I find there are two extensions that I install for Thunderbird every time I set up a new computer. The first is Plaxo for Thunderbird, which does a pretty good job at syncing contacts. The second is Messagefaces with Gravatar support turned on, which you can find in Add-ons > Options > Online Services. (Wish it was on by default, it doesn’t really work without it.) Plaxo has an avatar feature but I turn it off because way more people have Gravatars than Plaxo avatars.
Category Archives: Tech
Hulu Kudos
I wanted to take a moment out to give kudos to the folks behind Hulu. Remember how much criticism and naysaying they got before and during their launch? It must feel good to have executed so well, and the content they have is really killer. You can watch all of Fifth Element, for example.
Buenos Aires Day 4
Lunch, and dinner at Novecento. (One of the better restaurants I’ve been to.) Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Foz do Iguaçu, Argentina & Brazil
Breakfast in Brazil, the waterfalls at Foz do Iguaçu, drinks in Argentina, after-drinks back in Brazil. Lots of bugs and crawlies in the rainforest.
LOLcats Book
People who know me know I’m a fan of LOLcats, well now they have a new book! (What a website, as they say in the South.) I got a review copy and it’s delightful, sure to bring a smile to anybody’s day.
Gravatar Anniversary.
It’s now been one year since Automattic acquired Gravatar. “Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers. 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server. That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day. That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily!” Wowza!
The Publisher
I’ve been dubbed The Publisher by BusinessWeek as one of their “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” Before anyone else writes in that I beat Rupert Murdoch, I think the slideshow is in alphabetical order. 🙂
Startonomics This Thursday
The Startonomics conference is happening this Thursday in San Francisco and looks pretty interesting, I’m going to try to go by.
WordPress 57%
Community Tagging
Matt’s Community Tags. This is the VERY BETA plugin I’m using for the community tagging on my photos, which allows people to submit tags which then go into a moderation queue to be approved or modified by an admin. Not recommended for general use yet, just getting it out there since a lot of people have asked about it.
Cuil
I like Cuil. There’s just something very intuitive about the interface that fels comfortable to me, but I’m not sure how to articulate it. And it’s fast! Going to try it out as my default search engine for the next few days. Downside? Sometimes the images seem completely random, and I do see some spam in the index.
Beyond REST? XMPP
Beyond REST? Building data services with XMPP. Pretty fascinating stuff.
Caloric Restriction Pill
Leica at Maker Faire
Testing out Leica M8 camera at Maker Faire in Palo Alto.
Gravatar-enabled
The comments on this blog are now Gravatar-enabled. I didn’t use a plugin, just 2 lines of PHP. It’s pretty fascinating going through old posts and comments and seeing who has a Gravatar already. Do you have an account yet?
Gravatar Sold
Automattic has bought Gravatar. Om sees it as a larger trend, but to us it was just a good fit.
Rails Bashing
Since 7 reasons I switched back to PHP there seems to be a trend of Rails-bashing articles, epitomized by this one which is a fine example of the form until it advocates ASP.NET. Through it all, I still haven’t heard of a startup or web service that failed or succeeded due solely to its web framework or language. These articles are like the celebrity gossip stories of Web 2.0, complete with ad hominem attacks, and just as useless. Hacker News tends to be a fairly high signal source of discussions actually relevant to startups.
S3 News
Three bits of Amazon S3 news:
- We’re now using S3 as the primary storage for WordPress.com, rather than just for backups. We have some layers in front of it, notably Varnish, so the majority of our serving doesn’t hit S3. Still, our AWS bill went from around $200/mo to $1500/mo, and rising. It has simplified some of our requirements, but doesn’t look like it’ll save any money.
- Amazon now has a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Big companies like this, but in the real world I’ve found there to be a low correlation with service reliability and the presence of a SLA.
- In the Amazon newsletter they promoted Content Spooling Network as a good use of their services. Unfortunately, the service appears to be tailored for using Mechanical Turk to “ghostwrite keyword-based articles for SEO,” or more succinctly, “spam.” Get a web-savvy editor for that newsletter, guys!