My bud Kelly just pointed me to these cool Powerbook bags. This looks like it could work. I want something very slim and form-fitting for my 12″ to basically protect it from scratches. Most of the time it’ll probably be inside my messenger bag, but I need to protect it from scratches inside of that. Any suggestions?
Mark All as Read
I have finally embraced the freedom afforded by “mark all as read.”
WordPress.com
You can now sign up to be notified about WordPress.com. Tell your friends! First come, first serve. Thanks again to Ric Johnson for releasing the domain to us.
Someone asked me the other day who my favorite rappers were, here they are in no particular order:
Pre-2000: Big Pun, Jay Z, Nas, Ludacris, Method Man.
Post-2000: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye, Childish Gambino, J Cole, Drake.
Wikia Search
Wikia Search is pretty darn cool. Not sure what I was expecting, I guess I assumed that search would be much harder than doing a wiki. The “Visvo” index seems good enough for daily search use. Their social networking stuff is clean too, here’s my profile — please add me as a friend! (I hope those links work post-alpha.) If they can pull off an open source ranking algorithm… that’s pretty exciting.
2.1 downloads
Version 2.1 of WordPress has been downloaded an average of 19,483 times a day since it was released. The increased traffic on the site as a result has put a strain of the single server it runs on, we’re adding more soon.
It’s Not RSS
New formats called RSS that don’t work with anything else, specifically referring (I assume) to the “RSS 1.1” effort. (Where RSS stands for RDF Site Summary.) The name of RDF Site Summary is a mistake in the first place, they should take this new development effort as a chance to correct it. (Also, publishers are getting tired of supporting the format du jour. Maybe it’s “easy” for aggregators to support the latest permutation, but the last thing I want to do is bloat WordPress with support for Yet Another syndication format. Four is enough.)
Y! Search Frustrations
Why Yahoo search still sucks. Why Google doesn’t. Too bad Google can’t get off their butt with great APIs (available in JSON and PHP serializations) like Yahoo has. I guess I’ll try to hack something out using inurl: or intitle:. Not to mention Yahoo still can’t handle basic HTML entities in titles.
Note to self
When flying to Canada, BRING YOUR PASSPORT. Update: I wrote the preceding from my Blackberry at the ticket counter. After I found out about the passport, I rushed to the departure area and got the world’s best cab driver. His English was atrocious, but he understood what was going on. There was thankfully no traffic on 280 to SFO to my house and he did it in about 15 minutes. Ran in, grabbed the passport, ran back out. Lost a minute while he tried to ask me if I had “all three things”: passport, tickets, and ID. He says a lot of people run in to get a passport and leave the tickets on the table. He took 101 back to SFO, which had a bit of traffic. Big tip. No line at ticket counter, the flight was delayed. The lady was so kind, she switched me to the last window seat on the flight to Las Vegas and I got an upgrade to first class from Vegas to Toronto. (Maybe I’ll get some sleep.) No line at the security counter so I breezed through. Had time to grab a reuben at the deli. Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life.
150k
WordPress 1.5.0 broke 150,000 downloads earlier today.
MusicBrainz
I remember reading about MusicBrainz forever ago but I’ve really started using it in earnest today and it’s totally blowing me away. Running a little slow though, this might be the application that gets me to upgrade my computer. Why don’t these guys have every music site and VCs pounding down their door? Fantastic, moderated metadata plus collection management? That’s hot.
Automated Snail Mail
Been looking into ways to send personalized letters and postcards through the mail system, old school style. Mail is the new email! The best option seems to be Postful in terms of pricing and API. Wondering if anyone has any experience doing custom mailings like this, and if so what tips and experience you have.
Image Toolbar Header
I’m doing some code cleanup around here, and I came to a line in my <head> that is soley to work around an Internet Explorer feature I don’t want on my site.
