Chris is grokking why the Sandbox theme is going to be a big deal.
Category Archives: Asides
Live from WordCamp
It's a bright and early morning here in San Francisco, I'm at the Swedish American hall for WordCamp 2006. The first of our brilliant volunteers are here and the wifi is strong. Life is good. See you guys on the other side of this crazy event.
Big Day
Just launched some pretty major features at WordPress.com: private blogs, store, and custom CSS.
WordCamp kickoff party
IE7 on New Sonys
I was in the Sony store at the Metreon the other day because Vista has been driving me nuts, I can't find my restore disks, and in a moment of weakness I was contemplating a new laptop. Anyway they had some pretty nice models, but what struck me most when playing around with the different computers was that IE7 was installed as the default browser on each of these computers. Consider IE7 wrecks havoc on sites like WordPress.org, I better start testing with it.
Yodel Anecdotal
Yodel Anecdotal is the new official Yahoo blog, powered by WordPress.
Our Tail
Someone had asked me about traffic patterns on WordPress.com the other day and whether or not they followed a "long tail." I knew the answer was yes, and I guestimated the numbers from memory at around 80% outside the top 10 blogs. It's actually a little more acute: 92.63% of the traffic to WordPress.com is for blogs outside of the top 25. (About 8.4 million pageviews in the past week.) This is from Google Analytics, so doesn't include RSS or anything like that.
Bryan Veloso
Words and Software
Long Tale
Upcoming
I will be… at Blogher this weekend, live on the PHP Arch podcast on Friday, at WordCamp on August 5, speaking at BayCHI on August 8, going into a coma, at BarCamp Austin on August 26, and finally back to New York at the end of the month. I will probably not be spending enough time here.
New RSVP
I just got an invitation to a wedding via Facebook. I don't know what this means, but I feel like something just shifted.
Packt CMS Nomination
If you have a favorite open source CMS, consider nominating it for the Packt Open Souce CMS award.
37signals Investment
I [heart] WordPress
Some folks on the WordPress.com forums have come up with some really wacky I [heart] WordPress logos.
Amazon Grocery Update
Remember the TP Amazon Grocery order I blogged about before? Here’s how it ended up. Don’t think I’ll use Amazon Grocery again. I went to Safeway yesterday.
OpenDNS
OpenDNS is a great idea, well-executed. They took something basic and ubiquitous, DNS, and improved it by adding spell-checking and phishing protection (usability enhancements). They provide the service for free in exchange for monetizing typo search pages. The typo search pages are simple, fast, and generally useful. What I was looking for is usually the first result. There is no software to install, just two settings to change, and they provide a registration-free way to set preferences on their site. John Roberts is a friend from my CNET days and gave me a preview a few days before they launched, I've been using it full-time ever since and it has been invisible in all the right ways.
Future of Web Apps
Just a reminder, I'm speaking at the Future of Web Apps summit here in San Francisco September 13-14 with Kevin Rose (Digg), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Evan Williams (Odeo), Steve Olechowski (FeedBurner), Cal Henderson (Flickr), Tom Coates (Yahoo!), Tantek Celik (Technorati), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Jeff Veen (Google) and Ted Rheingold (Dogster). Should be a good show.
REI 5ives
Five things I had to keep explaining to the guy at REI, my day yesterday. Hat tip: Merlin Mann on my fake rock shoe tester photo.
dot info
Some days don't you want to just blacklist all of .info? More spam there than anything else except maybe .com or .be, and certainly a higher percentage than any other top-level domain.