Category Archives: Meta

About this blog — design changes, technical notes, and navel-gazing.

First Step Toward World Domination

Meta, WordPress

Before I finish getting ready to leave (and yes it’s 4 AM) I would just like to point to this search. Google is a harsh mistress; weeks ago I was on the fourth page (after skirting the first page a while back) and now somehow I’ve been bumped up to 8, 7 if you take out the duplicate.

I can’t think of a better birthday present for this blog from Google. (This domain turned one year old a couple of days ago. I’m working on a year recap but it’s taking a while. Loving the new WordPress draft feature though.)

More Updates

Meta, WordPress

The new release of WordPress is out and kicking, so get it while it’s hot.

The photolog is also back up, but it’s ugly. An attempt to make it standards-compliant with some help from Gerrit Kaiser crashed and burned when I realized that I was overwriting files with older versions and that was breaking a lot of things. So right now it’s in a very half-baked state but as Kevin said the other day, any update is always preferable to nothing. So I’ll save face by calling it “public redesign” of the photolog.

Upgrade Day

Meta, WordPress,

Just finished upgrading the server to address a mod_ssl vulnerability and get PHP 4.3.2. It went swimmingly, which is always nice.

In the process of upgrading about half a dozen sites to WordPress .71 to test it out before the code is released. It’s a good process because the sites need updating (security problem again) and it’s a good way to find any bugs that may have made it through so far.

I’ve always remarked that people tend to write about bad things more than they write about good things. Journals, blogs, diaries, all tend to be one-sided, at least in my experience. As is such though yesterday started quite badly, after I emerged from my migraine-medicine–induced haze I had a pleasant evening with my family.

Today has been great too; been hanging out with Mike and Christine at Kaveh Kanes (where the chai is tasty and the music is grooving) getting Christine set up in email utopia, where spam is like the distant buzzing of a fly you think you heard but you’re sure it’s really just in your head. Back to work! There looks to be some frisbee in the plans this evening…

Update: Mike has a meta moment.

Summer Showers

Meta, WordPress

I woke up this morning to a delightful storm outside, which I think is the best possible way to wake up. It’s also the best time to stay in bed, which I did for a while and just enjoyed the storm from the comfort and protection of my semi-slumber. Houston really needed the rain.

There have been a few changes around here, for one I decided that wider is better, and content now stretches like it used to. There have been a few tweaks here and there, and I was hoping to bring the photolog back up but some WordPress work is going to prevent that today. Also you’ll notice that the endorsement box at the top is a little nicer and it has a new extra touch. If you visit this site using Internet Explorer, which is a satisfactory product but looks dead from an upgrade point of view, you will see a small promotional message extolling a virtue of the official browser of PhotoMatt.net, Mozilla. It’s the browser so good I installed it for my Mother. Yes, it’s that easy. If you tried it before and it didn’t suit your fancy I highly encourage you to give it another go, as it has progressed by leaps and bounds and is hardly recognizable as the slow dinosaur it used to be.

There are new shares of PhotoMatt available if you’re into that sort of thing. BlogShares finally figured out I’m worth something and adjusted my price accordingly, so I thought a few extra shares out there would spice things up. I’ve decided to take a very passive approach to the whole game. Besides, Brad has made me rich enough to retire to a small island and relax. Thanks Brad!

Updated Updated

Meta, WordPress

The updated blogroll on the sidebar is now powered using WordPress Links instead of Blogrolling. It’s always nice to use your own project. One more thing knocked off my very long list of things todo this early Monday morning. Speaking of things to do, Alex’s Tasks might be just what the doctor ordered for organizing me a bit. In the past the most sucessful system I used was my Palm, but that’s relatively inflexible and I can’t forsee a situation where I wouldn’t have internet connectivity anyway.

While I’m on this meta post, I should let you know that PhotoMatt.net is seeking a summer editor. Rebecca Lammons, who has edited almost from day one, is not going to be online very much for the rest of the summer. So if you have a keen eye for proofreading and visit the site when it updates drop me an email and let me know why I should give you administrator access to this blog. What do you get in return? Well, you will be less frustrated by the errors that crop up occassionally (okay, frequently) in the posts. I can also promise fame, fortune, prominent linkage, and something from your Amazon wishlist at the end of the summer.

