Improbable Research Magazine Now Free Online

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Talking about the Ig Nobel, CNET announces the following:

The Annals of Improbable Research, best known as the host of the Ig Nobel Awards, will now offer a free online version of its journal.

Via Slahdot.

Update: ReadWriteWeb also reports on the news that “all research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency with a $29 billion research budget, will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal.” Very nice! Twelve months is a long time in science though, and we’ll have to see what loopholes greedy researchers might find.

Montreal's Sexiest Geek

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From “Vote for Montreal’s sexiest geek in 2007“:

In the spirit of Wired Magazine’s poll of the year’s sexiest geek, TechnoCité wants to show a little love for the brightest and most beautiful in Montreal. […] Below are the six nominees, chosen for their having made the news this year in a tech-related field, and for being breath-stopping gorgeous. Choose with your heart, and vote at the bottom of the post.

Via MontrealTechWatch.

I know quite a few more that should have been on this list, but one can’t really disagree with the selection.

WordPress is Infinitely Extensible

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The main “Extend” page on WordPress.org states:

One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

That’s a statement I’ve heard about countless platforms before, but have often been disappointed to find it to be more of a marketing catch-phrase than anything concrete. Not so with WordPress!

I’ve been doing research on how to achieve specific goals with yet another plugin project, and the more I look, the easier it gets. Every time I catch myself thinking “hmm, this one’s gonna be tough”, a quick trip to the WP Codex changes my attitude within just a few minutes. Everything is possible.

Don’t get me wrong, WP is far from the only extensible platform out there and everybody has their personal pet peeves with the code base, but when coupled with amenities such as the wp-hackers mailing list and the wp-plugins dev repo, Matt and Automattic sure made it easy to adopt WordPress as a full featured scaffolding. And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.