Now with Twice the “Mattic” – Matt Thomas joins Automattic full-time. We’re still figuring out what to call him, since “Matt” is obviously taken. 😉
Biggest Community Wins
Biggest Community Wins. “I picked, in other words, community over open source. And honestly, I have very few regrets about that decision, despite our pending migration.”
Gallery: 11-20-2006
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El Pais Interview
There has been a ton of media attention here at the blog conference in Spain. Friday and Saturday were a whirlwind of TV and newspaper interviews. The most in-depth, I believe, was from Pablo Fenandez in El Pais and is now available online in Spanish. There is something really special going on here in Spain with blogs, the people are full of such energy and passion that it’s definitely going to be a space to watch over the coming years.
Gallery: 11-19-2006
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Gallery: 11-18-2006
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Gallery: 11-17-2006
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Netflix Iteration
The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site. I don’t think two weeks is really that fast though, but it’s probably the fastest a big company could possibly move. Startups should be able to ship iterations daily or weekly.
PC World Blog Tips
PC World – New Tools Help Take Your Blog to the Next Level. “Top-flight bloggers are increasingly moving to WordPress, Automattic Productions’ no-cost, open-source blogging software. Unlike the basic blogging tools found in Blogger, Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, and Yahoo 360, WordPress offers tons of plug-ins and widgets for customizing your blog.”
Ideas about Ideas
Ten ideas about Ideas by Doc Searls.
Gallery: 11-16-2006
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Gallery: 11-15-2006
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Thoughtless Embrace of Accountability
Gallery: 11-14-2006
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New Blog Design
It is now official get out of your RSS reader day. Take a few minutes to check out the new photomatt.net and browse around a bit. This is, I believe, the fifth major iteration of the design here but it’s the first one since 2003. When I last freshened the paint around here it got a link from Zeldman saying “lucky in redesign” and I figured I would never be able to top that, so I left the design the same for years. The only major change was the introduction of Asides in 2004.
Well I couldn’t top the last design, but Nicolò Volpato had no trouble creating something beautiful I started coding up earlier this weekend. Nicolò is still working on mocking up a few of the pages, and in the meantime I’ve been working on a little additional functionality around the site, particularly with photos.
Here are a few things you might notice so far: related posts on entry pages, recent entries shown in the sidebar on entries older than 2 weeks, when a blog is from the same day as a photo album random photos from that day are shown at the bottom, and likewise a photo will show when there’s a post that day.
The main goals of the photo integration were to enable a little more serendipity. There are a lot of other little Easter eggs, but those will remain an exercise for the reader.
In Seville, Spain
I’m going to be in Spain this week for Evento Blog España. It will be my first time in Spain or Seville, so if you have any tips please leave them in the comments. I’ll be bringing a huge stack of WP stickers, and if there are any WordPress users in the area I’d love to get together, just drop me an email.
Joe Clark Micropatronage
Joe Clark Micropatronage is an attempt to start an accessibility project with donations from the community.
MySQL Camp Google Notes
After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.
Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances
The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.
Guardian Profile
The Guardian UK story on Web 2.0 is now up, including a profile of me. They took some pretty funny pictures for this thing, I’d love to see the print version. I’m the one in the back with the crowbar.