Double You

Links, Meta

Just a reminder: I love all the links that have been coming in recently, but if you link to something here, save yourself four keystrokes and leave off the “www.” It’s three months now, all the useful search engines (except Blogdex) have figured it out, why are two thirds of the HTTP responses from this site still 301 Permanently Moved? It’s going to take years to shake that thing.

Blogroll Updated

Meta, Tech

The blogroll on the menu has been seperated into Pingers and Non-Pingers. People under “Updated” ping Weblogs.com when they update and float to the top of the list, which I check umpteen times a day. Those on the other list ping very inconsistently, or not at all, so I just check them every now and then to see if anything new is going on. If you’re on one list and think you should be on the other, let me know because there’s probably a problem with the URL I have for you not matching whatever you ping with. I also came up with a much, much simpler way to parse blogrolling lists into semantic lists, and I’ll update the script and article accordingly later this week when I have more time.

Being In Katie’s Dream

Meta

Katie—one of the first people to ever link to this site, who I met at a H-Town gathering months ago, and who I was lucky enough to spend some time with at SxSW, but who unfortunately I haven’t seen in a while—had a dream in which Jane and I were in a fight and everyone there (including Christine) won’t talk to each other except through their blogs. (I bet the trackbacks were flying.) We’re mere feet away from each other, but no one speaks a word. (A situation not unlike some HWUG meetings.) I know how even the most bizarre dreams can sometimes echo in real life, so to avoid any distress, a public apology is in order.

Jane, you seemed like a perfectly nice person when we met so if we’re fighting it’s probably because of something stupid I did, which is not at all unheard of. I am sincerely sorry for my actions and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive and forget. Hope to see you again next year at SxSW. —Matt

Spam in a Can

Meta

I usually clean out my spam folder nightly and watch for any false positives, but partly because I’ve been quite busy and partly because I have gotten one false positive in the past month it has slipped my mind for about a week. I just checked it and between my two accounts I had gotten 691 spams. What’s great is I don’t mind a bit. Every bit of spam I get, especially the ones that aren’t caught before they get to my inbox, makes my personal filters a little smarter and more likely to catch the next one. It’s a beautiful thing. For the first time since I’ve been online, I feel like I’m winning the war against spammers.

Moving On Up

Google, Meta, Yahoo

I feel ashamed posting this, but #10 on Yahoo. Not sure why I’m 10 on Yahoo, and I’ve moved from 13 to 12 and back on Google, but does it matter? I get these things from my referrer stats, honest! You can insist on my quest for search engine domination by linking to me with the Matt. Slight variations like “Matt Mullenweg,” “photo matt,” “I love Matt,” and “Matt is a _____ (fill in blank)” should be alright as well.

LINK Navigation

Meta, WordPress

Now I know I just gushed about Opera, but I just found another reason why Mozilla kicks butt. Back in the day a number of link types that could be used by user-agents in an additional navigation bar or pre-cache some elements “to reduce the perceived load time.” Cool, eh? There are a number of possible applications in the blog format that lend themselves well to this, and I’ve tried to put as many as possible here. Viewing the source or visiting in Mozilla is the best way to get a feel for what’s happening and how neat the application is, but some descriptions are in order nonetheless. I don’t know the default setting for the “Site Navigation Bar” is for Mozilla, but to make sure it’s on go “View > Show/Hide > Site Navigation Bar > Show Only As Needed” to make sure you’ll see what all the fuss is about.

First, it was very tricky hard to get this all working with my current setup; whenever I try something new here my immediate thought to how it can be integrated into WordPress, but the steps I had to take were so convoluted that I doubt that any of this will make it into the next release. Anyway the first useful link that came to mind would be “bookmark,” something I specify the rel attribute on my permalink tags but no current browser picks up. So for example the bookmark link for this entry would be like so:

<link rel="bookmark" href="/p620" title="LINK Navigation" />

For any index, individual, archive, or category page you look at on the journal part of this site there will be a set of bookmark links to each of the entries on the page. I have created similar links for commenting and trackbacking entries, that personally I’ve found to be an extremely efficient way to get around. Check under your “More” menu in Mozilla to see it all. Mozilla also links nicely to the alternative representations of the content, such as RSS, and though it links to the same resources on each page it really should link to the specific representation of only the content on the current page, so for example the comments page could link to its unique RSS 2 feed.

