I just got my Dopplr stats for the first half of the year. “You took 28 trips, which added up to 221,054 km or 60% of the distance to the moon. You spent 72 days at home, 109 days traveling. Your personal velocity so far this year was 48.12 km/hr, which is about the same as an elephant.” These stats are the #1 reason I use Dopplr, it’s just fun to play with it.
Category Archives: Asides
Haiku-powered Design
qTranslate
I recommended a translation plugin the other day at WordCamp Montreal but couldn’t remember the name. It was qTranslate.
Writing Useful Software
Time Tracking
Why I do Time Tracking, by Swaroop C H.
Cheese Sandwich
To address the constant questions of “Matt, what did you eat for lunch?” and “What music or funny sign did you see today?” I’ve re-ignited matt.wordpress.com, where I’m primarily mo-blogging using the WordPress for iPhone app and the Post by Email feature. I used to do this on Flickr, here’s my manifesto for switching. Please subscribe to the feed here for a more personal side of me.
PollDaddy Ratings
Techcrunch covers PollDaddy: PollDaddy Traffic Soars, Releases Ratings Widget With Possible Digg Competitor On The Horizon. You can read more about the new ratings widget on the PollDaddy blog.
Acquia Search
Acquia Search looks cool, Automattic should do something similar for WordPress.
Live Web
Live Web, Real Time . . . Call It What You Will, It’s Gonna Take A While To Get It. Excellent article by Mary Hodder.
Velocity and the Bottom Line
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.
Real-time Systems Knowledge
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.
On Tekzilla
I was on Tekzilla Episode 92, interviewed by the lovely Veronica Belmont.
Typekit Web Fonts
Introducing Typekit, an iTunes-for-fonts on the web that allows you to have rich typography in your designs and pages without resorting to flash or image hacks. (Old time readers will remember my yellow design which used Dante, the original WordPress logo font, and generated-image titles.) Typekit takes advantage of the current and upcoming browser support for embedded fonts and abstracts away all of the complications thereof like Feedburner did for feeds. Brought to you by my friends at Small Batch, previously of Adaptive Path, Measure Map, Start, and Wikirank fame. The people building the web have been waiting for this.
AFP WordPress / China Article
AFP: Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China — the Agence France-Press talked to me when I was in Hong Kong about the early days of WordPress.com and our experience with the Chinese firewall. Today we are still sporadically blocked, nothing official but enough that almost everyone in China uses WordPress.org. It’s funny that this story came out almost two months after the interview because I’m wearing that exact same sweater today.
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. 🙂
Journaling Tools
WordPress listed as one of “Five Best Journaling Tools” at Lifehacker.
WordCamp Developer Day
I have some cool news: On Sunday the day after WordCamp San Francisco we’re going to host a WordPress developer day at the Automattic office on Pier 38. It will be Barcamp-style with no pre-announced schedule, but expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now, there should be plenty of room for everyone to connect. (Try to keep things local though, we’re not sure how the internet will hold up.)
How David Beats Goliath
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath, from Malcolm Gladwell. A really enjoyable read. Hat tip: Raanan.