Category Archives: Personal

Life updates, reflections, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

Twenty-Five

Books, Essays, Personal, Search, WordPress,

Today I am a quarter of a century old. To be honest I never thought I would be this old, it was a number beyond where I could imagine or visualize but the last few years have just gone by in a blur and here I am, 25 years young and finally able to rent a car without paying an age penalty.

Following up from the open source resolutions, here’s what I’m going to aim for this year in no particular order:

  • Learn a language where WP has a big impact (probably Spanish).
  • Take more videos, post at least 2 a month.
  • Post 10,000 photos in 2009.
  • Post at least one book a month I’ve enjoyed.
  • Don’t try to do everything myself.
  • Redesign Ma.tt! (And get back up in the search engine rankings for “Matt” on Google.)
  • Post more personal stuff. (Like this.)
  • Spend more time working with and coaching other young entrepreneurs and startups.
  • Donate to 5 Open Source projects that touch my life daily.
  • Learn to make/prepare one food item a month.
  • Launch, launch, launch! (Real artists ship.)
  • Get people to capitalize WordPress correctly, and stop using the fake mis-proportioned W. 🙂 (Here are some correct ones.)
  • Print my favorite picture of another person every month and send it to that person in a picture frame.
  • Reinstate WordPress Wednesdays and make it easier to do an amazing photoblog with WP.

(Hat tip to Boris Mann, Benji, Niall Kennedy, John Roberts, Titanas, Network Geek, Avinash, Kirb, Julie, Mark Jaquith, and Kabatology for the resolutions.)

This is the seventh year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23, and 24. If you had asked me 7 years ago where I would be today I couldn’t have imagined all of the amazing things that have happened, the incredible people I’ve met, and the communities that I’ve become a part of. Thank you. Here’s to the next 25.

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Open Sourcing Resolutions

Personal

Every year I make resolutions. Some years I do them. This year I want to try something different and open source them by opening it up to you guys. Here’s how we’ll try it: leave a comment with what you think my resolution(s) should be for 2009. I’ll pick the best ones, and if you’re the first to propose one I pick I’ll credit you in the follow-up post. I’ll print out the winning resolutions and put them on my desk for the year, so hopefully they’ll have a lasting effect. Remember, measurable things are better!

Top Emailers 2008, etc

Personal, WordCamp

As an update to last year’s post:

  1. Toni Schneider — 1,052
  2. Maya Desai — 826
  3. Mom — 659
  4. Raanan Bar-Cohen — 452
  5. Donncha O Caoimh — 424
  6. Barry Abrahamson — 386
  7. Mark Riley — 222
  8. Jane Wells — 218
  9. Ryan Boren — 200
  10. Andrew Ozz — 197
  11. Matt Thomas — 193
  12. Liz Danzico — 148
  13. Mike Hirshland — 144
  14. Heather Rasley — 139
  15. Joseph Scott — 129

I’ve expanded the list to 15. A lot of the same folks at the very top, but new faces in Liz and Jane from 2.5 and 2.7 usability cycles. Also three people on the list have changed their domain in the past year, just like I did. It must have been a year for that.

Also for fun here are some yearly posting stats courtesy of Alex’s queries:

Posts Avg. Words Total Words Avg. Comments Total Comments
2002 360 139 50,190 1 390
2003 429 168 72,359 3 1,287
2004 990 54 54,257 6 6,236
2005 624 48 30,090 9 5,963
2006 313 70 22,010 11 3,503
2007 334 60 20,267 17 5,919
2008 302 50 15,206 21 6,493

As you can see I’m doing fewer posts with fewer words than ever, but getting more comments. At this rate I’ll be down to 40 words per post next year. Yay brevity. 😉

Working on collating some travel / WordCamp stats.