Typepad Switches Atom

Press, WordPress, WordPress.com

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.

Better Trackback?

Google, , ,

There is talk of pushing for Trackback to become a standard. A few of the problems with Trackback are immediately apparent: horrible internationization support, bad auto-discovery, proclivity for spamming, no verification, historical baggae of category junk, bad spec. Fix all these and you get… pingback. Pingback is big enough now to make a blip in Google’s markup survey, and is supported by a wide range of platforms. The question is whether people are going to want to support an existing and robust standard or want to put their name on something new, the global “not invented here” syndrome where everyone wants their 15 standards of fame. (As someone who has been involved in several standards myself, I admit the draw is strong.) What Pingback does need is a better advocacy site, like atom has.

Curly Quotes in Movable Type

Books, WordPress

I am happy to announce that the “curlyquotes” module for Movable Type has passed out of beta into the release stage. Many thanks to Todd of Dominey Design for testing and providing valuable feedback. Here are the updated instructions. For full details, please see this script’s info page, which lets you receive updates by email, leave comments, report bugs, ask for features, and ask questions, et cetera. Here are the updated installation directions:

  1. Install the MTRegex plugin. (Directions from readme.txt file)
    1. Get file.
    2. Place the ‘regex.pl’ file in your Movable Type “plugins” directory
    3. Place ‘regex.pm’ and ‘postproc.pm’ in a ‘bradchoate’ subdirectory underneath your Movable Type “extlib” directory.
    4. You should end up with something like this:
      • (mt home)/plugins/regex.pl
      • (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/regex.pm
      • (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm
  2. Create a new template module called curlyquotes with the code from here.
  3. Add <$MTInclude module="curlyquotes"$> to the top of all your templates.
  4. Replace all occurences of <$MTEntryBody$> with <$MTEntryBody
    regex="1"$>    .

Usage is free, in every sense of the word, but if you could throw a link back this way I would appreciate it. Also if you improve on the code in some way, submit your changes so everyone can benefit.

What this module does: It takes straight quotes/prime mark, and makes them proper typographer’s quotes, sometimes called “curly” or “smart” quotes. So basically it takes "this" and makes it “this” using the proper HTML entities. It also works with single quotes, apostrophes, and multi-paragraph double quotes. It slices and dices!

Why? Because there is no button for a curly quote or apostrophe on the keyboard. No really, see the old post for more.

Thirty-Nine

Automattic, WordPress

The last year of my thirties! WordPress turns twenty this year. Automattic is now ~2,000 people across 98 countries. There’s so much that has happened in the past decade yet it feels very much like we’re on the cusp of something even more exciting.

This morning started well; I pulled the hammock out of the garage (it had been hiding from the rain) and read for a bit, trying to get my 5-10 minutes of sun in the first 30 minutes like Huberman suggests.

Candidly, the last year was a really challenging one for me personally. There were some beautiful moments, and I consider myself the most lucky in my family, friends, and colleagues, yet among that same group there was a lot of loss, existential health challenges, and that weighed heavily on me. It’s also my last year to get on 40 under 40 lists! 😂

Usually when people ask me what I want for my birthday I don’t have a good answer, but this year I do! As Heather Knight wrote about in the SF Chronicle, the beloved Bay Lights are coming down in March. This has to happen — the vibrations and corrosive environment of the Bay Bridge is taking lights out strand by strand. Fortunately it’s now been a decade since the lights first went up, and there’s much better technology both for the lights and how they’re mounted and attached to the suspension cables. Finally, the lights were not visible from Treasure Island or the East Bay before, but this new version 3.0 will be, which is why the artist behind the lights, Leo Villereal, is calling it Bay Lights 360.

Like the Foundation series, we can’t stop the coming period of darkness from happening, but if we raise $11M we can bring the lights back. If we raise it soon we can shorten the time they’re down to just a few months, so I’m working with the 501c3 non-profit Illuminate to help fundraise. The idea is to find ten people or organizations to put one million each, and raise the final million in a broader crowdfunding campaign, to re-light the Bay Bridge and give an incredible gift to the people from every walk of life that see the bridge, and hopefully have their spirits lifted by the art. I’ve heard 25 million people see the Bay Lights every year.

It’s a lot to raise, but every little bit helps so please donate here, and if you are interested to do a larger gift please get in touch. I’m committing a million dollars to the fundraise, and myself, Illuminate director Ben Davis, and the artist Leo Villereal are happy to personally connect with anyone considering a larger donation.

Because of some family health reasons I’m back in lockdown, so going to try and throw an online party tonight in the “Matterverse.” We’re going to party like it’s late 2020. 🎉

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Happy Birthday, Charleen

Books, Personal

I’ve had many blessings in my life, but the very first was the family I was born into. Today, I’d like to tell you about my only sibling, favorite sister, and best beloved, Charleen Mullenweg.