Here is the standard way to remove it:
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />
Since the http-equiv attribute is meant to be simply a document-level replacement for real HTTP headers, and I have the ability to send out real HTTP headers, I decided to try out removing this line and replacing it with this bit of PHP, which according to the spec is functionally equivilent:
<?php header ('imagetoolbar: no'); ?>
Looks funky, but according to the HTTP 1.1 specification user agents should ignore headers they don’t recognize, so there’s no harm. However in my testing I was disappointed (though not terribly surprised) to find that Internet Explorer did not respect the header. I have trimmed other parts of my markup quite a bit though, and I’m willing to sacrifice this one line.
DoubleMattic
Now with Twice the “Mattic” – Matt Thomas joins Automattic full-time. We’re still figuring out what to call him, since “Matt” is obviously taken. 😉
Gravatar Profiles
Gravatar profiles are now live. The fun thing about these are that they look handy, every linked service is verified, they’re as easy to link as Gravatars (hash of email), and they’re as open as Gravatar, meaning that with the email hash you can get all information someone has made public, in any format you like.
Shanghai WordCamp
Shanghai WordCamp and dinner afterward.
Travel Troubles
By the way, I’ve never been happier to be home. It’s the little things — like using a mouse and a real keyboard. Unfortunately getting here took the better part of 19 hours. They actually had the hood up on the plane that was supposed to fly me overseas, which was a long delay. I overheard someone say “if they get out the duct tape I’m staying here.” The connecting flight in DC was very missed, but after 45 minutes in line I got the last seat on a direct flight to SFO leaving in about two hours. Then I spent more than two hours in line trying to get a boarding pass and through security, the height being my ticket was once again tagged SSSS which mean I got the “special” treatment at security with my flight set to take off in 8 minutes. (I swear I’m on some sort of list.)
The very worst was I had bought some matchbooks for my sister (who collects them) and they were in my suitcase. The guy asked how many there were and I said “two” because that’s how many I bought at souvenir places. He found another (a free one from a hotel) and another TSA guy came up and said “which two of these do you want?” and took the third one away from me. I was shocked, and said “Are you going to keep that?” and he replied “Well you’re not getting it back.” I stumbled away to the shuttle and ran to the gate, 10 minutes after it was supposed to leave and all the doors were closed but luckily the plane hadn’t left yet. I finally got in around 1 AM and it was too late for BART so I just took a cab. Now I’m home and warm and dry and clean and being back after travelling so intensely makes it seem that much better. Time to disappear under some sheets…
Typepad Switches Atom
I think that Typepad may have just switched it’s Atom feeds from .3 to 1.0. How do I know? Because two blogs I read just popped up with 10 new entries (none were new) and each one was broken in Bloglines. (Which is the single largest aggregator in the world, at least according to WordPress.com feed stats.) Here is Seth Godin’s as viewed by the feed validator. This is a bold move, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be their support department tomorrow. This could also just be my misunderstanding, as some feeds like this one from Marginal Revolutions (one of my favorite blogs) seems to be on Atom 0.2.
On Rita
Houston is the 4th largest city in the entire United States. The neighborhoods that flood the worst are the poor areas, but that doesn’t sound like it’ll matter with the magnitude of this hurricane heading to my home of 20 years. My parents have been on the road for 10 hours now and haven’t made it out of the city yet. Many other members of my family are staying, along with my Grandmother who is too sick to travel. After Katrina there was a rush of people metasearches and directories, NOW would be a good time for Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and the other giants to pool their resources and get the infrastructure in place to help before it hits. This one is hitting much closer to home for me, it’s hard to think about.
A Summary
I guess the problem with a long piece is many just skim it, and the more words there are the more chance there is for the meaning to be lost. I’ve given a lot of thought to putting things as succintly as possible: Knowing what I knew then, I would probably make the same decision; knowing what I know now I wouldn’t even consider it. Not thinking through all the ramifications was a big mistake. So was not having more community dialog from the beginning, which would have caught this earlier. I am extremely sorry for both, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. Amazingly, WordPress has gotten more donations in the last 4 days then it has in the past year — what an incredible community.