“Vague, but exciting.” Thirty years ago yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN — what would later become the World Wide Web (and, it turns out, a huge influence on my life and career).
To help celebrate, I tweeted WordPress’s contribution to the web’s grand timeline (above), and I got to participate in The Economist’s Babbage podcast looking back at the pioneers of the early web. Listen to the whole episode below:
Riding the Crazyhorse: Iterative Testing and Design of WordPress. If that sounds like something you’d want to see at SxSW 2009 presented by Liz Danzico, Jane Wells, and yours truly then vote early and often. Polls close soon.
Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Hackaday, and the Royal Navy all now have WordPress-powered blogs. The first three switched from Blogsmith. Hat tip: Automattic Publisher Blog.
Some biking around Eygalières and dinner in Aix-en-Provence.
A True dinner for Om‘s birthday and guest of honor Kara Swisher.
Empanada dinner and Obama election party at Sacramento in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.” — The End of Wall Street’s Boom.
Berkeley Coworking and cog motive are hosting a WordPress Installfest on January 15 to help folks get going with WordPress 2.7.
WordPress Is Probably Powering Your Favorite Candidate’s Website, from Mashable.
Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction. Umair Haque’s thoughts on venture capital and the current crisis.
Persistent PHP processes in Erlang/OTP. “It’s so easy, in fact, that I now use it to debug WordPress functions from within Erlang.”
Although it’s not at all new, I try to read this great essay by my favorite designer Jeff Zeldman just to keep my perspective fresh. Today I had a long day, and it just seemed right.
In 2006 David Eagleman, who wrote one of my favorite books, Sum, wrote a letter published in Nature:
Kathleen Morrison, in News & Views (“Failure and how to avoid it” Nature 440, 752–754; 2006), notes that societies have often prevented collapse by adopting new technological strategies. In today’s world, where one of the most-talked about prospects for collapse is an epidemic of infectious disease, it is worth remembering that perhaps we already have the technological strategy to avoid it — the Internet.
Remote working, made possible by the Internet (‘telepresence’), is already a key component of national and business pandemic plans. Telepresence can inhibit viral transmission by reducing human-to-human contact. Prepared organizations can leverage telepresence to allow continued productivity and functioning of supply chains during an outbreak.
He explores these ideas as well in his Long Now talk in April 2010, in which he talked about Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization. Here’s an excerpt from that talk covering telepresence and telemedicine. Both videos have had under a thousand views so far. When you watch this remember that it was April, 2010!
This is the topic of his new book, The Safety Net: Surviving Pandemics and Other Disasters.
A night in Shanghai: Dinner at TMSK followed by jazz at the Cotton Club.
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath, from Malcolm Gladwell. A really enjoyable read. Hat tip: Raanan.
Since Frontity launched their open source framework, they have been making the integration between React and WordPress easier. Their proven drive and experience with clean technological solutions will benefit our efforts as we continue to make the block and theme APIs a joy to use and WordPress the best development platform on the web.
The next step in the growth of this relationship is for Frontity and its team to join Automattic and contribute to core WordPress.org as part of our commitment to Five for the Future.
I believe there’s still a lot that we can learn from decoupled systems and we can incorporate those learnings into WordPress itself as we emphasize performance, flexibility, and ease of development. I look forward to Frontity joining WordPress and channeling their efforts into the WordPress APIs, documentation, and Gutenberg’s full-site editing tools.