efficient + can do no harm anyway = do it!

Did you notice? I've just seen that Google has a new favicon. I couldn't find any new thing across all other services, though (Gmail and stuff). Is this a first step in some bigger redesign process? No more green-blue-red-yellow logo on the search page?

Reddit is a cool site to know what's currently hot, interesting or funny on the web. (For the record, I also use a lot del.icio.us/popular and don't like Digg for a number of reasons like stupid captchas, cumbersome submit procedure or site slower than acceptable)

But the true value of Reddit (and yet another point where Digg fails pathetically) is… The comments. At least once in a day I find a definitely hilarious comment thread that is in itself worth more than the URL it's supposed to promote. Today's ROFLage will be this discussion.

I love Reddit :)

WordPress 2.6 will implement a potentially very cool feature: Google Gears.

Here is what you get to see after you click on a catchy "Speed up!" link in WordPress 2.6 …

Basically, Google Gears is a browser addon that stores on your local computer some files, allowing for quicker (as in "immediate") access. Those files are stored in a local database that can re-sync to your online content when needed. So, basically, you don't even need to stay connected to the intarwebs to actually use online apps.

So, basically, no matter how far your webserver or hapless your internet connection, Google Gears should make your blogging experience with WordPress faster than ever, as you'll be loading images and CSS and running javascripts locally. Geniosity.co.za has a little wrap-up of this upcoming feature that is already implemented in the trunk.

Too bad I couldn't test it myself yet. The Windows flavor of Google Gears is designed to run on XP or Vista, and my main box is running Win2000. My kids & wife's computer, running XP on a lower end machine, only spewed that "Local storage status: Error: Invalid manifest – * Line 1, Column 1 Syntax error: value, object or array expected." Will try as soon as I can :)

I'll be having a job interview in another company next week, so I'm googling a bit about the manager who will interview me…. Got some hits in Google… Has a website… Hey cool, it's a WordPress blog… Having a look at his wp-content/plugins directory… OK, he's using a plugin I wrote. Things looking fine so far :)

Widgetized Dashboard: this very efficient plugin allows you to populate your Dashboard with the widgets you want, all the widgets you want, and just the widgets you want, just like sidebar widgets. Remove the "Plugins" widget? Add any RSS feed you like? You name it.

In my early WordPress 2.5 review a few weeks before it was released, I was mentioning that a widgetised Dashboard should open the door for some cool and crazy Dashboard plugins (a small "quick post" mini form? To-do lists?). Widgetized Dashboard is actually just what was missing for this.

Very cool plugin, and gives some justice to our potentially-but-not-yet cool Dashboard. Should be core. (while I'm at it, I'd like an option to remove the whole "Right Now" section)