Some of you may have noticed we’ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment.

Although shortcodes are great and we’ll continue to support and encourage them for comments the simplest possible interface seemed to be just a URL.

The URL is all you’ll need to include a YouTube video or PollDaddy poll. To try it out copy and paste the permalink for a video or a poll on PollDaddy Answers and put it on its own line in a comment, like enter enter http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1598108/ enter enter. You’ll now have a poll embedded in the comment just like this:

View Poll

(By the way, I …

Do you have_community_features? I do!

SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'have_community_features';
+-------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name           | Value |
+-------------------------+-------+
| have_community_features | YES   |
+-------------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I am pretty sure this is one of those variables that MySQL has put in as an unused placeholder, but for now, it is not even documented as unused (as are table_lock_wait_timeout, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-system-variables.html, and a Google search restricted to the site dev.mysql.com turns up only one match, …

Two articles have already been published from the competition submissions. One …

The most recent MySQL server I used in a production environment was a 3.23, so in conjunction with reading the 5.0 sources, I saw fit to reread large parts of the documentation to see where updates had happened, fixes were applied, extensions added. Here are some random clippings from the docs that illustrate quirks, changes from MySQL 3.23 (other than those noted in 3.23->4.0, 4.0->4.1, 4.1->5.0 which we'll give a brief tour of at the end) and differences from the standard. If you recently read the docs, kindly walk on, there's nothing to see here. If …