We’re trying something new this year: instead of WordCamp San Francisco being the main WordCamp event of the year doing a WordCamp US in a rotating city. I’ve heard some great in-person pitches for places like Phoenix already. Do you think your city would be the coolest place in the 50 states for the first ever WordCamp US? Submit your city in this new survey. It’s open until the end of the month.
Unsubscribing from Newsletters
When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.
There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:
@photomatt unfortunately there's no mass unsubscribe option at this time, though we are seriously considering it for the future!
— Unroll.Me – Easy Email Cleanup (@Unrollme) May 5, 2015
I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.
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| var i = 0; | |
| function unroll_me_unsubscribe() { | |
| // Bail if share modal (indicating free limit reached) is encountered. | |
| if ( jQuery( '#fb-root' ).length > 0 ) { return; } | |
| var unsub_link = jQuery( '.LetterList a.uicon-set-unsubscribe:first' ); | |
| if ( unsub_link.length > 0 ) { | |
| document.getElementById( unsub_link.attr( 'id' ) ).click(); | |
| if ( i++ < 6000 ) { /* Upper limit in case something goes wrong. */ | |
| setTimeout( unroll_me_unsubscribe, 1500 ); | |
| } | |
| } | |
| } | |
| unroll_me_unsubscribe(); |
Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.
Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
— Thomas Jefferson
Webmonkey Podcast
I was on the Webmonkey Podcast talking about WooCommerce and tech in general, my part starts around 26 minutes in.
Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
― Douglas Adams
On the recommendation of my friend Timothy Young I checked out the book The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir. Think of it like Shackleton’s Voyage (a great recommendation from Toni) but on Mars. I really enjoyed the book, and if you like geeky, science-filled novels you will too. One thing about the publishing I thought was really cool, as the Wikipedia puts it:
Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans he made an Amazon Kindle version available through Amazon.com at 99 cents (the minimum he could set the price). The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling science-fiction titles, where it sold 35,000 copies in three months, more than had previously downloaded it for free. This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for six figures.
I was hoping it was on a WordPress blog, but it appears to be more of a static HTML site (his official site is WP-powered) and includes some awesome short vignettes like Meeting Sarah.
When I spoke in Ireland yesterday someone asked if I would blog about them today. I am, but not the best story: Ireland’s media silenced over MP’s speech about Denis O’Brien. Because of an injunction, no media in Ireland can report on alleged corruption, laws I think set up with good intentions (preventing libel?) but being twisted now to prevent the vital functioning of the fourth estate. The country showed amazing mettle in their Yes vote for gay marriage last week, perhaps censorship could be the next thing the populace tackles. (Also I really enjoyed my visit to Dublin, if you want an amazing meal check out Forest Avenue.)
The Misconception about Money and Motivation, a good summary of the work by Dan Pink, Dan Ariely, and others.
In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.
The New York Times answers Why Do We Experience Awe?
Monk was the master of the single note, perfectly selected, timed, and struck so that it would have a symphonic amplitude. The asymptote of his music is a punctuated silence, which is why he was especially sensitive to his drummers and dependent on them to organize the music’s forward motion.
The New Yorker reviews the 15 CD set, The Best of Thelonious Monk, which sounds like a lovely set of music to spend a weekend with.
WordPress + Japan
Did you know that WordPress users in Japan have meetups dedicated just to eating crab in the Fukui prefecture? WP Tavern has has a fantastic article on Community, Translation, and Wapuu: How Japan is Shaping WordPress History. There is so much that is quotable, just check out the entire thing!
Andrew Bosworth, one of the early engineers and leaders at Facebook tells the story about how he almost got fired in the early days despite being a top engineer. “If I was a good engineer, why would it be hard to work with me? Of course that question was the very foundation of my problem.”
Talent is leaving Silicon Valley because of high real estate costs. Today, the median price for a home just exceeded $1 million.
Why one in four Silicon Valley homebuyers wants to leave. Yep.
The John Biggs article on Why I’m Still Wearing My Apple Watch almost perfectly describes how I’m feeling about the watch right now. It is a very personal device, I’ve gotten attached to the little fellow, and I should probably start selling all my mechanical watches.
Undercover UberX
Emily Guendelsberger went undercover as an UberX driver in Philadelphia and wrote about the experience, particularly the economics of it. It’s a pretty fascinating and gripping longread, both in its content and it’s just well-written.
Mr. Zinsser was a prolific author, editor and teacher, but it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply.
The New York Times obituary of William Zinsser is touching and fascinating. Clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand, and Zinnsser’s work On Writing Well did more than any other to help me hone my mind.
Woo & Automattic
For years, we’ve been working on democratizing publishing, and today more people have independent sites built on open source software than ever before in the history of the web. Now, we want to make it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralized services — to enable freedom of livelihood along with freedom of expression.
It’s not a new idea: at a WordCamp a few years ago, someone stood up and asked me when we were going to make it as easy to create an online store as we’d made it to create a blog. Everyone applauded; there’s long been demand for better ecommerce functionality, but it’s been outside the scope of what Automattic could do well.
That changes today — drum roll — as WooCommerce joins the Automattic team to make it easier for people to sell online. Along with Woo’s announcement, here’s a short video explaining more:
In the past few years, WooCommerce really distinguished itself in its field. Just like WordPress as a whole, it developed a robust community around its software, and its products meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Woo is also a team after Automattic’s own distributed heart: WooCommerce is created and supported by 55 people in 16 countries. Added to Automattic’s 325 people in 37 countries, that’s a combined 380-person company across 42 countries — the sun never sets.* I can’t wait to meet all my new colleagues.
Just like us, the vast majority of WooCommerce’s work is also open source and 100% GPL. And just like WordPress, you’ll find WooCommerce meetups popping up everywhere, from Los Angeles to London, and its global and community-focused work together to make the users’ experiences the best they can be.
The stats are impressive: the WooCommerce plugin has over 7.5 million downloads and a million+ active installs; BuiltWith’s survey of ecommerce platforms shows Woo passing up Magento in the top million, with about triple the number of total sites. Even a conservative estimate that WooCommerce powers 650,000 storefronts means they’re enabling a huge number of independent sellers. They’ve added a tremendous amount to the WordPress ecosystem (alongside everyone else working in this area).
WordPress currently powers about 23% of the web. As we work our way toward 51%, WooCommerce joining Automattic is a big step opening WordPress up to an entirely new audience. I can’t wait to see how much more we can build together.
Automattic turns ten next month: another amazing milestone I couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. Today’s news is just the first of a number of announcements we have planned for the remainder of the year, so please stay tuned! There’s still so much work to do.
* Want to work with us? We’re hiring. Bonus points if you live in Antarctica, the only continent we don’t have covered.
As I said in the video, please drop any questions you might have in the comments and I’ll answer them as soon as I can. Also check out the posts from Mark and Magnus.
Read more: Mashable, Recode, Techcrunch, Venturebeat.
How to Get Yourself to Do Things. Hat tip: Alex.
Sometimes, you just want 2 chocolate chip cookies. This happens to me all of the time. I want a super indulgent, rich and buttery chocolate chip cookie, but don’t want to make the whole 36 of them which I’d inevitably inhale over about the same amount of hours.
Ever wondered a good recipe to make just 2 chocolate chip cookies? Now you know.
As promised a few weeks ago, a new installment of the Wired Silk Road story is out and I wanted to share it, The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall. This one is actually a lot more normal, with some surprisingly simple breaks leading to the downfall of Ross, but there’s an interesting twist at the end.