If you’ve upgraded to the recently released WordPress 2.3, you may have noticed that the release brings official support for “native tags.” Tags are familiar to most people who use various social networking sites such as Flickr or Del.Icio.Us, but in the context of blogging it can be a bit confusing because there is often some semantic overlap between a blog server’s use of tags and categories.

In short, categories are typically used more conceptually for organization, while tags are used for identification by whatever keywords seem appropriate. For this reason there is usually a limited number of categories on a blog, while there may be an infinite number of tags.

Many people have asked me when MarsEdit will support the native tags in WordPress 2.3. For once, I’ve got good news that doesn’t require me to release a new version! Thanks to some thoughtful design by the WordPress developers, native tags are already supported.

How do you take advantage of the support? Just show the “Keywords” field for your WordPress 2.3 blog in MarsEdit. You do this by selecting it from the View menu in the main menu bar. Now you can enter tags as a comma-separated list of terms. These will be sent along with your post to the WordPress blog, and if it’s version 2.3 or later, the terms will automatically be incorporated as tags along with the post.

I hope this brings an “unexpected” feature to light for those of you running WordPress. There are obviously improvements I’d like to make in the way MarsEdit handles tags. Obvious things that come to mind are auto-completion and an improved UI for reinforcing the separation between tag terms. But for the short term I think this feature will be very appreciated.

I haven’t even been interviewed all that many times in my life, but I’ve met with each and every one of the interview creatures Rands describes in his latest article, The Button.

He elaborates on several stereotypes you’re liable to meet in the interview room while you’re searching for your next job, and tries to put some logic behind their behavior, while giving you tips for dealing with them.

I particularly like the presumption that the utmost goal of the interview is to get more information out of your interviewer than they get out of you. Essentially he suggests that people who are influential enough to do something meaningful with information about you will also be directed enough to make sure they get it. Everybody else, you might as well use them for your own purposes, to get more information about the job and whether you actually want to take it.

My friends over at Rogue Amoeba have been working their butts off for a long time, putting a bunch of work into both the technical and aesthetic design of their latest application.

Radioshift: Radio On Your Schedule

I’ve gotten to know almost everybody who works with Rogue Amoeba to varying degrees and I really like the way they run their business. They draw on the talents of fantastic programmers and designers from around the world, coordinating their efforts through the internet to produce freaking amazing software.

I would describe Radioshift as a sort of Tivo for your ears. You can browse a wide variety of freely available audio content – some available at any time, and some available on a particular schedule – and then you ask Radioshift to record your favorite programming for you so that you’ll have it at your fingertips when you’re ready to listen.

It’s sort of a coincidence that so many of my indie developer friends happen to be cranking out awesome software lately. I hope I’m not starting to sound too much like a link blog (I used to have one – remember!). But this is too good to pass up without downloading and giving it a try! Can I help it if I hang out with geniuses?

Wil Shipley types extensively about Apple’s attitude trending towards greed. A great article without a great hook. Just force yourself to start reading, you’ll be glad you did.

Most of us independent developers spend a lot of time trying to be more Apple-like. The idea is pretty simple. There’s this company, and they produce almost all of the products that we love in this world. And if we want to produce products that people love even half as much, we should emulate them.

It’s a really good idea, because there is a lot of great stuff in Apple to emulate. But reading through Wil’s article reminds me to take a defensive stance while evaluating Apple’s strategies. It’s not a lock-in that every step they make should be followed by faith. Apple is an amazingly successful, customer-pleasing company because of its successes, but also in spite of its screw-ups.

Recently on a developer mailing list, the perennial question of software pricing came up. I wrote about this a relatively long time ago. At that point I was most interested in the sheer economic mechanics of picking a price that would sit well with customers and still bring in as much money as possible. Since then, I’ve become a little more tuned in to the organic relationship between customers and businesses, and have also grown to appreciate the value of “doing what you love” even more than I previously did.

I wrote on the list that although maximizing profit might be a good idea, it shouldn’t be the primary idea. There are other emotional considerations such as whether you’re having a great time, and whether your customers are having a great time. In many cases, these situations should probably be considered higher priorities than maximizing profit.

Wil excoriates Apple, raising good points about whether Apple’s policies are more and more of the maximizing profit variety than of the maximizing fun and innovation kind. I particularly love the last paragraph of his entry, which sums things up quite nicely:

But Apple has to always remember that simply making money CANNOT be its point of existence. The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, NOT to get money from customers. It’s a subtle distinction that is the difference between good and evil.

Filed under one-liner personal mental mantras: “accept the customer’s money, but don’t take it.”