Velocity and the Bottom Line. How performance touches everything on the web, and includes a quote from me about the importance if of speed to the user experience. You can check out my whole presentation, the Moral Philosophy of Performance, on Blip.
Category Archives: Asides
The Capitalist Manifesto
The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To a Point). A fair summary view of financial goings-on, with a bit of preaching at the end.
GigaOM Pro
GigaOM Pro is a new subscription research site from my friends on the GigaOM crew. It’s also the first major media site I know about powered by BuddyPress and it’ll be interesting to see how the social features influence the sites evolution. Here’s Mark Jaquith’s post about building it.
Ask Matt!
Ask me a question here and I’ll pick the best and post a video answer here on this blog. This was always the intention of the Ask Matt category, just never got around to doing it before. 🙂
New WordCamp SF Site
The new site for WordCamp San Francisco is online, go check it out. Got some more speakers and announcements when I get back from Japan.
YCombinator and Techstars
YCombinator and Techstars spawning similar startups. I’ve noticed this too, though it’s most likely just good ideas occuring to several folks at once and the seed folks lowering the barrier to entry of starting a company and execution, so we notice more of the confluences.
Gravatar in Gmail
Jon experiments with Gravatar in Gmail. I would love to see more of this. We also need a better way to get Gravatars into your Apple address book / iPhone for people that don’t have a set picture.
My Twitter
People keep asking me if I have a Twitter, the answer is yes. I don’t use it too frequently, so I won’t flood your stream if you add me. Weblog Tools Collection also published a list of 31 WP folks you can subscribe to on Twitter.
Community Tagging
At Web 2.0 Expo
For those of you in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo, I’m going to be speaking Friday in the main ballroom at 10:15 AM. Earlier that morning are Jonathan Schwartz, Dan Lyons, and Matt Cutts, all tough acts to follow. I’ll be doing a “High Order Bit” which means “short” and will be launching something.
Identicons from Gravatar
You may notice in my comments now for people who don’t have an existing Gravatar I show cool geometric patterns. These are called Identicons and they were originally conceived by Don Park. With a single parameter, you can have the Gravatar API fall back to an identicon or even force it to return one. This works in any size Gravatar supports, up to 512 pixels. Sweet!
Catching up on March
March is almost over, but email-wise I’m just getting started. Between the travel, conferences like SxSW and WordCamp, the 2.5 release, and the wisdom tooth stuff I’ve got stuff backed up even from Febuary. I’m back home this week so I’ll be doing as much catch-up as possible. If you get a response to an old email from me, that’s why.
Share Icon
The open source Share Icon is back, after its trace disappearing from the internet for a time. Good on Share This for promoting this project to the community. The spread of this icon, which already is incredibly ubiquitous, will continue.
Upcoming Speaking
Coming soon to a town near you. I’ll be doing a keynote at Northern Voice in Vancouver, speaking at Future of Web Apps in Miami, and on two panels at SxSW Interactive in Austin, and kicking off WordCamp in Dallas.
SVASE Panel
Tonight I’ll be on a SVASE panel with Mike Cassidy, Naval Ravikant, and Peter Yared down in Palo Alto speaking on “How To Build A High Growth Startup Fast And Cheap.” Get all the details here. Zoli Erdos has some more information.
Nickel and Diming
Seth Godin: Nickel and diming. (As an aside, it drives me crazy that people like Seth Godin and John Moore are pouring countless hours into creating priceless content as sharecroppers on domains they don’t own. To clarify, I have no problem that they’re using Typepad, but for goodness sake put it on your own domain. When someone Google’s you the first hit shouldn’t be .typepad.com. Your name is the most valuable thing you have, and every day you put it off is more links to someplace you can never truly control.)
SOCKS5 Proxy DNS Cache
Note to future self: If you’re behind a SOCKS5 proxy for DNS lookups, your machine will ignore the local HOSTS file, and you’ll need to make host/IP modifications on the machine you’re proxying through instead.
Twenty-four
Every year my birthday sneaks up on me, and this was no exception. After the lull of the holidays and the whirlwind first few days of the year, I am now officially 24. This is the sixth year I’ve celebrated with you guys on this blog, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. This year should be interesting because many of the things I started 2–5 years ago are just now starting to come to fruition. I’m also hoping there will be some big changes on photomatt.net, including possibly a change in domain name. I’ll post more on that as it develops though. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.
Wikia Search
Wikia Search is pretty darn cool. Not sure what I was expecting, I guess I assumed that search would be much harder than doing a wiki. The “Visvo” index seems good enough for daily search use. Their social networking stuff is clean too, here’s my profile — please add me as a friend! (I hope those links work post-alpha.) If they can pull off an open source ranking algorithm… that’s pretty exciting.
Starbucks Cheer Chain
At Starbucks people have been starting “cheer chains” where they pay extra money to pick up the coffee of the person behind them in the drive-thru. Some have gone 2 solid hours. The blogger is cynical, but some of the comments are from baristas that work at Starbucks. I want to believe.