With a gap of nine and a half years between us, we could have easily been distant from each other, but it was almost like I had a third parent, one who was just the coolest person I could imagine in the universe. My sister paved the way for me, giving my parents lots of experience and training, so they were pretty chill by the time I came along. As a very young kid, I didn’t always understand what was going on. For example, one time, I remember getting jealous of all the gifts she was getting… gifts given after a really intense surgery for severe scoliosis (twisted spine) that required her to wear a brace for many years. She was always gracious and understanding towards the little kid following her around everywhere and trying to be like her.

However, Charleen never wavered in being my biggest supporter, despite how annoying I must have been as an eager kid a decade her junior. All of my early aesthetic and musical tastes were derivative of her early discovery of cool bands like The Police, U2, Counting Crows, and Concrete Blonde. Despite being labeled with her initials, I’d “borrow” all her CDs and tapes. We’d make each other mixes and share books.

I’ve never doubted that no matter what I did, Charleen would always back me up, as she said “I’m behind you 1000%.” I missed her dearly when she moved to Austin in the 90s, far before everyone else figured out how cool Austin was, but that just meant countless road trips to visit and crash on her couch. The distance didn’t keep her from being there for every holiday and major event, including when I started to have jazz performances or host technology events in town. Whatever my interest was, she was there and supportive. As WordCamps started to become a thing, she was there. I always knew however much I messed up or people were mad at me (there were lots!) I could look out and see my sister’s face, there to comfort me.

Her influence on me didn’t stop with music and art. Charleen’s early research into genealogy, which included deep dives into libraries and making rubbings of gravestones, couldn’t be more perfect for my first foray into relational databases. We learned together how to set up the structures in MySQL and phpMyAdmin to represent all of the genealogical information in tables, which complemented the PHP I was learning to create Mullenweg.com, still up today. Before I built any other content management systems the first content I was managing was Charleen’s and my Uncle Colin’s research.

If you’re a sibling and want to be as awesome as Charleen, start with this: Unflappable, unwavering support, and honesty. My entrepreneurial path was not straight up and to the right: It included many twists and turns, close calls, borrowing money, huge mistakes, but I always knew Charleen was a phone call away. Her sharp intellect was able to slice through whatever I was struggling with, able to back and support me however I needed in that situation. You can jump further when you feel like you have a safety net, and my family has always been that for me. There have been times when it felt like the entire internet was calling for my head, nobody liked me, I couldn’t do anything right, but Charleen was always there.

They say there’s family you choose and family that you’re born with. Well, if there’s any sliver of truth to the idea from a movie like Pixar’s Soul that you have some choice in the matter of where you end up being born, I’m delighted that I chose to be born as a little brother to Charleen. Because we saw so many other examples of familial relationships torn asunder, we never wanted that to happen to us, so we’ve always maintained that ability to just let things go that don’t really matter as much as your lifelong bond.

Charleen, thank you for a lifetime of love and support, from my first breaths to our latest adventures. You inspire me to be a better human. I can’t imagine being as successful at anything I’ve done in life without you there behind me. I’ll do my best to follow your example of always being behind you 1000%. You’re the best sister I ever could have wished for. At this half-century mark, let us count our blessings and plan many more shenanigans.

Bloglines DOS

Personal, Tech

Bloglines is DOSing blog providers. Every other major crawler implements some sort of per-resolved-IP throttle, why can’t Bloglines? Even if there were a way to opt-out of their hundreds of simultanous crawlers descending on your service, it seems to me the default behavior should be to not be harmful, and then work with large providers on a case-by-case basis to increase the concurrency of requests. We don’t have this problem with any other aggregator or crawler, hosted or non-hosted. Test: freedbacking

Image Toolbar Header

Tech

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.

A highlighted example of an Internet Explorer image toolbar.

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.

It’s Not RSS

RSS, WordPress

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.)

Spam Blogs

RSS

You should read spam and fake blogs, another problem I’ve been seeing a lot lately is entire blogs being scraped and their content being re-published with ads on it. Structured formats like RSS make this easier than before. The dark side to the numbers all the blog search engines have been toting is that a LARGE percentage of these are fake blogs, so much so that I currently block over 80% of all incoming pings to Ping-O-Matic as obvious spam. This has been a huge resource burden as well. We have around 2 million legit pings per day, do the math.

Who is Steve Jobs?

Apple, Personal, Review

I checked out the new book Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli because there had been some interesting excerpts published to the web, and apparently those closest to Steve didn’t like the Walter Isaacson book, with Jony Ive saying “My regard [for Isaacson’s book] couldn’t be any lower.”

Along with about a million other people I bought and read the authorized biography, and didn’t think it portrayed Jobs in a way that made me think any less of him, but there must have been some things in there that someone who knew him closely felt were so off that as a group they decided to coordinate and speak with a new author to set the record straight, as Eddy Cue said of the new Becoming book, “Well done and first to get it right.” I will never know who Steve Jobs really was, but it is interesting to triangulate and learn from different takes, especially Isaacson’s biography that Jobs himself endorsed but might not have read and this new one promoted by his closest friends, colleagues, and family.

