That’s right, no ethics at all :)

More, um, accurately though there are no places left, we’re full, and you’ll need to get in touch with us if you still want to come and haven’t signed up on Upcoming.

The full schedule for the day is available now too (.pdf).

Update: A very helpful bloglines engineer got in touch with me and they’ve applied a special script to set up  a combined rate limit for 10 requests per second for the edublogs domain. Seems to be working nicely so far so you’re back in the good books Bloglines ;)

A year on Bloglines continues to misbehave attempting to make hundreds to simultaneous connections through it’s crawler to WPMU hosts like edublogs – causing slowness and even crashing even on brand new clusters.

They don’t respond to emails about it and the only solution seems to be to limit their IP (65.214.44.29) to something like 20-40 concurrent connections – naturally massively slowing down the updates that get through.

It stinks and if they don’t do something about it we’re going to actively start asking the 100K+ users of edublogs sites to use Google Reader and discourage their readers /subscribers from using bloglines in favour of another RSS reader.

It’s a real shame as they were pioneers of web based aggregators and I used them for years but to be honest I’ve had enough.

Better hurry over to Upcoming to register for WordCamp Melbourne as there are technically only 6 places left!

If the great list of speakers and topics and beer doesn’t tempt you (how could it not!) then there are also lots of lovely goodies to be had… purely for turning up.

Just posted this on The Edublog Awards site. There have been over 300 nominations so far but I reckon people need to think outside the box a bit :)

“Also, let’s get imaginative people! Probably 50% of the many hundreds of nominations so far are for ‘best teacher’ – whatabout best designed, best individual, best newcomer, best post and best paper… going for a niche you’re strong in will seriously increase your chances of making it through to the shortlist.”

There’s so much being written about the proposed wp.com theme marketplace that coming back from a few days offline (not even a working mobile!) any contribution to the debate has probably already been covered and I’m kinda off the boil anyway. But what the heck…

I reckon it’s a nice idea. ‘Nice’ in a whole heap of ways.

Nice work (if you can get it): Wp.com have a massive community of users, they’ve worked hard and invested a lot of money into this community – they’re now saying ‘hey, howabout you come and assist the site with good stuff in exchange for $’, now that isn’t exactly a new concept.

Nice GPL: Sweet, more support for people making great GPL themes that the rest of us can use or supply to others through Edublogs etc.

Nice cover: I actually didn’t really agree with the whole removing sponsored themes thing – it was getting a bit ugly but it was a way for talented theme designers to get paid – but this would more than make up for it… and it’s based on quality rather than sheer promotion.

Nice ‘facebook’ nice: Now, when facebook or myspace or whoever opens up APIs then they’re not doing this out of sheer altruism… but I don’t hear people getting all upset over that.

Sure it’ll (further) help turn Automattic into a very successful purchase or IPO, sure wp.com is a serious business (but, you can’t deny the blatantly obvious benefits of this to all WP users!) and sure we all love a conspiracy theory or several – me more than most ;) – but I reckon this is damn nice idea… extend it to upgrades too!

This time more smartly attired… how do you think my emerging video presence is coming along ;)

Donncha’s just announced the release of WordPress Super Cache (which we’ve been lucky enough to do some testing on).

It’s an absolutely massive plugin as it essentially takes the (already excellent) WP-Cache plugin and, for want of a better word, Movable Types it.

So, now when a page is cached it’s really cached in terms of static html files being served straight from your webserver.

And it’s even WPMU compatible.

So now WordPress will perform as well or better than any other blogging engine for high traffic sites… in every respect!

Great work Donncha… here’s the official plugin page.

Sue’s got a very interesting post up talking about ownership and online communities – asks some good questions too, go check it out.

Huzzah, the Edublog Awards 2007 are underway and at a brand new home!

Nominations are now open – so go nominate not only the best edublogs, but also the best educational uses of tools like wikis, virtual worlds and audio / visual stuff too.

Here’s the blog post introducing the new site and the 2007 awards.

Our 4th year too… how time flies!

I love gmail, honestly I do, it’s the bees knees. I’d be stuffed (or at least certainly less productive) without it.

But enough with the spam boasting –  anyone who runs a WPMU site will tell you that the number one email provider  for spam blogs (splogs) is most definitely gmail… it would be nice if their lives became a little more difficult too.