Since everyone is talking about Macs today — did you see the iPhone — I thought it would be a good time to pose to my highly intelligent readers a question that has vexed me for months. I have a Dell 24″ monitor attached to a Mac Mini, my preferred configuration for this is vertical (you can turn the Dell on its side) but I can’t find the setting in OS X that lets you put the screen into portrait mode. Any tips? Update: It was right under my nose. System Prefs -> Displays -> Rotate. Thanks to Daniel and Barry.
Disconnect
One thing I’ve found in the past year is there is sometimes a huge disconnect between people who make noise on blogs, or might have impressive blogs themselves, and productivity in the real world. It’s unfortunate, because it makes it that much harder to find good folks.
Net Income Show
Tomorrow I’m going to be on the web radio show Net Income. That entry mentions my Wikipedia page, which oh-my-goodness has an awful picture.
FlatPress
From Within
Michel Camilo & Tomatito – From Within, from a fantastic CD given to me by Luis Rull when I was in Spain. It starts off slow and then becomes really intense, a beautiful song.
Ford uses WordPress
Jason just wrote in that Ford Motor Company has launched a WordPress site, and it’s pretty kickass. How cool that the first Fortune 5 company to use WP goes beyond just a regular blog and really shows what can be done with a powerful framework.
Working Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync doesn’t suck anymore. In fact, it works great, just like you would expect a Google product to. I’ve replaced Foxmarks with it.
Static File Web Server
Philip Greenspun asks What’s the best web server program for a lot of static files?
Habari
Habari is a new PHP5, object-oriented, database independent blog project that includes some people who have contributed to WP in the past. Should be worth keeping an eye on once they get a release out, it reminds me a lot of Drupal meets Serendipity.
RTL support
RTL support in WordPress 2.1, I’m really looking forward to the release of 2.1 this month. Our internationalization efforts is probably where I learn the most new stuff day to day.
ALA Style Guide
The A List Apart Style Guide is fantastic, a nice concise refresher for anyone who writes to be read.
Dojo Offline Toolkit
How WordPress Spoils Developers
How WordPress Spoils Developers, I get the impression Brian is bullish on the future of WP. He’s right that we have a lot left to work on though, after 2.1 is out the door I think there’s going to be a ton more core development. Update: I agree far more with the developer-friendly bits than the “no room for anyone else” bits. If the latter arguments were true, WP itself wouldn’t exist and the fact that it’s never too late for something new is a point I emphasize in my talks a lot.
Resolution Recap
Like Tantek, I found I didn’t seem to make any public resolutions in 2006, so because of my awful memory I don’t have any idea what I hoped to accomplish last year. Anyway I thought it would be interesting to make a progress report on the resolutions I made two years ago.
- Build up piano chops — This pretty much tanked. I got an upright piano for my living room and started taking piano lessons from someone I found on Craig’s List. However right before I left CNET I got this awful pain in my hand, particularly my thumb, that was pretty crippling and I ended up with my left hand in a cast for a bit. The only thing that had changed in my routine was that I was practicing a lot of piano at the time (probably too much) and the doctor recommended I stop. I lost touch with my teacher, and basically haven’t done much with it since. Mainly I use the piano these days to keep my ear up by transcribing parts of music I enjoy. (Did you know Timberlake’s Lovestoned is all pentatonic?)
- Read more — I’ve done pretty well on this one, mostly thanks to travelling about 20x more than I used to. I’m a little bit addicted to computers, so I rarely read at home, but when forced offline I tend to tear through books. I usually carry a book in my bag to grab moments for cafes/parks, which doesn’t happen very often, but is worth having the book for the once every month or so it does.
- Release more — This has been yes and no. WordPress.com is the epitome of release more, with pushes sometimes dozens of times a day, but the space between WordPress 2.0 and 2.1 is way, way too long. (2.0 is over 1.5 million downloads now.) We’re trying an experiment after 2.1 to encourage more frequent release, since the codebase is pretty much “stable” all the time since it runs live on WP.com. I’ve heard about book writers who have to stop blogging to work on their book, so similarly maybe I should take a break to get some of my unreleased software out the door. On the bright side, I feel like everything currently released, from bbPress to Akismet, is getting all the tender loving care it needs, so nothing is really neglected. (Which is a bad feeling.)
- No more mental roadblocks — This is a little ambiguous. I still procrastinate sometimes. I think what I was referring to was assuming certain resources were needed before doing something and a fear of failure. One thing I’ve certainly learned in the two years since making that resolution is that there is no causation between resources, especially money, and success. I really believe with committment and elbow grease, you can make almost anything happen.
Now to start thinking about resolutions for 2007, hopefully things a little more measurable.
Macworld Meetup
Some folks are putting on a WordPress Meetup at Moscone Center around MacWorld next week. I’ll be there, you should too.
Couldn’t Live Without
For the second year WordPress has made the Techcrunch Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without list. If you count Akismet and WordPress separately, we actually made it twice. Thanks Mike!
John Mayer
John Mayer’s blog is good, but someone tell his personal ninja to hook him up with permalinks.
Build a Better You
Reader’s Digest helps you with your New Year’s resolutions, which we’re tracking on WordPress.com. Hat tip: Jeremy Boyd.
2006 Predictions
Thomas Hawk takes a look at all the predictions people made for 2006 and how right or wrong they were. I don’t know why, but I love prediction posts because they get people’s imaginations going.
Focusing on Market Share
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE — “[A] study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.”