“If, like me, you are a staunch pogonophile and do not believe there is a single man who cannot be improved with a beard, these are happy times indeed.” The Guardian asks Have we reached peak beard?. Also check out their take on the lumbersexual, which a closet full of plaid shirts might indicate I’m trending toward.
NewsForge Review
A great review of WordPress at Newsforge is up, very thorough and covers a lot of the resources at the Codex.
Smarty
As SxSWi rapidly approaches, and my spring break zooms by faster than I could have imagined, I find myself knee-deep in Smarty, which I feel is the most pleasant engine/enviroment/platform/whatever I’ve used in a very long time. Everything is so elegant, extensible, and well thought out. It is simple at its core, but brims with power. Plus it absolutely flies with PHP Accelerator. It looks like I’m going to use this for everything from now on.
Prepare
Just getting things ready to head up to Austin. Laundry and money. What else do you need? (Besides this cool bag of course.)
Space Shuttle Endeavour
The Space Shuttle Endeavour flew over San Francisco and I snapped a few pictures of it from my patio.
Color Me This
I’m playing around with some new colors on the site. I think I’m partial to the blue/green that’s up here now; it just feels cleaner. I’m open to comments, suggestions, complaints, rants, and observations.
Put up some new pictures up, as well as some older videos that I hadn’t put online yet. Now that things aren’t as hectic I’m going to start the daily photos again.
One of the areas where Automattic and its products like WordPress.com have the most room for growth is in the area of marketing. It’s also an area our competitors are spending heavily in, with Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Web.com, and to a lesser extent EIG and Godaddy, spending over $350M this year in advertising. (Of course marketing is much more than just advertising, but their spend is still significant.) We’re hiring for a number of positions in this area to build up our team, including a CMO, a performance marketing specialist, marketing-oriented designer, and a role focused on events. If you know of anyone who would be ideal for these roles, or if that person is you, please read about Automattic on that page and follow the guidelines for the role to apply.
Getting Started
Well I slept a little late but now that I’m awake I’m going to get the last few things ready before I head up to Austin. I’m planning to blog everything this weekend so this should be a good opportunity to start. Most of the major stuff is done, I’m just waiting on an important letter (read: check) in the mail before I leave. I can’t dawdle for too long though, as tonight at 6 I “Break Bread with Brad“. But for now I’m running late, and need to get my rear in gear.
Budget Extraction
JS Quicktags
Fellow WP developer Alex has released his cursor-aware quicktag code under the LGPL. This is one of my very favorite features of WordPress, and its ease of use is one of the main reasons I haven’t adapted a meta-language like Markdown personally.
Heading out!
And so it begins. I’m showered, the car is washed, everything I need (I hope) is in the car, and I’m ready to roll. It’s not a short drive though, so it’s a good thing I love driving! See everyone in Austin.
Absolut Path
Performance As Design, by Brad Frost. Great thoughts and links. Performance is going to be a big focus for me in 2015.
Productive Day
I feel like I’ve had a very productive day, espescially compared to yesterday when it felt like I did nothing. Here’s a summary of the day thus far, with the boring parts (and classes) taken out:
- Good breakfast
- Human Situation Discussion class
- Re-printed some business cards for a client, had to tweak design
- Took David his graphics card
- Checked if David’s processor was just underclocked or if they actually sent him the wrong one (wrong one)
- Filled tank
- Deposited some checks
- Made some important phone calls, did email
- Installed my $7 copy of Windows XP Professional bought using UH’s new site liscene (more on this later)
- Had long lunch with Kel at a nice deli whose name escapes me, oogled at his iPod
- Picked up Kel’s grandmother’s ten-year-old computer, which she’d like me to fix. We’ll see; I’m not a miracle worker 🙂
- Took client her new business cards, decided on another change, talked about website
- Spent too long in traffic, but it’s okay because I made a new mix disc
- Finally arrived home at around 4:15 PM
Whew! I think now I could crash for the next week or so, but I’m waiting for a call from someone . . .
Work-safe
Work-safe art, John Ashcroft would approve.
Better Web Browser
How to build a better web browser, a really great essay highly relevant to several issues at hand.
Scott Berkun asks Why Isn’t Remote Work More Popular?
WP Blacklist
I’m not sure why they’re still working on a WordPress Blacklist when that functionality is built in to 1.2 in a very robust fashion. At this point patches to improve the included blacklist/moderation would be more useful to the average user, I think.
More Pingomatic
66,639 pings on Ping-O-Matic yesterday, let’s see if we can beat that today. 🙂 I rewrote the pinger deamon in Python, because the old PHP one was crashing the system on a regular basis. The new one is amazingly light, and was ridiculously easy to write. So now Ping-O-Matic is powered by PHP, Python, Perl, and caffeine. Right tool for the right job.