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.
Category Archives: Asides
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.
Falling Snow Script
I’ve been looking around for a good falling snow script, as I’m a sucker for cheesy holiday javascript, but everything seems to be from the era of Netscape 6. I even found one on my own domain, but it doesn’t seem to work in Firefox. So where’s the state-of-the-art snow script for web 2.0? Time is running out!
Entertainment Gathering
Even though I swore off conferences for the rest of the year, I’m going to be making one final exception for the Entertainment Gathering in Los Angeles, which will be going on December 2-4. I’ll be going outside my normal role and attending as the official blogger for the conference, covering all aspects of the sessions, speakers, and attendees armed with a laptop and camera. If it sounds like your cup of tea, I think there are a handful of seats left.
Metcalfe’s Law and Social Networks
Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks, written by Bob Metcalfe himself. (The title is tongue-in-cheek.)
Amazon Grocery Update
Remember the TP Amazon Grocery order I blogged about before? Here’s how it ended up. Don’t think I’ll use Amazon Grocery again. I went to Safeway yesterday.
dot info
Some days don't you want to just blacklist all of .info? More spam there than anything else except maybe .com or .be, and certainly a higher percentage than any other top-level domain.
Vista Jump
I'm installing Windows Vista on my laptop. Wish me luck. I got a free DVD at Gnomedex, so figured why not? Update: Upgrade failed (froze), going to try a clean install.
Darwin on Web 2.0
Darwin on Web 2.0: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
MySQL Counters
Check out this cool INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE feature in MySQL 4.1. This will make some logging code I have much easier and cleaner than it currently is.
Web 2.0 Band
I’m going to start a Web 2.0 band, thinking about calling it “The Standards.” Any other name ideas? Hat tip: Glenda.