WordCamp Moscow 2016

I’m Konstantin Kovshenin, a WordPress core contributor, Systems Wrangler at Automattic, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in the rainy UK. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

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Recent Blog Posts

Finally, WordPress 2.7

I’m so proud they finally did it. After the RC2 coming out I thought they’ll have problems up until January, but there they go! It’s nice to see that people are already upgrading their blogs, and as for Russia, we’ve got developers who’ve done the translation already, so I guess I’ll be running it in two or three weeks. Don’t wanna hurry though, and...

Robotics in Russia

Hey, just had another exhibition here in Moscow, and we’ve finally presented the new AR-600 android robot. It looks a lot like ASIMO, but it’s totally new. It doesn’t know how to walk yet, but that’s only a matter of time – the mechanics are strong enough to hold that 100 kg robot on one leg! If anybody’s interested, be sure to check out the photos and videos...

WordPress 2.7

There’s been a lot of noise after the 2.7 beta release and I really liked the First Look at WordPress 2.7 article by Weblog Tools Collection. So I’m really looking forward to upgrade. I’m currently running 2.6.3 and my WordPress keeps yelling for 2.6.5 upgrade, but I think I’ll stay to 2.6.3 cause it seems pretty stable, unlike 2.6.2 where I had some problems setting up WP...

Google Maps and UTF-8

I bet everyone’s already using the UTF-8 encoding for all their pages. Well, windows-1251 remains the most popular russian encoding, although many people have realized that 1251 won’t go far. I’ve been binding some Google Maps to a cp1251 page and hadn’t had any trouble viewing it through mozilla firefox and opera browsers, but when I switched to internet explorer, I had...

Windows Live Writer

The Pro Web 2.0 Mashups book I wrote about earlier is going great and I finally got to the blogging chapters. Standalone blogging, yeah that was a news for me. I mean it is obvious that offline/standalone blogging is applicable to WordPress and other blogging systems, and that’s one of the main reasons why the XML-RPC protocol is supported by them, right? Well I just didn’t see the...

Pro Web 2.0 Mashups

Finally, I got the book about Remixing Data and Web Services and read about 3 chapters. It seems that everyone is already mixing up all kinds of data from sources like Google Maps and News, Flickr photos, delicious bookmarks, last.fm charts and others. The very first mashups like Housingmaps.com are brilliant, and with Yahoo! Pipes coming along, things seem to get much easier for people without...

A Robot Playing Ping Pong!

Woah. This is wicked! I wrote a ping pong game that had an AI player about two or three years ago in C++, the algorithm isn’t very difficult to figure out, but here’s one built-into a robot! RoboCup claims that they’ll win the international soccer championship by 2050, and I think table tennis will be much easier (because japanese are the best in robotics AND table tennis ;)

FeedBurner and Google AdSense

All of you know what RSS is and why feeds should go through FeedBurner. Most of you also heard that Google has aquired FeedBurner so you shouldn’t be scared when FeedBurner will ask for your Google account details. Anyways, I’ve been using FeedBurner for quite some time now and I definately don’t regret it. Some writers don’t like posting full articles to FeedBurner for...

Removing Comments Author Links

Askimet (the anti-spam plugin for wordpress) is great, but when it comes to readers commenting posts and leaving backlinks to their sites, Askimet doesn’t count that as spam unless the message doesn’t look like one. Yeah, wordpress marks them with a ‘nofollow’ attribute, but search engines aren’t the worst case in this situation. It’s pretty good if readers...

I Got my Flickr Account!

Yeah, I finally got my Flickr account and would like to share my photostream with everyone, so if you’re interested feel free to add me to your contact list: flickr.com/people/kovshenin. By the way, I haven’t got a camera – I use my cellphone to take pictures so the quality isn’t very good, sorry. Anyways, I’ve found a great way to upload images directy to Flickr...