Rolling Stone Magazine published in 2004 their list of the 500 best albums and singles of all times. These lists are now available in streaming audio, thanks to a Romanian online radio :

• Best 500 albums
• Best 500 singles

The list is pretty eclectic and offers a great musical trip through styles from the fifties to nowadays. By the way, I'm not sure how legal this is, so just in case you better hurry on this :Þ

(Found the list via le Blog de François, which I found via Sites Near Me, a cool hack of Google Maps mixed with GeoURL)

Over the last two or three weeks, I've been helping Tim Yang package a WordPress Theme. Its layout and design will be interesting and innovative in more than a way, one of them being Adsense optimization, built from his own long-term experience on this subject.

My role on this project is trying to make everything that involves PHP as simple to use as possible, as well for the end user as for the theme creator. After designing my own site layout I've had a few ideas listed somewhere in my mind, and working on a new theme has been an opportunity to try them out.

If everything goes as planned, I'll be releasing soon in a few days when it's done something like an "Enhancement Theme Toolkit" : a theme administration menu, aiming to help theme authors give more control to end users over their theme, while being extremely easy to set up and customize for theme creators.

Incidentally, while setting up Planet WordPress yesterday (a feed aggregation about WordPress), I noticed that Kubrick2 is about to be released (or at least it's in beta now). Ever since knowing that this theme will be shipped with an admin menu, I decided not to have a look at it, since this was something I had planned to do for long and I wanted to get it working myself before I would look into someone else's code. This said, when everything on my side will be functionnal, I'm looking forward to having a look at it and see how they managed to do things.

Who knows, eventually the two could cross-pollinate into something even better :)

I went on my computer quite early on this Sunday morning — thanks kids for reminding me at 6:30 AM that there are more productive stuff to do than sleeping :P — with loads of ideas to work and code at. Suddenly, I felt like I urgently had to give Planet Planet a try, just curious to see how this stuff works (this is what powers planet.wordpress.org, for example)

About an hour later something that was not part of my plans comes out, but it's still cool. This piece of software works like a charm, requires practically no knowlegde of anything, and produces neat things like this one : another WordPress Planet
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Just opened : wordpress dot com, powered by — of course — WordPress dot org. This was announced rather crypticly by lead developper Matt, and it seems to be a invite-only blogging network. Everyone invited gets, with their free blog, an invite to give away. Something like Blogsome with an Orkut flavor ?

So the whole point is : what the hell is this for ? What are these fine folks preparing ? Live beta testing of the upcoming WordPress 1.6 that is currently powering the platform ? It is obviously part of WordPress' World Domination plan, but I can't see how it deserves their purpose…

Anyway, it's invite only, this means it's l33t, this means I had to get one. And I'm in ! Thank you Donncha ! Oh, I almost forgot. All this implies that I have an invite to send, so I'm expecting sycophants and fans to seduce me now.

Sometimes, you find some interesting files on the internet, and want them mail to you, your office, or a friend. Why bother doing it yourself with your mail client and your connection when your webserver and its fat dedicated line can do it for you ?

PHP Send File By Email is a script that you feed with a file URL and that gets this file delivered into an email box, as a regular attachment. In other words :

Not my prettiest code, but it works fine, and I really needed something like this.

I've just found something that is quite cool, and potentially useful : Talkr. From its FAQ : " Talkr provides a service that allows you to listen to your favorite text-only news sources rather than read them. Point us to an RSS feed and we will convert it from text to speech."

Basically it generates an MP3 from a blog post, and the result is decent (or at least it seems decent to my ears :). Adding an automatic link to each Talkr'ed post on one's blog would be extremely easy. You can even generate an RSS feed containing the required MP3 enclosure to make your blog a real podcast.

For example, register for free and listen to this older post : Offline for a Month.