Rights to Read a Book Out Loud

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” — New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir

Yeah. It’s like saying “You can’t sing that Beatles song”.

We don’t pay for the individual letters or words in the book, but rather for the whole content, the idea and the story. Words spoken out loud are not derivate work of the same words in writing.

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Post from Laconi.ca to WordPress

I have managed to add this blog as a subscriber to my identi.ca account. This means that I can post directly from Identi.ca (or any other application that supports OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) protocol, such as Laconi.ca) to my blog.

To achieve this I wrote a plugin that uses the power of XRDS-Simple plugin to generate Yadis document which specifies the location of OAuth and postNotice, as required by OMB (see konstruktors.com/blog/?xrds). A modified version of WP-OAuth plugin takes care of OAuth 1.0 dance (for the initial authorization and all the update notices) and adds support for receiving updates from the listenee (any Laconi.ca application on your phone, for example). Read more »

Squeeze the Header of the New WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

I love the new WordPress 2.7 dashboard design even despite all the bad things that I have previously said. Back then it was only a prototype and probably even the core developers didn’t have a clear and complete picture of how it is going to look and work in real-word environment.

Now when it is one minute away from the prime-time, I applaud Jane, Matt and all the designers and developers behind the overhaul who carried out the work in such a transparent and feedback driven way.

For me it is the new icon-only-slide-right navigation bar that makes the whole administration section work so much better than I could have imagined. All the administration sections are only one click away. Navigation takes up only 40 pixels of the cheap vertical space and thus saves much of the expansive vertical area where things get done. The result is truly amazing and it makes me wonder if anyone really knew it will turn out to be this good. Read more »

Show Ads Only to Visitors Coming from Search Engines

With the latest design update, I have stripped away most of the clutter in the form of secondary content. It also included removing most of the ads, just because 400 visitors a day is still to few to get more than a single click per day.

I decided to install Ozh’s Who Sees Ads plugin to make ads visible only to visitors coming from search engines. The problem, however, is that it shows ads only on the landing page and not on all pages that the user visits. Read more »

WordPress 2.7 Vertical Navigation

After having used the new WordPress 2.7 (which is not even beta yet) for some time, it is clear that the vertical dashboard navigation has been a bad design choice.

The aim of this revised design was to minimize vertical scrolling and make everything easier for both new and experienced users. The fact is that for me it has made the navigation more complex and has moved every action several clicks and scrolls away.

Why? Because information of equal importance cannot be aligned vertically. Items at the top will always have more importance than the ones at the bottom. Read more »

WordPress UI Idea: Menu Item Sorting and Renaming

Don’t like the proposed WordPress 2.7 menu structure? Why not make it sortable and with ability to rename top-level menu items so that those who still prefer Manage and Write instead of Posts and Pages can have it.

WordPress Dashboard menu sorting and renaming

Here is how it works: Read more »

WordPress 2.7 Administration UI Wireframes

Automattic have published WordPress 2.7 user interface wireframes (.pdf) that list and explain the changes planned for the next major release of WordPress.

WordPress 2.7 User Interface proposal (version 002)

I think there are only two things wrong with the purposed user interface and the information architecture: Read more »