Dayta is designed to help you log any sort of data set that you wish to track over time. How many miles do you drive between refilling your gas tank? How much money did you spend on iPhone apps last month? Is your World of WarCraft guild improving its raid success ratio? You can create a Dayta log for anything.

You can recall data points by date, or view them on a graph. The charts Dayta generates are simple, and much like Google Analytics in style.

Inputting data is one area that confuses new users frequently. The default input field is a number that you can increase or decrease by tapping a simple plus or minus icons. The figure is committed to the log by pressing the number itself. But what if you need to enter a larger number, like 216, or something with a decimal point? It took me a little bit too long to have the “duh” moment… If you swipe your finger from right to left, across the input area, it will slide to show a text input with a numerical keypad.

Your various logs are displayed on a Dashboard screen, complete with sparklines next to each log’s name. They can be sorted into folders, too, so things don’t get too cluttered, as would likely happen for stat addicts.

Dayta is a great, and well-designed, application. It’s well worth the $0.99 cost.

Dayta icon and screenshots copyright Sahil Lavingia.

Google supports a few microformats in their search results. vCard data can be displayed in some cases, upcoming events can be shown for theaters and event centers, star ratings can be displayed for reviews, etc..

Joost de Valk has put together a tutorial on how to add the hreview microformat to your WordPress site, giving Google the option to show your editorial ratings on SERPs for any products you may review. I’ve implemented it over at Fantasy Folder, as I often write book reviews there, and I had been planning on adding editorial star ratings anyway.

In his previous post here on Yoast, Frederick explained why you should use Microformats to increase the CTR from Google. In the comments of that post, people were asking if there are plugins to easily implement this in your theme. While those are probably a bit hard to do, I though it would be good to explain how I implemented hreview in my theme.

Implementing hreview in your WordPress theme [Yoast]

The applications included aren’t necessarily as impressive as those from previous bundles, but there are some good ones.

If you ever need to backup a DVD, RipIt has replaced the difficult to obtain “Mac the Ripper” as the most prominent solution. It’s very simple to use, and it works with pretty much any disc you can throw at it. It’s usually $20 or so when your trial period is ends, so the MacHeist bundle is a pretty good value if you’re already looking for a good DVD ripping application. I haven’t tried out all of the other apps yet, but the clipboard enhancer Clips and the CoverScout album artwork-finder sound like they might be useful.

Oh, and one of the software packages included is Tales of Monkey Island, the latest installment in the infamous Monkey Island series of video games. As usual, don’t worry about the fact that it and RapidWeaver are not “unlocked” yet; they will be.

Over the past few months we’ve been preparing for this celebration by sliding new hypervisors into place with an additional 50% in RAM – and now VPS.NET*is happy to announce that this week we will be increasing the RAM per node – every VPS.NET node for both current clients and new signups will go from 256MB to 375MB per node – every node will also receive an additional 200MHz in CPU (600Mhz per node). This is all given to you at absolutely NO cost.

No worries – we’re still not overselling. . It’s taken a few months (and we’ve somehow stayed quiet on this!) but we’re finally almost ready to roll these upgrades out to you.

For those of you who haven’t heard of VPS.net, they take a “cloud” approach to managing their Virtual Machines. A VPS can consist of as many (or as little) “nodes” as you wish, a node representing a fixed unit of computing power. As your needs grow, you can instantly order and activate new nodes, and your VM dynamically expands. A 119MB increase in RAM per node is a very welcome bonus.

Happy birthday, and keep up the good work, VPS.net!

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

It sounds to me like they just patented a fairly obvious mechanism that has been long used by sites like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, RSS readers, blogs, etc..

Am I the only one who isn’t okay with this sort of patent-trolling behavior? Why does the USPTO keep letting these kinds of application through? It’s bad enough that Amazon is still fighting to have their one-click buying patent approved, and now we have another stupid patent that is just too obvious. Facebook is by no means the first website to have a “news feed,” and the idea is hardly patent-worthy.

Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them? [TheNextWeb]

First you want to find the application in the Finder. Right-click it and choose “Show Package Contents.”

A new window will open with a folder named “Contents” inside. Double-click it, and then open the “Resources” folder inside.

Now look for a file ending with a “.icns” extension. It’s icon should look exactly like the application’s. Double-click it to open Preview, and you should be greeted with an enormous version of the icon, along with several alternate sizes which can be viewed by selecting them in the sidebar.

Just press Command+C to copy the icon, and you should be able to paste it right into Skitch. That’s all.

…even a theme or plugin that entirely dependens on WordPress to run at all, or simply improves WordPress in some way, would not be a derivative work and the GPL would not apply. For the vast majority of themes I’ve seen, the GPL would not apply because the theme is not, in my opinion, a derivative work. (In fact, if any one thing “incorporates” another, it’s most likely WordPress incorporating the theme, by use of the PHP include() call, rather than the other way around.)

According to the article, the copy of the GPL included in every download of WordPress even states that a derivative work is “a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications.” I’ve been making a similar argument for awhile now. I have yet to see a theme or plugin that actually incorporates WordPress into the plugin code itself, rather than being included by WordPress. It sounds to me like WordPress, if anyone, is the one doing the deriving…

Most WordPress themes and plugins are unique code for the most part, with a few hooks or function calls. I must have missed the memo that utilizing a third-party API makes your application a subset of the other software. (That would mean any desktop application would be a derivative of the operating system.)

A follow-up article from the same author makes the additional case that, whether the GPL applies or not, the Fair Use Doctrine can protect developers from the licensing terms of the original creator. The same laws that ensure you can quote part of an article without having to pay whatever licensing fee the publisher can cook up apply to software. As little, if any, WordPress code is used in a theme, it would likely be considered fair use.

I like some of the ideology behind the GPL, and quite a few software packages licensed under it. However, it seems that in this case one party is misusing (or misinterpreting) it to prevent small developers from earning a living while further enriching the WordPress community. For what reason, good intentioned or no, I cannot guess.

add_action('admin_print_scripts', array(&$this,'admin_scripts'));

In this example, we’re using a WordPress hook, and passing an array with a class and method combination, instead of just a function name. (The $this variable, of course, means that the function name is inside the same class.) But what does the ampersand before the variable mean, though? To tell you the truth, I didn’t know until recently…

When you prefix a variable with an ampersand, you’re creating a “reference.” PHP references are like shortcuts or symlinks on your computer. You can create a pointer variable that is just another name for the same data.

$variable = 'Lorem ipsum';
$new = &$variable;
$variable = 'Some new data';
echo $new; //Prints "Some new data"

Pretty nifty. I’m sure you can think of some uses for that.

In the WordPress hook example, what I gather to be happening is that the plugin author was passing a reference to the $this variable, rather than the variable itself. I assume there is some sort of RAM/CPU-saving benefit to this.