Then some basic navigation elements were in order. The logic of these should be apparent from the code, but there is a link pointing to the top page of this site, a link to the search page, the FAQ, information about myself, and finally copyright information. When you are browsing a single entry you are offered links to the previous and next entry, as well as to the very first entry. This could be expanded once date-based archives are available to allow you to browse from month to month or day to day. Once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever navigated any other way.

Finally I set the categories to be “sections,” though I’m not sure if I’m entirely comfortable with this. If you envision all of the text of this blog as a document, then the “index” could be the front page, but after that it’s open for interpretation. Should categories be sections or chapters? Could chapters be say, month-based archives? What if I wanted some arbitrary division of chapters, say by whatever relationship I was in at the time? Sub-sections seem ill-defined as you can’t seem to define several sub-sections as a child of a section, though I may simply need to explore this further. Also I am feeling slightly constrained by the software I use to manage everything, but it would be fascinating to see how someone without those constraints such as Tantek could do with his structure. Ideally some common set of relationships specific to the organization of a weblog—much like the goal of the Weblog Metadata Initiative (where’d they go?)—could be agreed upon and implemented by default by the authors of the most common software and templates. Several people already implement a bit of this already, for example Mark, but there is a lot of unrealized potential here.

Opera is able to use all of the standard defined links, but doesn’t catch any of the extra ones. IE of course is oblivious to it all. Mozilla gets everything. If you have any information on other browsers let me know. I should be defining the extra rel attributes in a profile document, but there are only a few hours left before I’m supposed to “wake up” for my classes tomorrow, so some sleep may be in order.

Recent Comments

Meta, Web Standards

All the cool kids are doing it, so here it is. If you put a number at the end, like comments/50, you will se the last 50 comments. Neat huh? Want to see something really fancy? After you put the number on the end, add “rss” like this. Hot damn. It’s even valid. Some feedback would be helpful, because I don’t have an aggregator to test it in on this machine. As Mike would say, “Baaaahhhh.”

The real reason I put this up in the first place is that there is some good discussion (and sometimes not) in the comments occasionally that I feel gets lost in the shuffle. Furthermore, the RSS monkeys have no idea which posts have comments already, or to know automatically if new comments have been posted since they last checked the feed, so this will give them something else to subscribe to for the closer-to-full PhotoMatt Experience. 😉

Hit Diggity!!!

Google, Meta

Click here, right now. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What is Matt making us click now? Maybe I shouldn’t, although that date thing was pretty funny…” Well to save the lazier among you some trouble, that’s the second page of Google results for “matt” and yours truly is at #13. Now before you call me the most narcissistic blogger ever in my defense I was merely vanity surfing my referrers when this popped up. Vanity surfing is not nearly as bad as vanity searching.

Anyway I’ve joked for a long time that the only reason I’m on the web is to become the #1 hit for “matt” on Google, it’s been the brass ring of my online existence. Before this latest Google dance I was somewhere toward the end of the 18th page if I remember correctly, so obviously something has been going right. Better yet, I now have a nice short hit list of people that have to go so I can make #1. 😉

I am so going to start using this at parties!

Image Fun

Books, Design, Events, Gallery, Meta

Been playing with manipulating images with PHP all night, something I haven’t done much since I had the fancy capital thing on this site, and that wasn’t as much manipulating images as generating images using truetype fonts. With GD included PHP is very easy to use for this sort of thing. I’m storing the images themselves in the database as BLOBs, along with a bit of meta-data I grab from them when they’re uploaded using a web form. I have a small PHP script that returns the images from the database, resizes them to whatever width I specify in the query string, and does “funky” caching so if the image has already been generated/grabbed it returns just about as fast as reading it directly from the filesystem would. I have to have some fun because the site I’m doing this all for uses tables.

