Day: December 17, 2009

The Open Video Alliance

The Open Video Alliance is a group dedicated to creating and promoting open video standards, codecs, players, etc.

The big idea behind the Open Video Alliance is that heading into this future, the tools for creating, manipulating, and sharing video must be available to everyone. And while having community-developed, open source versions of these tools is critical, it’s not the whole story. Open video requires that legal and business structures support the ability of huge numbers of individuals to use video in ways that go beyond just watching.

As someone who spends most of his work day wrangling this or that proprietary format video into usable form, this vision cannot be realized soon enough.

Upgrade Notification by Email

Some in the WordPress community will think I’m completely irresponsible for this, but sometimes I got as long as 72 hours without actually logging in to the admin area of some of my blogs. At the same time, I don’t want to get caught flat-footed if there’s an important upgrade that needs to be applied, especially if it has security implications.

Enter the Upgrade Notification by Email plugin. As the name suggests, the plugin checks periodically to see if there is a new version of WordPress available and, if there is, it sends me an e-mail.

The nice thing is that with this installed on each of my sites, I receive an email from each install which acts as a mini-checklist to ensure I don’t forget to upgrade one of my less active sites.