On Automattic's internal BuddyPress-powered company directory, we allow people to fill out a field saying how far their previous daily commute was. 509 people have filled that out so far, and they are saving 12,324 kilometers of travel every work day. Wow!

Blo.gs Sold

Asides

So blo.gs has been sold and there are no details as to who it’s going to (or for how much), which is odd. As a user I feel sort of blinded by oncoming headlights, but hopefully more information will be available shortly. There were 12,207 users when I first got the announcement, the number seems to be going down. I hope the new owner is cool. Update: I heard the new owner is cool.

39 Books in 2018

Books

Here’s what I read in 2018, in chronological order of when I finished it, as promised in my birthday post. I’ve highlighted a few in bold but in general I was pretty satisfied with almost all of my book choices this year. I’ve put a lot more time into the “deciding what to read” phase of things, and have also had some great help from friends there, and have been trying to balance and alternate titles that have stood the test of time and newer au courant books.

  1. Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook by Dan Shapiro
  2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (audio)
  3. A Higher Standard by Ann E. Dunwoody
  4. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin (audio)
  5. The Boat by Nam Le
  6. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
  7. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
  8. How to Say Goodbye by Wendy Macnaughton
  9. When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
  10. Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery
  11. Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger and Peter Kaufman
  12. Sam the Cat by Matthew Klam
  13. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
  14. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
  15. The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
  16. After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid
  17. The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell
  18. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
  19. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
  20. Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
  21. Darkness Visible by William Styron
  22. Tin Man by Sarah Winman
  23. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  24. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
  25. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Update: On Obama’s 2019 book list.)
  26. Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
  27. The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant
  28. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
  29. So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
  30. Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
  31. How to Fix a Broken Heart by Guy Winch
  32. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
  33. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
  34. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
  35. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson
  36. Severance: A Novel by Ling Ma
  37. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
  38. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
  39. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Bloggers Declare Bore

WordPress

Online Journalism Review writes Bloggers Declare War on Comment Spam, but Can They Win? I’m not sure what that has to do with journalism, but they talk to the same old people and read the same old sites and (not surprisingly) come to the same old tired conclusions. I’m trying to figure it out because I like everyone the article refers to and the article itself is well-written, but it feels very contrived. I think it may be because it draws a lot from blog material a year or more old, and selectively, like the writer had an agenda and Googled until there were enough quotes to fill the space. For example Mark Pilgrim’s blog is called “comment-free” when the entry on the front page for the last three weeks clearly has comments. Is it too much to ask to look at the front page of a blog you’re quoting? The article talks about Blogger redirecting URIs but not about Blogger’s registration aspect. It talks about Typekey but not the PATRIOT act. (Totally kidding there.)

You probably saw this coming from me, but most of all I think it’s silly that they don’t mention a single one of the dozens of other blogging systems that deal effectively with these issues every day. You can’t discuss the Movable Type spam epidemic without talking about people like Molly who tried everything out there including MT-Blacklist to no avail, then switched software and got on with their lives. There is a lot more to the story, but that’s been the conversation over the past year and a lot has come of it. The essence of blogging is communication and comments are here to stay, it’s just a matter of moderation.

Propublica has a piece on canvas fingerprinting done by the ad service that uses the trojan horse of sharing buttons, AddThis: Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block. Regardless of the usefulness of this particular technique, which seems to not be effective enough to stick around, services like AddThis and ShareThis will always spy on and tag your audience when you use their widgets, and you should avoid them if you care about that sort of thing. That’s why we put sharing buttons into Jetpack that are much more privacy (and performance) friendly.