One week after AC/DC's Black Ice Tour in Paris, I've had yet another musical rendez-vous: Hellfest Open Air 2009 (momentarily closed as of writing), a music festival held about 30 kms from where I currently live. I've seen live on stage:
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Update: Lorelle in the comments has a totally different interpretation on "merging". Much less exciting to be honest :)

Update 2: Jeffro got some clues from Donncha. Bottom line: Merge, as anticipated at first. Yay!

The hot scoop of the day is, as announced by Matt at WordCamp SF, that WordPress and its multi-blog flavor, Mu, will merge.

As Technosailor points it out, this totally makes sense since the two are very close code wise, and this will give the opportunity to BuddyPress to expand its reach by large.

For those who have never tried Mu, it's pretty much exactly the same thing as vanilla WP. Plugins work the same, themes work the same, blogging work the same, you just get the extra warm feeling when you suddenly set up a side blog in a click. This is great news!

Encoding an array to JSON is dead easy on PHP 5.2+: you just use PHP's function json_encode(). The thing is, WordPress has pretty loose requirements and is designed to run on older PHP builds. For those, you need a third party library that will encode to (and decode from, if you need) JSON.

The cool news is that you don't have to bother searching for such a reliable library: WordPress comes with its own. Just include() the file located at /wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/spellchecker/classes/utils/JSON.php and you're good.

Check more details and examples on KAPISH.

I've just read on TechCrunch the announcement about awe.sm, a service that sells custom URL shorteners (a la TinyURL) for your own domain.

That's funny: I've been using my own private URL shortener for about a week now (notice the "shorter link" mention at the top of this post). The script I'm using is based on something created by Lester 'GamerZ' Chan who has been running his own URL shortener on lc.sg for a while, and that I've improved (re-using some code from my work on scr.im) and hooked with WordPress (so, for instance, right when I'll press "Publish", my URL shortener will create a tiny link for this post, WP will store it in a custom field and broadcast it on my Twitter account)

The point of running your own URL shortener is obvious: it's leet and fun :) Moreover, it sorts of certifies that the shortened link won't be some crappy spam, as this is not a public tool. Our tool provides basic stats (number of clicks), my domain is short (ozh.in), my wife is amazed, I don't need more to be a happy man.

Lester and I have been discussing about GPL'ing our URL shortener and plugin, but I was just dubious that this would interest people. Now, seeing the announcement about awe.sm, I'm changing my mind. Would this actually interest some of you?

In the upcoming WordPress 2.8 there's an interesting function set meant to help authors manage their plugin custom options. In a nutshell: whitelist your options, define how you want them to be validated, and just lean back and rely on the API to handle everything for you.

Your new best friend is function register_setting(), and I'm going to recapitulate how it's supposed to be used.
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If you're a WordPress freelancer, you already probably have your regular web sources for your gigs (and if you don't, do read How to find a WordPress job right now). Did you know that Twitter was also a fine potential source of information for your next project ?

Here are three Twitter users that you should follow:

• @wordpress_work: about 20 tweets a day
• @freelancewp: pulling jobs from freelancewp.com, which is itself fetching from various web sources. About 5 tweets a day
• @wordpressjob: the most established one, pulling from wordpressjob.com, about 20 tweets a day

If you're really hungry, two other users might also interest you:

• @phplance: not about strictly WordPress, but PHP freelancing in general. Lots of tweets.
• @hashwordpress: this little experiment of mine retweets everything about "#wordpress". In this "all things WordPress" tweetage there will be a smaller signal/noise ratio but there are quite a few requests that could end up being your next little contract.

Know any other interesting Twitter source?

Using PHP's HTTP Authentication is a simple way to protect scripts behind a login/password prompt. There's one little problem: it's supposed to work only on PHP as an Apache module, not the CGI version. It took me a while, hair pulling and some googling to get a basic HTTP Auth system working on Dreamhost's PHP as CGI so for my own future reference, and for anyone that would find it useful, here's the trick.
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A few minutes ago, Mark from WebLog Tools Collection announced the 2009 Edition of the totally cool WordPress Plugin Competition. As I've written several times already, this is the best moment in the plugin year. Awesome ideas and awesome plugins popping, that's a truly exciting moment.

This year, Mark introduced a new rule: winners from past edition can't compete. I guess this rule is to meant to foster competition between newcomers and new coders who might be too shy to jump in otherwise. As every community, ours needs fresh blood!

So, I won't be competing this year: Instead I'll be one of the judges! I'm completely enthusiastic about this :) (yeah, bribes accepted, come in so we can discuss)

Filed in the "I hate SEO plugins" category (why), and tagged as "but some are better than others", there's an article on Urban Giraffe that gives a comparison of WordPress SEO Plugins.

The article is factual and tends to prove that HeadSpace is the most comprehensive and featured pack plugin, particularly compared with All In One SEO, more famous and obviously better in one topic: naming. "All in One SEO" sounds like a riot, when you don't get at first what "HeadSpace" is about.

Via @wptavern.