If you’re currently enjoying WPtouch installed on your website or blog, hopefully you’ve heard of WPhone, the excellent WordPress plugin that delivers AJAX goodness, simple and clear navigation structure and an intuitive, easy to use interface for the WordPress admin.

If you haven’t come across it, but have considered blogging from your iPhone or iPod touch if it weren’t for the slow, bloaty WordPress admin- I just made your day (actually WPhone will, but I digress).

I wrote this post using its slick admin, and its post limitations are really Apple’s devices’ limits (no cut and paste, no image upload).

There seems to be one bug where editing a post means re-typing the title each time, but I may be overlooking something in that regard.

Check it out.

I wrote a post a while ago about Google Gears, and how I wasn’t entirely convinced it’s the solution to the current problems on the internet. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s essentially a plugin you install in your browser that, when coupled with some javascript code, will give certain webpages the ability to offline content onto your hard drive. An example of this is Google reader — I believe if you have Google Gears installed you can manually download content to disk and view it offline later.

First, I have to ask, is that really necessary? The whole premise behind Google Gears is the assumption that people want to access a bunch of web pages even when they are offline. But is that accurate? Would it help if I could access the WordPress dashboard offline and write an entry? Maybe, but I can just jot one down in Word or VI real quick if I need to. What about the Google Reader example? Sure, it’s neat. But considering many of the blogs I subscribe to only provide excerpts and not full entries, it’s basically useless to me to unless I can get at the actual site. Same goes for comments. If I have a comment or suggestion while reading, am I really going to remember to log back online later, head over to the real site, and jot it down? I doubt it.

Also, how often are most of you offline nowadays? Google Gears seems to be basically targeted at the hardcore geek market right now. But seriously, most tech-savy places (other than Canada) already have realistic prices for unlimited wireless data plans. Except for airplanes, most people have the ability to be online almost all the time already, so is it worth the effort (that is, rewriting websites to work with Google Gears) to allow people to use them when offline?

There’s another aspect to Google Gears where apparently it can download an entire CSS/JS/IMG bundle from the webserver and store it locally. The idea behind this being that you can serve up the content rather quickly, and without an internet connection. This is basically HTTP caching, which has been around for years (although, you still need a connection to do proper HTTP caching). But in my mind, that functionality isn’t very useful if, after loading, you can’t utilize the same functionality of the website that you’re used to when it’s online. Sure, I can sit and look at a pretty website offline, but if I can’t interact with it, or follow links, is it useful?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Google Gears is all everyone thinks it will be, and it will spawn the next generation of amazing applications. I hope so. But let’s take a quick look at what other people are saying about it. We’ll utilize Google’s Trends service for that. Gander, if you will, at the following chart, which compares internet buzz for three things: 1) Google Gears 2) WordPress and 3) everyone’s favourite 50 year-old meat product, the hamburger.

As you can see, WordPress generates a ton of interest, as it should. But looking at Google Gears, it’s been basically flat, with only a few random blips when Google throws a bunch of press out about it. In fact, when compared to the hamburger, it’s hard to tell what people find more interesting, the food, or the offline content delivery system.

You want some fries with that content?

Photo from here

Last night, while attending WordCamp Vancouver, I was exposed to many great ideas from some passionate individuals. While listening to John Chow talk about advertising, and how many people who are familiar with the web actually ignore ads (which in my case is entirely true — I never click them), I started thinking about other areas that were similar.

One aspect of a WordPress blog that seems somewhat dated these days is the blog-roll. In principle, a blog-roll is nothing more than a list of sites that you basically endorse on your site. The problem is that there’s no context to the endorsement, and no real reason for the average viewer to click on a link in your blog-roll. It’s not very often I get links from someone else’s blog-roll, but it’s quite often I get traffic when they mention me in a post. The reason is, in my mind, because the post provides the context for the endorsement.

To that end, I think the typical blog-roll is a dated concept, and is in need of a refresh. One idea I’ve been toying with is sort of the opposite of a ping-back. That is, a list of sites that you’ve endorsed, along with a brief snippet that gives context to the endorsement. For the lack of a better name, let’s call it a ping-forward for now.

Given that I routinely link to my friends in my posts, effectively these ping-forwards now become my blog-roll. People I talk about often will stay near the top, and people who I rarely mention will slowly migrate to the bottom. It’s essentially a content-based blog roll that dynamically adjusts itself as you create new entries.

We have a ton of things on our plate over here at BraveNewCode, but I might take a stab at a quick ping-forward prototype this weekend. If the idea interests you, let us know here.

I’m sitting in a small room, three floors up above beautiful Vancouver, attending the first ever WordCamp Vancouver.

The turnout here is rather amazing, and I’m looking forward to giving a live demo about BraveNewCode’s WPtouch iPhone theme.

For those of you that want a play-by-play of what’s going on here, head on over to Miss604′s website, where she’s covering the event in real-time.

Photo by Vancouver’s Miss604

WordPress 2.5.1 came out today. If you’re a WordPress user, you might want to download it and install it apparently it has a few rather important security releases.