Category Archives: Asides
PHP Advent Article
Sorry for being quiet around here, I’ve been doing a ton of writing for other places. One went live today, Untitled as part of PHP Advent 2009. Since there are no comments on the site, I’ll accept them here.
Twitter API Support
You can now Post and Read WordPress.com via Twitter API, which was a pretty fun project. Everything doesn’t work yet because in some ways we’re overloading the Twitter API but it’s 90% of the way there to something really cool, and some relatively minor adjustments to the clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck can make this a really nice experience.
Feeling Lucky?
Feeling Lucky? by Tara Hunt: “It turns out that there IS such thing as lucky people, but it’s not some sort of mystical fate playing its hand at work after all. Instead, ‘lucky people’ are those who are really observant and open to opportunities.”
CoPress
After the Deadline now Open Source
After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.
Freedom in Action
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a story about someone republishing Mark Pilgrim’s book and selling it on Amazon. Not directly about the GPL, but the principles are the same.
Keyboard Cover
Curious if you guys have any favorite keyboard covers, I vaguely recall reading about one on Alex King’s site but can’t find it now. I’m looking for one to put over my laptop keys when I close the cover to avoid damaging the screen.
Plugin Mistakes
Kids are All Right
My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.
Ghost Fleet
November NYC Events
I’ll be chatting with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York when I’m there in November. I’ll be speaking in NYC three times that week: WordCamp New York, SVA, and at Web 2.0 Expo. Would love to see my Yankee peeps while out there. 🙂
GPL Win in France
WP on Palm Pre
Automattic Aquires AtD
Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.
RSS Cloud
RSS Cloud support has been turned on for WordPress.com and you can download a plugin for WordPress.org. Both are first iterations and will continue to be improved over the next few weeks, and I’ll be at the RSS Cloud meetup on Wednesday.
Keep WordPress Secure
How to Keep WordPress Secure, by me on the WordPress dev blog.
How Twitter Works
How Twitter works in theory, by Kevin Marks. “Phatic” gestures are important to understand if you’re building on the web.
Blog Mothership
Open City Data
Yesterday I was part of a press conference by Mayor Gavin Newsom promoting DataSF.org, which is one of San Francisco’s first steps at opening up. Tim O’Reilly also spoke and made the point to me afterward that as he dives deep into every part of the intersection of technology and government he’s most excited about the prospect for change at the city level. Here are some pictures from the event. I think we’ll see more along these lines, and more WordPress, for San Francisco in the future.