Nickel and Diming

Asides, , ,

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.)

Best Cities

Meta, New York, Travel

When we had some calm seas while I was on the Drumfire, with my schedule unusually clear and Starlink humming, I found myself writing Python with Claude to export and analyze all of my Swarm check-in activity. I have 14,021 check-ins. So now on my about page it lists the ~70 countries I’ve been to and the top 200 cities I’ve spent time in. But it made me think a lot about what my favorite cities are, so here are my top ten current faves, in no particular order:

  • Paris
  • Tokyo
  • Sydney
  • Florence
  • New York
  • San Francisco
  • Stockholm
  • Singapore
  • London
  • Houston

Any of these I would be happy to live in. Honorable mentions but didn’t make the cut: Austin, Jackson, Seattle, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Montreal, Vienna, Reykjavik.

I would be remiss if I didn’t use this as an opportunity to highlight Paul Graham’s great essay on Cities and Ambition.

Link Thanks

Links

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.

Zeldman Keynote

Personal

I recorded the Zeldman keynote on my camera and the quality isn’t the best (I haven’t even listened to it yet) but I wanted to put it up for people who couldn’t make it. Listen for the surprise towards the end. Here it is: Jeffrey Zeldman SxSW 2005 Keynote. Sorry, looks like I accidentally put up my Jeffrey Zeldman/John Cage remix edition. The link should work now! Everything was really exciting, I can die happy now. 🙂

Christmas Jazz Music

Essays

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!

Random Photo Returns

Gallery, Meta, Music

The random photos are back. I wrote a quick hack to loop over every photo in every album and read its relevant info into a MySQL table. Now instead of taking a few seconds to get a random photo using the Gallery data stores, it uses a single query and takes a millisecond. Long-time visitors to the site remember that the random image in the corner has always been one of my favorite things about this site, but as the photolog grew to a thousand, two thousand, and then nine thousand images it slowed down more and more. I had to start caching it so it would change once every 15 seconds, then every minute, then every 5 minutes, and then I just manually rotated it for a while. Finally I put the random image out of its misery.

Now it’s fully dynamic, every page you view is completely unique, just like you.

(There goes my bandwidth.)

MobileMe Notes

Apple, Tech, ,

Dear MobileMe / Me.com, I really think you’re swell. I’ve been dreaming dreams of sync since my first Handspring, and you are the best I’ve used. Two things would put you over the top. First, the notes application on the iPhone is handy, but please sync this to a quickie app on Me.com so I can put stuff in and out of notes easily. Second, and this is a stretch, I know you don’t like to-do applications, but I also have an inkling you could do something that would make me stop using paper and pen for to-dos. And synchronize it. With love, Matt.

ThinkGeek’s Crappy Wishlist

Essays, Press

I’ve always found the Wishlist concept to be cool, especially as Amazon implements it. I love it when the developer of a plugin or software I use links to their Wishlist because then I can buy them something personal, it seems less crude than a Paypal donate link where you’re putting an explicit price on things.

The other day Kent Brewster found a JS problem on WordPress.com. I was browsing his FAQ and saw this: “My ThinkGeek Wish List is always open.”

If you click that link, you’ll see in red letters: “To shop from this wishlist, please add items to your cart using this form only! Otherwise, your gifts will not be removed from this wishlist, and the recipient may get duplicates.”

Okay — a little weird, but ThinkGeek’s home-grown shopping cart has always been a little odd, I’ll run with it. I add it to my cart from that form, go to the checkout form and sign in (I’ve spent lots of money with ThinkGeek over the years), and complete the order. (How to Survive a Robot Uprising, for the record.)

So I send an email to their customer support: “I ordered something off someone’s wishlist, order e5886bb4. Everything in the order looks like it’s being shipped to me, not the recipient. Could you confirm it’s going to this guy’s wishlist and not me?” I then linked to the wishlist. Next morning, a response:

Matt,
This order is being shipped to [my address redacted]
United States
That was the address entered when the order was placed.
Thanks,

Tracy G
Customer Service

Not helpful at all… my reply: “Why would I buy something off someone else’s wishlist and then ship it to me? If it can’t be shipped to the person who made the wishlist, then please cancel it.”

No response, and two days later the order ships, to me. This morning, a final response from Tracy:

Mr. Mullenweg,
When the order is placed the order you had the option of entering an alternate ship to address.
Since your order has already shipped we can not change or cancel the order.
Thanks,

Tracy G
Customer Service

Given the next-day shipping I paid extra for, the book should be arriving any day now. The whole point of a wishlist is that I don’t know Kent’s address, nor should I need to. Also the big red sentence on the wishlist page implied to me that Kent would get anything I order from that specific form/page, otherwise why would I need to add it to my cart specifically from that spot?

To Kent, my apologies. If the robot uprising comes before I’m able to get you this book and we both die in the aftermath I’ll buy you a drink.

To ThinkGeek, you’re cooler and smarter than this. Please fix your wishlist functionality.

To everyone else, set up a wishlist on Amazon. It works, and if you link to it from your blog and do nice things people may order from it for you, and there’s nothing nicer than a surprise Amazon box showing up at the door.

No Guinness

Press, WordPress

Been in Ireland since Saturday, and it couldn’t be better. What a lovely country with lovely people. One thing I’ve noticed, at least here in the “real capital” Cork, that “Guinness is for tourists.” Everyone here drinks Murphy’s. Anyway, back to work with Donncha on some WordPress.com goodies.

Rich Brooks on Fast Company asks What’s the Best Blog Platform?. That’s an easy one to answer. There’s still some disagreement over “What’s the best CMS?” but we’re trying to make that one easy to answer, too.

Ask Matt: Tips On Public Speaking

Ask Matt, WordPress

I get asked a lot about tips on public speaking because I do it so frequently. Positive response when I give a talk is generally proportional to how relaxed I was when giving the presentation and on good days I’ll get comments like people were able to relate to what I was saying or that watching me calmed them down. I don’t mention this in the video, but besides breathing and remembering the audience is there to see you do well, the best way to relax is to know your material down cold. I’ve lived and breathed WordPress for almost 7 years now, so I can talk about it for hours without thinking twice. I think practicing and knowing your material well comes across most in your body language which probably affects how people perceive your presentation more than what you say.

https://videopress.com/v/VSvor57H

We recorded this before Scott Berkun’s new book Speaker Confessions was out, which I recommend now.

Grey Followup

Essays

On the bright side, last week’s hatchet job in Techcrunch generated some great blog posts. For whatever reason they don’t show up as links on Techcrunch’s page, but here’s some of the better ones:

To summarize some of my responses:

  • I have no problem with people making money from Open Source, in fact I think some of the most successful OS projects have profit motives aligned with user motives.
  • Related: I have no problem with Pligg being sold. I think it’s better than them selling links in the software.
  • It is possible to make money while giving your users something they want and provides value rather than something they never asked for. (Think of selling a hosted version vs. selling paid links meant to spam search engines.)
  • The fact that I made a similar mistake in the past gives me unique perspective into both sides of the issue.
  • The developer blogroll links in WordPress are nothing like the links being bought and sold for the intention of spamming search engines, but regardless they have been replaced with links to WordPress resources instead of individual contributors.
  • Duncan said “Money is money, no matter how you make it.” I could not disagree more.
  • While anyone can do almost anything with WordPress under its license, that doesn’t mean we have an obligation to promote folks who we feel are doing so in a way which is not ethical or in the best long-term interests of the community.