Disconnected 1.3 is out. It includes support for WordPress 2.3's native tagging, and preliminary support for WordPress 2.5's get_avatar() function. I know I said I'd never support gravatars1, but since they're going native in 2.5, there's no point in fighting anymore. At least once 2.5 is released, I can write a plugin to use MyBlogLog Avatars instead.

There's a new theme for habari, I think it's the first fully original theme. It's a beauty, evoking the sleek monochromatic habari dashboard, and including a bunch of custom plugins. It's called Charcoal, and it's hosted on google code, although the code isn't up there, so there's no SVN updating.

1. Since they provide identity without authentication, a sure recipe for abuse

• WordPress is on Slashdot, courtesy of the above image.
• I've upgraded myself, although based on the number of offers for help installing Habari I landed myself with one comment on WW, I'm going to give Habari another shot in the near future.
• That thread made me realize that Habari is not a WordPress fork at all, but a WordPress clone. It's the same relationship that Pidgin (Gaim) has to AIM: most of the features, none of the crap, none of the code.
• My only reason for upgrading is to work on adding the tagging features to Disconnected and Dream in Infrared. Dream in Infrared will most certainly drop support for UTW, as well as any compatibility with 2.01 . Disconnected will be a bit more difficult, since I'll need to maintain UTW/2.0 support in parallel with 2.3's tagging.
• The above assumes, based on the announcement, that there were no security patches in 2.3. Like Anil says, though, things like that should be crystal fucking clear in the announcement. Then again, we are talking about matt, who needs public outcry to explain simple things like privacy policies.
• Further problems resulting from the Refusal To Explain Anything:
  as I was going through my list of plugins and upgrading them using SVN (it's even suggested in the announcement), i ran into more than a few plugins that are hosted on wordpress.org, but have to be updated the traditional way, because no one knows how to organize their repositories. The biggest offender is the Google Sitemap Generator, which has all of the translations in /trunk/. Subversion naturally balks at the encoding. Wget to the rescue.
• This is surprisingly not related to Matt or privacy, but I've switched to defensio anti-spam, because I'm a fickle sum-bitch, and easily enticed by betas. So far its false-positive ratio is about on par with Akismet, which has the usual social consequences (sorry Trent, Engtech). It does marry the excerpt concept from Akismet Auntie Spam with "Spaminess", which is vaguely similar to SK2's karma, giving it the best usability of the 3.

1. does this affect anyone? my information says no, please comment if it will.

With the arrival of wordpress 2.1, andy's comment about database tables has finally come around and bitten disconnected and the links list. I added version 1.1.1r2 to the list of incompatible themes, which made me very sad. i haven't updated the theme in forever, so even though it's just a maintenance release, there are a lot of changes:

• Disabled the linkslist widget for anyone running 2.1 or above. (it's still there for anyone on wordpress 2.0.x) It's been removed entirely from the non-widgetized sidebar. if you're not using widgets, and not upgrading to wordpress 2.1, don't bother upgrading.
• added hAtom support (i think. there's no validator, and i'm not sure how to check it against a schema)
• added smackfoo's javascript
• added a version check script, from ceejay's tutorial (in case my hAtom support isn't right), like the screenshot up above
  
• fixed a bug in the tag page (props Pepe)
• renamed the archive template to match other themes (you'll have to switch the page template if you're upgrading, but if you're switching themes, it will probably be the same as your archive template).
• added a meta description tag to the head of the document
• added chris pearson's SEO friendly titles
• added some standard classes to use in posts
• added the custom header option.

so head off to the theme page, and download! Oh, and a small favor. if anyone is hosted with dreamhost, please, contact their tech support and ask them to upgrade the version on their servers. i can't, since i'm not hosted by them.

The Techrunch Re-Redesign.
I am not a graphic designer. I'm an architect. (lower case for a couple more years yet). If an Architect did what jeremy baines did, they would forfeit their AIA membership. Why? Working for free takes away the 'viable career path' part of the design profession. It's not Michael Arrington's fault, really. Posting the redesign in public? probably bad. Openly considering what someone is giving you for free? totally understandable. Clients aren't supposed to safeguard our profession. We are. Unfortunately, graphic designers don't have an overarching professional organization like the AIA. probably because i'm yet unaware of any wrongful death suits involving graphic design.
Clients do stuff like this all the time, because they don't know any better. Personal example: my firm gets blasted by an architectural critic, because the smart marketing money is on environmental conservation right now. So their marketing material calls our building "green." It's a shame it wasn't the hot trend a year ago, when that could have been part of the design of the building. So now we're trying to tell the client that bad press is the least of the fallout that could come from this.
Now, for the record, anyone comparing hiring a designer to commisioning a painting is unclear on the difference between a designer and and artist. Design directly involves the client, and the end user. Art touches the sublime, and has no clients, only patrons.
As much as the situation definately sucks, the one who put both Michael and Rachel in tough positions is the greedy graphic designer who cares more about his own notoriety than ethics.

in case you haven't noticed, or if you've bee reading my blog through an RSS reader, there's a new link at the top of the page. After jon's commments about page loading time, i decided to invest some more time in my disconnected theme. It just so happened that the day after the initial release, Automattic released the widgets plugin for standalone wordpress installs. it's a fantastic plugin, i think. so, i took some more time to add support to the theme. that's the main reason i haven't posted about the theme until now.

It's pretty easy to add support, although i (naturally) made it hard for myself. I wanted to preserve the Inward/Outward structure of the sidebar, so i had to a) make two sidebars, with descriptive names, and b) modify the before and and after widget code so that widgets look nice. it would have been easier to just dump the default widgets in in place of the whole sidebar, but that's one of my main problems with the original connections, that each sidebar heading is too heavy.
Unfortunately, the blogroll widget is rather shortsighted, so i had to disable it. fortunately, since i suck at php, Matthew Holger released a links block widget that respects $before_widget and $before_title. so if you like the theme, and you like widgets, you'll need to use that.

Click the image for download and further information.