Is just me, or is "real-time" the replacement term for "Web 2.0": you know, hideously over-used, over-hyped and prime for a square on the Internet Bullsh*t Bingo card? I mean, word has it that every man, dog and Venture Capitalist is on the real-time train now that mere mortals like parents are embracing Twitter. Continuing the real-time push is Pubsubhubbub - the real-time blog notification technology with a name that 95% of the Internet struggle to pronounce on first reading - and today it received another boost from Typepad who've enabled the technology on all their hosted blogs.

[Original Image from Dave Winer]

This summer the folks at Automattic asked users what features they'd most like to see in the next version of the popular WordPress blogging client. one of the most popular suggestions was image editing, and now it looks lke the developers are beginning to add image editing capabilities to WordPress.

The image editor will be baked into WordPress 2.9 and won't require a plugin. The editing functions are pretty basic. You'll be able to crop, resize, and rotate images. Don't expect support for advanced effects, layers, or other features, at least not right away. But the ability to upload your images before editing them should make blogging a bit faster and easier for many users.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

As a heavy (and admittedly very proud) Tumblr user, I frequently get asked "Can I self-install Tumblr on my own webspace?" and have answer "No". That's not a big deal to most people - it's possible to use custom domains with Tumblr, customise the look and feel of your site and more directly from within Tumblr - but for the slightly more technical, it can be a deal-breaker.

If you're wanting to self-host something similar, however, Chyrp is a light-weight blogging engine that allows you to self-host a Tumblr-style blog, right down to the specific Tumblr post options such as Link, Quote, Text, Video and Image. It's also pretty extensible, with extra modules and 'feathers' available for users to add and enhance their sites.

Chyrp certainly isn't for the average Joe, looking to set up a blog without any fuss - however if you're looking for the style and speed of a Tumblog, and want to delve into the code to customise its design and function, it might be right up your street.

Chyrp is available under the GNU General Public Licence (version 3) for your hacking pleasure, and requires a PHP5 / mySQL or SQlite compatible webhost.

In "Wait, they really didn't already have that?" news, Google's publishing platform, Blogger, now supports jump breaks in posts. Users have been splitting their posts by hand for a while now, so no one can blame you if you thought it was already a supported feature. Besides, you've seen this before on practically every other blogging platform - heck, I remember LiveJournal having jump breaks 10 years ago - so it's good to see Blogger catching up with the times.

You can add a jump break in the visual editor using a new toolbar button, or you can add it manually in the HTML editor by inserting " <!-- more -->" where you want to divide your post. If you've got a heavily customized template, you may have slightly more work to do, but there are instructions to help you out.

[via Lifehacker]

Residents of New York City beware... Engadget is planning to take over the Tishman Auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design for the evening on September 13th!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the folks over at Download Squad's sister blog Engadget are excited to announce the first taping of The Engadget Show, a monthly coagulation of interviews, round-table discussions, video clips, live music, and whatever else the Engadget crew can come up with.

This coming Sunday's taping will include a one-on-one interview with Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, who we're all sure will have a lot to say about the new webOS-powered Pixi, as well as the success of the Palm Pre and other goings-on at Palm. Also featured will be live music from Bit Shifter, a popular chiptune artist.

Tickets will become available at 2PM on Sunday, and the Tishman Auditorium seats about 450 people. Doors open at 4:30PM, and the show will begin at 5. If you can't make it to the taping, don't fret; The Engadget Show will be made available free for your viewing pleasure just a few days after the taping.

(Oh, and you can thank Nokia for sponsoring this event, as well as Parsons The New School for Design for hosting it.)

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired a spiffy spellchecker called After The Deadline. It's now available on Wordpress blogs, and you can enable it in the Wordpress visual editor by clicking the ABC button with the green checkmark (If you're using a WordPress.org install, get the plugin). After the Deadline is smarter than the spellcheckers we're used to in desktop apps, because it analyzes the millions of posts on Wordpress.com to create context and get things like proper names right.

After the Deadline finds a lot of mistakes that other spellcheckers won't. If you use "new" instead of "knew," for example, ATD will know whether you've got the right one in context. It can also check for clichés, double-negatives, passive voice, and other problems that generally weaken your writing. ATD also gives you fine-tuned control over those stylistic elements: you can have it stop checking for certain problems, or teach it to ignore your intentional, but technically incorrect, word choices. ATD only works with English right now, but other languages are in the works.

[via TechCrunch]

A few months ago, we brought you news of Download Squad's long time friend and blogger Drew Olanoff's Hodgkin's Lymphoma, as well as his efforts to get everyone to blame everything on it. Since then, almost 12,000 people have credited Drew's cancer with more than 26,000 of their unfortunate or ridiculous happenings.

At midnight this morning, Drew and his crew of blamers kicked off the Blame Drew's Cancer Blame-A-Thon party/benefit concert in Philadelphia. The blame games will go on for 24 hours, during which time Drew and company will be Livestreaming the event for all to watch and chat about.

The Blame Drew's Cancer team has put together a few ways of helping to support LiveStrong during the Blame-A-Thon; blamers in Philadelphia can purchase tickets to the second portion of the event, which will be located at North Star Bar and begin at noon. Supporters can also purchase a raffle ticket for a Twitter raffle going on during all 24 hours of the event. If you simply want to donate, the blame squad encourages you to donate directly to LiveStrong on behalf of Blame Drew's Cancer.

Several sites are reporting that a major attack on Wordpress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of Wordpress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever's behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.

How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on Wordpress offers two possible ways to find out:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are "eval" and "base64_decode."

The second clue is that a "back door" was created by a "hidden" Administrator. Check your site users for "Administrator (2)" or a name you do not recognize.

