On Monday I’m going to be leaving San Francisco to spend some time in Montreal, about a month and a half. I really enjoyed my time there last year for the Jazz Festival hence the extended stay this year. I’m looking forward to seeing all the bloggers, WordPress users, friends, and entrepreneurs there. I’m also hoping a WordCamp can happen while I’m in town again.
Keep WordPress Secure
How to Keep WordPress Secure, by me on the WordPress dev blog.
How many hours?
About how many hours of productive work do you get done a day? Comment anonymously if you prefer.
Dilemma No More
The Blogging Software Dilemma. On this day, 6 years ago, WordPress was conceived in the comments section of this blog. Hat tip: Mike Little!
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.
Firefox Worm
Adam Kalsey doesn’t recommend Firefox because it doesn’t address the needs of users who don’t understand what a “browser” is and he jabs at the Firefox site. I’ve helped people like this and it’s a humbling experience. The IE info page is much worse, especially if you click on any of the links, but people don’t worry about it because IE is always there. Which prompts the obvious answer: a worm that transparently replaces IE with Firefox.
Zeldman Switches
I can now tell my kids about the day the inimitable Jeffrey Zeldman moved from almost 11 years of hand-coding to use WordPress. He wrote a bit about his thinking in Why WordPress? I’m about to walk out the door to go to Austin for SxSW, which last year was amazing and I thought it couldn’t get any better. When I started WordPress I had a one or two people in mind that in my wildest dreams would someday use the software, and that drove much of the development. Zeldman has switched, and I couldn’t be more honored. Now there’s even more work to do.
In Florence
I’m in Florence and it’s absolutely beautiful here, but a little damp. Ciao!
Marketplace Followup
Alex Jones has some good thoughts on the marketplace. As some stats, our themes page on .com got 2.4 million pageviews last month and someone previews a theme about once every 1.74 seconds. I can’t say how many people have purchased upgrades on .com, but even with our limited selection of products it’s a meaningful percentage, and that’s one of the reasons we think this idea has legs. It’s still impossible to know for certain, though, and I appreciate that our launch partners are taking a risk that they might create a theme and not sell a single one, and the whole thing might tank. If it goes well, though, I fully expect there to be thousands of themes in the system by this time next year, and the people in early will have a significant advantage, much like app developers did on Facebook.
Standards Police
The Standards Police, I think Keith is totally off here, as I began to express in Dave’s comments. A laissez-faire approach to compliance isn’t helping anyone. Someone needs to set an example, and if it’s not these guys who will? Jeffrey and Doug, each with no small amount of content on their site, seem to have no problem keeping things compliant. Neither does Eric, Tantek, Joe, Lars, Anne, Mark, just to name a few. Don’t tell me “validation is very hard and takes quite a bit of effort.” That’s a weak cop-out. Accessibility is very hard, design is very hard, music is very hard, driving in between the lines is very hard. If you don’t want to make the effort, then don’t dabble and make flippant comments that hurt the field as a whole and insult the people who work “very hard.”
I’m coming out. This site is to the best of my ability valid XHTML 1.1 sent with the proper MIME to browser that can handle it. Even the photolog, which took me hours and hours of work to get to the point where it is now, and for a long time was far from decent markup. However I am fairly certain that there are some comments (particularly on the mosaic thread, which now has almost a thousand replies) that have broken validation, and though I am very busy I will personally check each of these. WordPress helps a lot. The WordPress site is also XHTML 1.1 with the exception of the forums, which are compliant by default (more hours of work) but which could do a much better job of validation input. These are my weaknesses, out for the world to see. Even though the sites work just fine, and “validation doesn’t pay the bills,” I’m going to devote my time to fixing these problems because how can I presume to be a member of an organization devoted to standards without following them myself?
Update: Pulled and republished.
Giving Back
In August of this year I started thinking a lot more about philanthropy and giving back. I was raised with a strong emphasis on civic responsibility and volunteering and though I’ve been very lucky in this world but haven’t found a way to connect back philanthropically beyond sporadic donations to open source, freedom, or music organizations I’m passionate about. There are a million places you can give money to, but it’s tricky to identify where it’ll be best used and have the biggest impact.
Spurred on by a lunch I attended with Peter Diamandis talking about the prize-based philosophy behind the Xprize and goading from Tim Ferriss I’ve stepped things up in the latter part of this year, starting by matching Tim on First Giving (something I hope to continue though he’s ahead right now). If you’re thinking about dipping your toes in giving back, Donors Choose is a great place to start.
It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine
At first I was optimistic that the Lockergnome redesign wouldn’t be that terrible, I mean they have smart people there. Then the evidence mounted that there wasn’t going to be any good hybrid approach. Why go backwards? Is it a joke? Is ruining their website some twisted form of RSS evangelism?
Earlier today a comment from Simon said:
Well, the redesign appears to be out now and it�s much worse than I expected – blockquotes for indentation, paragraphs with non-breaking spaces in them for added vertical spacing – tag soup if ever I�ve seen it. Yuck.
