{EAV_BLOG_VER:c967aa2d93c7cb18} Mark Maunder writes Can WordPress Developers survive without InnoDB? MyISAM vs InnoDB benchmarks.
Category Archives: Asides
ExpanDrive, a program I’ve used for years, allows you to mount FTP, SFTP, or S3 accounts as local drives on your computer on Mac or Windows. They just released their new Windows version, and it’s fast and slick. They support key authentication, which is my must-have feature.
The Selby goes with Pharrell Williams at Home in Miami. Explore the rest of the site, this is actually one of the less-interesting galleries.
Alec Baldwin, my favorite character on 30 Rock, has a great-looking WordPress-powered site. It was also built by Alley Interactive who did the Observer site I blogged about the other day.
Gopher dead, blogging lives. “If blogs are dead, what are we reading in Instapaper?”
Four Cool WP .gov Sites
I was in Washington DC last week at the OpenGovDC conference where I participated on a panel about design. The organizers and many of the speakers were pretty Drupal-focused, but I did get to meet some folks and learn about the ever-growing use of WordPress inside the Beltway. Here are four:
- CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is the best-looking of the four, and 100% WordPress.
- MO.gov, Missouri State. Is there a LESS.gov?
The show-me state has a solid WP-as-CMS going here. - Office of Compliance. As exciting as it sounds.
- NCCS.gov, National Center for Computational Sciences. Website is okay, but center is super-cool: they provide super-computing (tens of thousands of processors) for open scientific research.
Any other favorites? Particularly well-designed ones like consumerfinance.gov.
How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs. This is why I love saying “scripting is the new literacy.” A bit of scripting glue can tie together Big Projects like WP and Google Docs to create something completely novel.
Gamasutra: Greg McClanahan’s Blog – Achievement Design 101. Long article, but worth getting through. I’ve had it in Instapaper forever.
WordPress Publisher Blog: Influential Weekly The New York Observer Migrates from Drupal to WordPress. Cool!
Every 60 seconds on the web there are 50+ WordPress downloads and 60+ new blogs created. Hat tip: Andrew Nacin.
Six years ago on this blog we scheduled a WordPress meetup in Seattle which ended up including a number of folks who are still changing the web today, including Bre Pettis, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Matt May, Filipe Fortes, Andy Skelton, Scott Berkun, and Lee Lefever. We’re going to do an informal 2.0 tonight at 6 PM, Friday June 3 at Pike Pub & Brewery on 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle. Come by and share a beer, reminiscence about trackbacks, and talk about the future of the open web. It’s short notice, so please spread the word to your Seattle-area friends.
Louis Pasteur is credited with the observation that chance can only help the well-prepared mind. I also think that my long string of lucky breaks can be credited to my mode of paying attention: I look at funny things and never hesitate to ask questions. Most people would not have noticed the dirty blackboard, or looked at the article that my uncle gave me because he was not interested.
via Edge: THE FATHER OF LONG TAILS — Interview with Benoît Mandelbrot by Hans Ulrich Obrist. For extra credit and an exercise in brevity and clarity, link or write in the comments the simplest definition of “fractal” as used by Mandelbrot and Obrist in the interview.
I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
Johnathan Franzen’s Liking is for Cowards in the NY Times.
Tomorrow I’m going to be speaking at ZURBsoapbox in Campbell, California at noon. If you’re in the Bay Area please come out and say howdy.
The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, I’ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.
Fantastic read over at Tweetage Wasteland : I Don’t Care if You Read This Article. Or put another way “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Hat tip: Mark Riley.
I believe the mini-bubbles above are different ripples in what might call the surface of a superbubble: an opulence bubble. Here’s what I mean by opulence bubble: our conception of the good life, as I’ve discussed with you, has been centered on what I call hedonic opulence — having more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now. But we might be finding out, the hard way, that the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator industrial age stuff might have been steeply overvalued, in terms of its social, human, and financial value.
The Opulence Bubble by Umair Haque. Hat tip: Tim Bray and Paul Kedrosky.
Joel Falconer has written a pretty definitive article on WordPress: The Free Software With a Big Economy & How You Can Get Involved.
I’m honored to be have been chosen alongside some cool folks like Kevin Rose, Dave Morin, Andrew Mason, and Charlie Cheever as one of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs in 2011. I only have 3 more years before I’m too old for these lists. 
Batters Up: Major League Baseball Now on WordPress.com. MLB’s blogging system used to be powered by Movable Type, and about 15,000 blogs switched over to WordPress.com as part of this. It’s an honor and delight to have so many great bloggers joining the family. They’re also in good company with VIP blogs for the NFL, NBA, NBC Sports…
Bruce Mau Design Incomplete Manifesto for Growth — “Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project.” I dig. Hat tip: Noel.