As an independent third party who doesn’t know any of the characters involved personally, I must say that I felt like I got a much worse impression of Steve Jobs from Becoming than from the authorized biography. It was great to hear the direct voices and anecdotes of so many people close to him that haven’t spoken much publicly like his wife Laurene — he was a very private man and his friends respect that. But the parts where Schlender/Tetzeli try to balance things out by acknowledging some of the rougher parts of Steve’s public life, especially the recent ones around options backdating, anti-poaching agreements, book pricing, (all overblown in my opinion) or even when trying to show his negotiating acumen with suppliers, Disney, or music labels, they make Jobs look like an insensitive jerk, which seems to be the opposite of what everyone involved was intending.

The direct quotes in the book could not be kinder, and it’s clear from both books that Jobs was incredibly warm, caring, and thoughtful to those closest to him, but Becoming tries so hard to emphasize that it makes the contrast of some of his public and private actions seem especially callous. The personal anecdotes from the author are the best part: one of the most interesting parts of the book is actually when Jobs calls Schlender to invite him for a walk, as one of the people he reached out to and wanted to speak to before he passed, and Schlender — not knowing the context — actually chastises him for cutting off his journalistic access and other trivia, and then blows off the meeting, to his lifelong regret.

It’s tragic, and it’s very human, and that’s what makes for great stories. No one suggests that Steve Jobs was a saint, nor did he need to be. His legacy is already well-protected both in the incredible results while he was alive, and even more so in what the team he built has accomplished since his passing, both periods which actually amaze and inspire me. Becoming Steve Jobs tries harder and accomplishes less to honor the man. It is worth reading if, like me, you gobble up every book around the technology leaders of the past 40 years and want a different take on a familiar tune, but if you were only to read one book about Jobs, and get the most positive impression of the man and his genius, I’d recommend Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

I’m going to try out intermittent fasting for a few weeks, after hearing about it for several years from fit-minded friends. It’s tough to find a link on it that doesn’t have some sort of newsletter popup or sell an ebook, but Tim had a good guest post on it in 2008 which ends on a skeptical note, and this beginner’s guide to intermittent fasting by James Clear is awesome for its graphics and straightforward way of introducing the concept and ways to approach it. I’m going to aim for a late lunch and a normal-timed dinner, since like James dinner is often my most social meal.

Update: I also forgot that I wrote about this with a few more links and some good comments in January.

iPod Supports Standards

Tech

Standards like MP3? Nope, web standards. Go to the iPod sub-site and toggle your stylesheets using a favelet. Notice anything? Now check out the source; still crufty in places, but a giant step forward from Apple’s old code, which is still viewable on other parts of their site. Great!

I noticed this because I was on the site to check out the iPod Mini. Yes, I know that for $50 more I get 11 more gigabytes, but even the largest iPod still wouldn’t hold all my music. Realistically, I don’t 10,000 songs in my pocket. About a thousand should hold me for a few days between syncing. I thought the Minis were pretty silly until Elissa dragged me into an Apple store the other day and I saw one up close. My goodness those things are small, making the iPod feel gargantuan in comparison. Size does matter, a lesson I learned from my old 16.1″ Sony laptop, bulky digital camera, and the Visor Prism. My only concern about the Mini is I wouldn’t be able to use accesories like this voice recorder. That’s probably for the best though, as I need to stop recording concerts and such on hardware not meant for it and break down and get (another) MiniDisc recorder and a decent microphone.

While at the site I noticed the rollovers were so fast they had to be CSS, and checking under the hood I found not only a mostly-CSS layout, but pages just a few simple mistakes away from validating. It’s good to see a company that “gets it” in many other areas finally maturing in their web presence.

UPDATE: Apple properties which seem to be on the bandwagon:

This is obviously a work in progress becuase you have pages like this antivirus page which is very much old-school markup. Can’t wait to hear more about this, or an official word from Apple with more information about their new-generation markup. Are there any bloggers inside of Apple?

Spring Ping Thing

Tech,

Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s Spring and time for me to stop teasing and come forward with something dramatic.

Announcing Ping-O-Matic, the automatic pinging fanatic that handles the pinging of almost a dozen different update services. Erratic server responses making pinging problematic? Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic results page and let us handle the dirty work.

With the dream team of Dougal and yours truly, you knew it was going to be cool. What you see is just the beginning. Think a unified XML-RPC interface (One Ping to rule them all, One Ping to find them…), think ping queueing, think quality of service and response graphs, think different, think global blogtimes, think update aggregation, think Ping-O-Matic.

So spread the word from here to Beijing. More than just a fling, we’re committed to being the Kings of Pings. We take this ping thing seriously, so you don’t have to.

Bing!

Liz Gannes writes for AllThingsD, Automattic Grows Up: The Company Behind WordPress.com Shares Revenue Numbers and Hires Execs. In addition to Stu joining as CFO and Paul as Consigliere/Automattlock, we’ve been on a hiring roll the past month or two with excellent folks joining at every level of the company, including two more Matts. If you’re passionate about Open Source and making the web a better place, like we are, there’s never been a better time to join. My favorite thing about logging in every morning is the people I work with. Friends say I work too much but it hardly feels like work at all. Update: Now in Techcrunch too.