Speaking of tables, everyone head over to Big Pink Cookie and see how there aren’t any there. I recreated the basic layout in CSS and then helped Christine tweak it till it became the beauty you see before you now. If you’re curious, here are some of the changes I made:

  • The CSS and Javascript is now in seperate files, as to be easily cached.
  • The header graphic is now a h1 tag with the text hidden and the graphic as the background.
  • The latest pictures from Pixelog at the top of the page are now an ordered list, styled to display horizontially through CSS.
  • There is a “rapper” div (gotta have some flava) of a fixed width centered using margin: auto and a IE workaround.
  • Inside that there is a content and menu div, the menu has a fixed width and is floated on the right.
  • ms that were previously all preceded by “::” are now unordered list items with the :: effect recreated through a list image. Now if Christine wants to change the way her menu looks she just has to edit one file instead af change hundreds of double colons.
  • It now loads really, really fast. Especially when compared to before.

It might still have a stray error here or there that’s keeping it from validating, but give it a few days and all those should be ironed out. More importantly, it validates in spirit. I can now add Christine to the list of site I check when I’m browsing on my Palm over a 9.6k connection. Best of all, I think CSS no longer makes Christine’s eyes bleed, and she can see Tantek again.

While It’s Hot

Meta, Personal

Not that I’m advocating anything, but now probably would be a good time to buy some PhotoMatt, especially since the price just drastically dropped and there is a new juicy front page link that hasn’t been picked up by the bot yet. Is this wrong? Maybe, but all’s fair in love and BlogShares.

In other meta-news I stole some buttons from the incredible Eric, but the real reason was I have a strange irrational desire to please this thing.

I better get to sleep though. I’m sitting in a rehearsal at 10, presenting for HPUG at 1, and again at the Web Technology SIG. Stop by HAL-PC if you’re interested.

Peaks and Valleys and Belly-Buttons

Events, Gallery, Humor, Meta

I don’t usually like to discuss traffic, but here goes. Over the relatively short history of this website there have been a number of peaks in the traffic here, usually coinciding with some particular event. The first big surge came with the MTCurly plug-in, which is now really starting to show its age. However a single link from Todd Dominey had the counters rolling. Then there was quiet in the land, and I slowly but surely built up a readership of people searching for “enron women nude” and other interesting things. And then of course there’s Tantek, Christine, Jeffrey, Kathy, and Rannie.

Then came my pilgrimage to South by Southwest, and as a result of meeting people and posting summaries of the sessions, my hits rose predictably. At least until this picture showed up in Kottke’s link blog and had my head spinning and the counter rolling.

More recently, two incidents have made me rethink my entire approach to blogging. First my blog was invaded by the French. I’m not kidding. If anyone can tell me what this means I would greatly appreciate it, because all I know is it links to a photo of the lovely Sarah C. with one of my keys. Since then a number of comments have been left on various pictures of Sarah that say things like “Sensualité.” Speculation has run wild, especially since no one I know can get a good translation of the text, but the general consensus is that Sarah is secretly some sort of underground “entertainment” star in France and her rabid fans somehow stumbled across this site.

But today was the day that broke all the rules. I was expecting a bit of traffic from the new stuff but it came instead from a surprising source. Yes, I’ve been Barlowed.

Anyway, this is all tangential to what I’ve been trying to say the entire time, my new revelation. The whole writing thing has been done. People don’t need another interesting website, they’ve got so many of those they line them up like cattle in aggregators and extract their content in such a manner as to get through as many as possible. What the world is really thirsting for is web celebrity paparazzi. You want scandalous pictures of the web personalities you know and love, and I want to give them to you. We can have the exposé pictures, something like Tantek using Safari; the scandal photos, which could involve pretty much any situation with a certain blonde SxSW panelist; and finally the relationship tracker, where to start, there are tons of these going around.

I see untold dozens of dollars waiting to be tapped in this nascent market. Obviously this is too large a task for me alone, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m also curious to hear some thoughts on this. How long before we see Josh Davis while standing in line at the supermarket?