Tired: Being hired by Yahoo. Wired: Being bought by Yahoo.
Category Archives: Asides
Rest in Peace
Norma Hageney was an amazing woman and grandmother, she carried an entire family with her integrity, passion, and faith. I’m lucky to have spent a lot of time with her growing up and picked up a few of her personality traits. Tomorrow I will help carry her.
Podcast Interview
While I was in Cork, Ireland Tom Raftery interviewed me and Donncha for a podcast that is now live on his site. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it all through yet but it was fun talking to him, and the accents are awesome.
XFN’s Birthday
Back Online
Sorry to folks that have had trouble getting to the site or sending me email the past few days, the server that hosts photomatt.net and mullenweg.com (and nothing else) has been down more often than up, and emails are coming in days late. They replaced the RAM which seems to have been the source of the problem. Now I just need to find someplace in NY with universal chargers so I can get my cells working again and I will be back connected to the civilized world. Update: Since the RAM replacement everything has been rock solid again. Knock on wood.
No Guinness
Been in Ireland since Saturday, and it couldn’t be better. What a lovely country with lovely people. One thing I’ve noticed, at least here in the “real capital” Cork, that “Guinness is for tourists.” Everyone here drinks Murphy’s. Anyway, back to work with Donncha on some WordPress.com goodies.
London Meetup Update
I’m here with Khaled and Podz at the Revolution Bar in Soho. We’ll be hanging out here into the night so come by if you fancy.
The Googleverse
I’ve been particpating in an online discussion called The Googleverse with some amazing people the past few days. The conversation has been good (and has been showing up in some of my fav blogs) so I’d recommend checking it out.
London Meetup
There is a WordPress meetup in London today that I’ll be at. I imagine the topics will cover everything from WordPress 2.0 to the Codex and support. I’m really looking forward to meeting some of the people that have been a part of the community for years now.
NY Times on WordPress
Dave Kellam just wrote in about The Carpetbagger, a new WordPress-powered blog from the New York Times. It’s currently linked to from the front page of nytimes.com. This is the last one I blog for a while, I promise!
London Troubles
Geez, I should have stayed in Paris! When I arrived at my hotel in SoHo London last night around midnight I found out they had no record of my reservation from Orbitz and no rooms available. What makes this worse is my reservation for 4 nights had already been charged. Every hotel in town was booked solid for the night. Several hours later I found myself in a hotel waaaay out by Heathrow and now instead of exploring London I’m trying to clear things up, find a place to stay in town tonight, and catch up with work I was planning to do last night.
Consumating Bought
Consumating was bought, something I chatted with Ben Brown a while back about and thought was interesting. (Apparently Alex Muse saw us and also has some thoughts on the deal.) Mike Tatum (the guy who got me to work at CNET) writes about the acquisition here, and the comments are interesting as well. I think CNET will be judged a lot based on how this goes over the next year or so.
German Focus
So the next trip to Europe I’ll have to catch the Netherlands and Germany, I’ve met some fantastic WordPress users (and future users) from both. There is someone on stage from a German media organization talking about how they’ve begun emphasizing blogs much more in their publication, Focus. After browsing a bit I noticed that blogs.focus.msn.de (yes that’s MSN) is all WordPress blogs — cool! What’s interesting about being Open Source is that the software turns up places you would never suspect or know about.
Akismet in Java
Akismet Java API, by David Czarnecki (the author of the excellent Blojsom). So cool!
Yahoo on WordPress
Stephen Steele (is that a real name?) just wrote in that the new Yahoo Mail updates blog is on WordPress. As far as I know this is the first official Yahoo blog on WP I’ve seen. What makes it really interesting is it’s the first time I’ve seen third-party software (like WordPress) on the yahoo.com domain. You’ll notice every time they’ve done blogs before it’s been on a different domain like yahoo.net or ysearchblog.com, I imagine because of the incredibly strict security requirements anything with access to Yahoo.com cookies must meet. This is very exciting news. 🙂
Landed
Paris has the most confusing airport, although I suppose any airport is confusing if you don’t speak the language. Franck was right. I ended up chickening out and taking a taxi, and I’m not checked in and settled. First order of business: find an adapter for these weird plugs. The weather seems to have cleared up so I’m going to venture out and explore a bit.
French Phrases
After reading about Andy’s adventures I decided I better Google up a French phrasebook for study on the flight. The first hit looks like it would get me in to a little more trouble than I’m looking for. 🙂
En Route
About to board the plane to Paris for the Les Blogs conference, where I will be representing open source and WP from the audience side. I’m looking forward to exploring Paris and meeting some French WordPress users. I’m surprised that Dot Clear isn’t represented at the conference, as it seems to be one of the more significant blogging tools over there. There is no WP meetup planned but I’m there through Wednesday so if you’re interested in something drop me a note.
Akismet Development
Akismet now has API documentation and not one but two Python implementations. The WordPress plugin has also been updated to respond to the most common feedback and a few minor bugfixes. Akismet has caught 465,769 spams since it started (81% of all comments) and is protecting over 35k unique blogs.
Roles and Capabilities
What’s New in 2.0: Roles and Capabilities. I’m using the new bookmarklet to post this, it rocks.