He expanded his thoughts illustrated by the code snippet:
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="778"
bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<tr><td align="left">
<div id="footer">
<blockquote>© 1996-2004, Lockergnome LLC. ISSN: 1095-3965. All
Rights Reserved. Please read our <a href="/about/privacy-policy.phtml">
Privacy Policy</a> and <a href="/about/terms-of-service.phtml">
Terms of Service</a>. Web site hosted by
<a href="http://www.webair.com/cgi-bin/in?51">Webair</a>.
Email newsletters powered by <a href="http://www.whatcounts.com/">WhatCounts</a>.
Domain registered at <a href="https://www.gnomedomains.com/">GnomeDOMAINS</a>.
</blockquote>
</div>
</td></tr></table>
One can only assume that the newsletters will be following suit, and no one wants that kind of filth in their inbox.
All joking aside, I am going to be unsubscribing from all Lockergnome newsletters. I am not under the illusion that my action will be anything more than a number blip to the people there, but principle of the matter is I don’t have a lot of respect for them anymore. How can I take web development news seriously from an organization that is in the wrong decade code-wise? Even worse, they had something great and threw it away. If enough people were to do the same and unusbscribe they might take notice, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
I might even be forgiving if their markup (which is invisible to the user when it works) devolved but the site was much easier to use or aesthetically pleasing, but the site has degraded in every conceivable way. I decided I could tolerate the design long enough to unsubscribe, but couldn’t even find that on the site. Google brought up a cached page that no longer exists which pointed to the correct URI, which incidentally still has the old design. So if you also disagree with the recent direction things have taken, unsubscribe from Lockergnome.
Looking for something to fill the void? It didn’t come to mind the other day, but I highly recommend the SitePoint newsletters for web development topics. Blogs are also great, but sometimes it’s nice to get something in yoru inbox. I’m open to suggestions for other newsletters.
Update: I’ve written a new entry that explains why I care.
New York City Meetup
I’m going to be in New York next week and it’d be great to meet some of the WordPress community there. How about we do a WordPress Wednesday on April the 11th, starting around 7 or 8. Any ideas for a good venue?
Tom Ford’s 15 Things
For the 15th anniversary of Vogue.com noted fashion designer Tom Ford made a list of 15 things that every man should have, which are as follow:
- A sense of humour.
- A daily read of a newspaper.
- A sport that you love and are good at.
- Tweezers.
- A good cologne that becomes a signature.
- A well cut dark suit.
- A pair of classic black lace up shoes.
- A smart blazer.
- The perfect pair of dark denim jeans.
- Lots of crisp white cotton shirts.
- Always new socks and underwear, throw away the old ones every 6 months.
- A classic tuxedo.
- A beautiful day watch with a metal band.
- The perfect sunglasses.
- Perfect teeth. If you don’t have them, save up and get them fixed.
A pretty good list, though I would replace the newspaper with Circa, and I must confess I’m not sure sure what #4 the tweezers are for.
The Publisher
I’ve been dubbed The Publisher by BusinessWeek as one of their “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” Before anyone else writes in that I beat Rupert Murdoch, I think the slideshow is in alphabetical order. 🙂
Nickel and Diming
Seth Godin: Nickel and diming. (As an aside, it drives me crazy that people like Seth Godin and John Moore are pouring countless hours into creating priceless content as sharecroppers on domains they don’t own. To clarify, I have no problem that they’re using Typepad, but for goodness sake put it on your own domain. When someone Google’s you the first hit shouldn’t be .typepad.com. Your name is the most valuable thing you have, and every day you put it off is more links to someplace you can never truly control.)
Link Thanks
I just wanted to take a moment to thank those people who give proper attribution (aka a hat tip) when they post about something they found here. More and more lately I’m seeing things that I know started here show up from blogs of people I know and respect with nary a note or link back. Taking the time to properly attribute things can be a drag sometimes, but I think it’s important to maintain the credibility of weblogging as a medium and to reward those who bring new things to light. If you are someone who does properly credit things please know that I appreciate it quite a bit, and I hold you in a higher esteem than more “professional” blogs who are sloppy at best with their attribution.
Bandwidth Caps
After writing two books on the science of climate change, I decided I could no longer continue taking a pro-science position on global warming and an anti-science position on G.M.O.s.
Mark Lynas writes How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food, particularly how GMOs impact the places where crops are needed the most. If you’re looking for a catch-up check out this link collection on ma.tt last year.
Christmas Jazz Music
I love Christmas: the lights, the food, the music. The music part can sometimes be fraught, though. There’s so many cheesy and badly done Christmas albums out there. Fortunately my favorite genre, jazz, has actually a really impressive collection of interesting interpretations of Christmas classics.
Over the years I’ve curated a few of my favorites. Thanks to Spotify, one of my favorite services I discovered in 2013, it’s easy to share them with you. Here’s my Xmas Jazz playlist, including my favorite holiday arrangement of all time, Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite.
Remember: It’s okay to play holiday music until at least mid-January.
If you have any favorites you’d like me to add, send them via Spotify messages or in the comments. Merry Christmas everybody!