My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, my hunger for her explains everything I’ve done. Herbie Hancock and Sting.
Category Archives: Asides
GE.tv
I was interviewed a while back “from inside the bubble” by Geek Entertainment TV. Some others: the Zimbra guy, the supr.c.ilio.us folks, flockstar Andy Smith. This is all part of the Bubble 2.0 Snark Group, who are “keeping it real.” *cough*
DTD Magic
Worth 200 Million
Are These People Really Worth $200 Million? What year was this written in? Anyone remember theglobe.com? 🙂
Geekstar
My business card apparently got me in this geekstar list. Geekstar is undefined in the urban dictionary.
In San Diego
I’m heading down to San Diego / La Jolla for the day to install some load balancers for WordPress.com and also to buy “Mr Fancy CTO” Jason a celebratory taco for their Joyent thing. If you’re in the area drop me a note. Update: La Jolla is beautiful, but servers happen. Trying to do things over a serial console is so 1988. (As Jason said.)
2.0 Bingo
Web 2.0 bingo, play it on your next conference call.
Textdrive Sold
It looks like Textdrive has been sold to Joyent. (Look at the footer.) Hosting 2.0? 😉 Here’s the press release and forum post.
Updated Akismet Plugin
The new Akismet plugin shows the entire content of caught spam, which was pretty much the only complaint with the first iteration. Happy Thanksgiving!
Funny WP Comic
A funny comic about WordPress 2.0 in Spanish. 2.0 means “all new bugs”! 😉
Old News
Bjorn wrote in that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has a couple of cool WordPress blogs including Old News which digs back into their archives.
WP.com in Red Herring
Just landed in Houston, it’s chilly here. The opening up of WordPress.com got a nice write-up in Red Herring earlier today. Just to clarify two things from the article quickly: I’m working on WP.com with Andy, Donncha, and Ryan and I do think our distributed database architecture (which I’ll write more about later, it’s nothing too fancy) will help us scale cheaply but I’m also a strong believer in big things from small teams, much in the spirit of 37signals.
Thanksgiving Travel Tip
Just a tip for people traveling this week: get there early! I got there when I normally would (45-60 minutes before) and didn’t make it, thanks mostly to standing in the wrong line twice. Airports are in need of a usability designer far more than any software I’ve used in the past year. I generally fly a few times a month, so I’m not exactly a novice, but this is the first time I’ve been in the middle of the Thanksgiving rush.
GBase and Wikipedia
I’ve seen a lot of people suggest with Google Base they’re competing with Craig’s List and eBay, but I see it much more as a play against Wikipedia. When I chatted with Jimmy Wales he said one of their biggest problems was for things that are relatively structured like the wiki dictionary or quotes having hte data in a totally unstructured wiki format makes it hard to work with. He suggested they would go the direction of mediawiki templates and microformats, which is great to hear. Google has come at it from the other direction, giving you a free-form DB to pour your heart into. I guess the question is, will people become as passionate about distribution (what Google promises) rather than working for the greater good of humanity through the Wikipedia.
WordPress.com Open
We’ve decided to open up WordPress.com for signups without invites for a bit. The service has been scaling very well since we got the problems from the move worked out. With that done and WordPress 2.0 in its final stages, there is a lot more time to focus on some cool features and common requests for WP.com now. (The design there has been updated, but is still just a placeholder.)
GEM Usability
Game-like elicitation methods: A new approach to user research. I like the sound of this and it looks like Mindcanvas is using WordPress to power their entire site.
Free Windows FTP
Filezilla is a great little free and open source FTP for Windows. Not-terrible UI and SFTP are all I really need.
Note to Self
Two things I’m going to blog publicly to get myself to finish them faster: First off, I really need to finish up the Automattic site so you guys can see some of the cool stuff we’re doing there. Second, I’ve been playing with some cool gadgets lately and developing some pretty strong opinions about them which I’d like to start posting and sharing.
IP4IT Wrap-up
I only made it to the IP4IT conference on Tuesday and flew back that night but it was actually quite well-done so next time I’m going to try and make more of it. My panel in particular was great fun, with Jimmy Wales (who blogged it! I can die happy now.), Peter Saint-Andre, and Christopher Dean. The conversation at lunch was just as interesting, straying toward identity systems and dealing with web spam. The Wikipedia has fairly sophisticated ways to deal with spam, it sounded like there could be some interesting ways to work with Akismet as well. On the trade show floor I met some guys from Coyote Point Systems, which has a terrible website but their products sound very interesting and are a third to a quarter the price of similar offerings from F5 or Alteon. Anyone have experience with them?
WordPress.Feedster
I was at Feedster earlier today and they very non-chalantly mentioned wordpress.feedster.com, which basically Feedster blog search restricted to WordPress.com blogs, which is pretty cool and I’ll definitely find handy. Update: It searches all WP blogs, not just WP.com.