At 100 years old, Dr. W. G. Watson is the world’s oldest practicing physician. He’s been working as an OB/GYN doctor since 1947, and everyone in his town knows him. He says he doesn’t go anywhere without seeing one of his patients, some of which he’s followed for over 50 years. And he still makes house calls!
When did TechCrunch make the move to WordPress.com? I took a look at the top WP.com blogs today, and it was listed there, which means it’s no longer self-hosted, it’s literally at WP.com, under their VIP hosting program.
I did a quick search of their site, but they say nothing about their migration. I can imagine it was a grueling piece of work given the sheer size of the site and their various content embeds, like CrunchBase. With Google’s help, I saw that CenterNetworks wrote a post on 2/8 where they asked and got confirmation that TC is indeed hosted at WP.com, so it looks like they migrated sometime in late January or early February 2010.
I completed my own migration to WordPress.com (albeit not under their VIP program) on January 31st, and support from WP was very hard to come by during my migration. Perhaps they were busy at work on the TC migration?
Back when TechCrunch was a smaller operation, they were hosted at Media Temple, and were continually running their banners on the site. Then they moved to the RackSpace cloud, presumably after they outgrew Media Temple’s Nitro service. Apparently RackSpace no longer sufficed, for whatever reason.
What I do know is that WP’s own VIP hosting program is a compelling choice for those who need that kind of horsepower. Pricing begins at $500/month, with a one-time setup fee of $1,500, and your site will pretty much be able to handle any kind of traffic that comes its way.
Vasile Stoica is the first Romanian to have traveled around the world on a wheelchair.
Born paralyzed from the waist down, he spent the first thirteen years of his life mostly in hospitals, enduring numerous operations which were supposed to enable him to walk, too poor for a wheelchair, forced to drag himself along the floor. When he got into his first chair, it felt like flying to him. Since then, he’s set ever higher goals for himself. He started making trips through Europe, then prepared for his trip around the world.
He completed his first round-the-world journey in 1998, and that’s also when he entered the record books as the person who traveled the longest distance by wheelchair. Since then, he plans different routes and travels with his special Kuschall wheelchair each year, hungry for new places and new challenges.
Here he is after he completed a grueling 5,250 km trek across Europe, in 2006, at Finisterre, Spain.
The man who traveled the world by wheelchair doesn’t get any respect in his own country, along with the other disabled people who live there. In a short video that he and his friends put together, he demonstrates how hard, or even impossible, it is for him to get around on his wheelchair in Romania, because of the lack of disabled access to public buildings, such as ramps or elevators — this in spite of laws that have been on the books for years.
Photos used courtesy of Vasile Stoica.
The first people to have traveled the world by wheelchair were Patrick and Anne Simpson, who published their account of the journey in 1997, in a book entitled simply “Wheelchair Around the World“.
One thing that works against you when you want to try out new WordPress themes (and this applies for either self-hosted WP installs or for WP.com blogs) is the width of your media, like the images you upload for your blog posts. Many themes are narrower than the width you may have chosen for your images over time, and this means images will either overflow beyond the margin of the main column, crowding out the sidebar and generally making your site ugly, or be cut off, which looks a little better but still ruins the user experience.
For example, most of my posts have images posted at 640 px, 600 px or 550 px wide, and that eliminates a lot of themes for me, even though they may be very nice, because their post column is too narrow to display the images.
I have a solution to this problem.
You know how you can set the size of your photos and videos on the Media Settings page?
And did you know there’s also a media width “guideline” within each theme’s CSS settings page (at WP.com)?
That width is the maximum allowed for videos and images. My current theme, “Journalist” by Lucian Marin, allows media embeds at widths up to 720 px, which is a LOT wider than most other themes, which are still stuck at 500 px or even less, at 420 px.
All of these differences would be okay, provided the WordPress platform were to read the maximum column width of a theme and adjust the maximum image width on the fly.
In other words, instead of hard-coding the image width when they’re uploaded to a blog post, it could simply say “thumbnail”, “medium” or “large”, much like it does for the image align attributes (“left”, “center”, “none”), then figure out what the “large” size really means by looking at the theme’s width limit value.
This way, no matter what theme we may choose, images and videos will still display properly and we’d be happier. After all, they’re already doing this for video auto-embeds. As you’ll see if you look at the screenshot I’ve posted above, they say “if the width value is left blank, embeds will default to the max width of your theme.” What’s to stop them from doing the same with images?
I would also encourage Automattic, should they consider building this into a future version of WordPress, to make sure it’s backward compatible, so that no user should have to go back through all of his or her old posts and make sure all the images are set to the right width if they decide to switch themes. Perhaps they can do this with a wizard that goes through all the images and sets them to the correct width, or the new image embed code can auto-magically fix the image width for old posts.
So funny… this little black kitten fears a hammer head and keeps pawing it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1757803256836451754
Raoul Pop 