Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Ning to BuddyPress

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JJJ at BuddyPress has some Helpful Resources for Ning Users. I’ve seen smaller startups rush to fill the space left by Ning’s announcement they’re getting out of their free tier, but honestly if a company with $120,000,000 in funding can’t figure that business out, I wouldn’t hitch my horse to a company with $5-6M. It’s better to get a $10/mo hosting account you know will be around forever and install BuddyPress and have complete and total control over your network, from the domain to the source code.

New York and Durham (Houston?)

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Two reminders for upcoming appearances: This Saturday I’ll be presenting a 24-hour art collaboration with Evan Roth at Seven on Seven at the New Museum. On Monday I’ll be in Durham, North Carolina to speak at Duke University. If you’re interested in the latter, leave a comment and I’ll make sure you get the details. We don’t have a ton of room but I’d like ma.tt readers to be able to attend. After that I’ll be in Houston briefly if anyone wants to do a meetup.

VaultPress

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We just announced VaultPress to the world. You can get your invite here. I’m very excited about this service because it is the first step toward my dream of every WordPress, regardless of where it’s hosted, to have best-in-the-world network (cloud? ;)) services that take all the worry and hassle away. People invest so much time, money, effort, blood, sweat, and tears into their WordPress-powered sites — they deserve for that to be 100% secure.

Sonos vs Squeezebox

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I few of my friends (including Om) are crazy about the Sonos, but I’ve been a Squeezebox user for 6+ years now and have stuck with them through a few upgrades and the acquisition by Logitech. Some of their new products like the Squeezebox Radio are super-handy, I like that the whole thing works over my Wifi network, and it runs Open Source server software. (I used to run it on a Linux box, now on a Mac.) That said, the software has always felt clunky to me, the lack of a good iPhone client is annoying, and the multi-room sync is temperamental. They also seem to have stagnated under Logitech, for example the Radio is cool but the battery for it (which is half the sell) doesn’t come out until April, and costs another $50 — lame. Has anyone used both Squeeze devices and Sonos and have a preference?

Bangkok Unrest

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In celebration of my arrival in Bangkok the opposition party is apparently planning a million person “red shirt” rally. Exciting! On the bright side, “The UDD [United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship] can only afford to keep its protest going for three to five days. If the government has not fallen by that time, it will have to withdraw and draw up a new strategy.” I always pick the best times to travel. 🙂 (Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay safe!)

Back to Firefox

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After a good while (I can’t search my Twitter stream) on Chrome I’m switching back to Firefox as my primary browser, and actually uninstalled Chrome. Why? I was getting the “Oh snap” failure page all the time, even on Google’s own Youtube! The only support I was pointed to was this page, and when I followed the instructions there when I restarted Chrome everything was gone. The sentence “copy the relevant files from the “Backup User Data” folder to your new “User Data” folder.” is useless when you consider the folder has 50+ files to sort through and I wasn’t sure which one was causing my previous problems. So back to Firefox, and thanks to Xmarks all of my stuff is there. I’m also using this persona which is pretty sweet. The feature I missed most on Chrome was lame: the ability to click and hold a folder then release on a bookmark I wanted to open. On Chrome you have to click twice. It bugged me. Now back on Firefox I feel like the browser has a large head.

IntenseDebate auto-login

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WordPress.com User Accounts now auto-login to IntenseDebate blogs no matter where they’re hosted, any website in the world. Connect services like Facebook’s and Twitter’s always require at the very least a click or two, and in worst case can be a full login and several bounces to the origin site, which increases the friction of commenting and can actually decrease the number of comments you get. (Oh noes!) This is much smoother, and faster. Previously this was only available if you actually hosted on WP.com, now it’s for any website, anywhere.