Wordpress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. Wordpress.com users aren't affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you've already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in Wordpress' FAQ.

[via Mashable]

You've met microblogging before. Twitter's the most famous example, with its 140-character maximum. Well, get ready to meet macroblogging. A new service called Woofer boasts a massive 1400-character minimum. Yeah, you read that right: Woofer won't take your posts unless they're more than 10 times as long as a tweet.

This definitely raises some questions. For example: is this a joke? How is macroblogging different from, you know, blogging? Yes, it's very possibly a joke: popular "woofs" include the entire Gettysburg Address and selections from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. And it's different from blogging because standards are lower. In fact, a woof has the same low standards as a tweet, but without the severe character limitation that makes tweets pithy and interesting. Fortunately, Woofer isn't looking to be taken seriously: the about page describes it as a humorous homage to Twitter.

If you like following news from your favorite sites, but you don't currently have a smartphone or other mobile computing option, it can be difficult to stay on top of things. I know I tend to get more reading time away from the computer than when I'm actually sitting at it. There's an odd service from Hewlett Packard that might be able to help you, as long as you don't mind killing a few trees.

HP has a site called Tabbloid that will allow you to enter RSS feeds for sites you'd like to follow, and it will automatically format and send you PDF files on a schedule populated with the contents of the feeds you entered. The formatting is very readable, but I'm not sure they're making the best use of space; I'd rather see the pages formatted into more columns, and maybe using a landscape format to better replicate the feeling of reading a newspaper or magazine.

It seems pretty transparent that what HP is hoping for here is to encourage users to get into the habit of regularly printing off reading material. Of course, if they do that, they will quickly be finding themselves at their local computer store buying ink for their printer. Evil genius!

Tumblr announced some big new developments they're working on. The first is an improvement to an existing feature, Tags. Now, tagged posts automatically generate #hashtags (much like the Twitter system) that collect similar posts into a group. The hashtags are displayed below your post and link to a page containing other posts with the same tag.

Because there's 650,000+ posts being published daily, Tumblr allows you to sort these by relevancy including most liked and most reblogged with a cool slider. The feature is still in development so the Tumblr staff say you may find a bug or two. Additionally, the central hashtag directory is not yet complete.

Additionally, Tumblr is working on direct integration with Facebook. Tumblr is set to introduce a new feature that allows your Tumblr content to be posted directly to Facebook pages and profiles. The content will automatically be formatted properly based on the type of post.

Blogs are a dime-a-dozen these days. There's no shortage of sites dedicated to posting articles on just about anything you could possibly be interested in. Regator.com, a website dedicated to sifting through the countless blogs on the internet has finally released their own companion iPhone application.

If you're not familiar with Regator, it's a great web resource that highlights the web's best posts from the web's best blogs. It acts as a news aggregator breaking down blog sites into categories and offering a fun way to discover content on the internet. The new application, Regator for iPhone [iTunes Link] promises much of the same thing with a slick and easy to use interface and some great features.

So what makes Regator for iPhone so great? It's the only mobile application that allows users to browse, search, share and read thousands of the web's best blogs. It might sound a lot like an RSS reader, but it's so much more than that. By collecting, sorting and providing readers with thousands of articles, it's an easy source for news on almost any subject.

A few shots of Regator in action:

What's better than a free trial? Why, when something's free forever, of course!

While I agree with that statement on the Nero 9 Free Edition download page, I'm not going to recommend any of you rush over to download it. Why not? I've got eight reasons.

1. They're asking for your email before giving out the download link.
Not a huge deal, I know, but it's still annoying. I'd recommend using something other than your primary email address on the download page or something like OtherInbox. In addition to the setup file, "you will also begin receiving Nero News with the latest tips, special offers and technology info from Nero."

2. The installer bundles the Ask.com toolbar
Again, not a massive problem - you can always opt out by unchecking the boxes during setup. Regardless, bundled toolbars are always an irritation during installation.

3. Upon completion, the installer asks you to send anonymous data
It's opt-in, but it's the third piece of the "why do they give it away for nothing" puzzle. A new address for their mailing list, possible referral bucks from Ask, and maybe some anonymous usage info from you.

Launching a new CMS these days is a tough proposition. It's a crowded field, and distinguishing your product takes some ingenuity. Well, FireRift is one publishing platform that knows how to take a marketing concept way, way over the top. The video commercial for FireRift is like something out of a campy Ronnie James Dio video from the '80s, with a meteor, glowing eyes, and a couple of wizardly guys charging into each other on a sand dune. It's totally stylized and totally absurd, but you're not going to ask, "Oh, which one is FireRift, again?" after seeing it.

I'd like to think our readers want a little more in a CMS than a commercial with some cheeseball special effects, though, so I should also mention that there's a screencast of FireRift available, so you can see the app in action. It runs through setting up an image/video gallery in FireRift, and the process actually looks well-designed and pretty simple to do.

For non-programmers, creating web forms to collect information from a website can be a real hassle. For example, what if you wanted to put a form on your blog to allow people to contact you, without exposing your email address to the nasties lurking online?

If your blog is on WordPress and you're looking for a solution to this problem, give Cforms II a try. Cforms II is a WordPress plugin that instantly gives your blog very full-featured form creation and management capabilities. Out of the box it comes with a few pre-configured forms like the previously-mentioned contact form, as well as a newsletter subscription form, tell-a-friend form, online booking form, and a sign-up form, among other variations of contact forms.

Cforms II is oddly hosted on what at first appears to be a blog supporting a cook book. Delicious Days is actually a blog run by a couple, Nicky and Oliver. Nicky is a foodie, and the site appears to belong primarily to her, and Oliver is the techie, so it seems likely that Cforms II and the two other WordPress plugins hosted at Delicious Days are his handy work.