Matt McAlister writes on the The Generosity Strategy after our conversation in London last week.
Well that’s a twist: Megaupload Search Warrants Ruled Illegal by High Court.
Interesting note: WordPress Comes To Chinese Users Via Sina.com’s New Cloud Service, costs CNY1 a month.
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Final day in Eygalières
Just puttering around the house and dinner.
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Aix-en-Provence
Touring around Aix-en-Provence
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Eygalières and Aix-en-Provence
Some biking around Eygalières and dinner in Aix-en-Provence.
Jack Chenge writes on The Slow Web Movement.
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Heading to Marseilles and Eygalières
The flight to Marsailles, and touring around that area, finally heading to Eygalières.
It’s a week for coming out of stealth: Livestar, An App For Trusted Recommendations and much more just launched, (an Audrey company). Congrats to Fritz and the team!
I’ve been going retina-happy. It’ll be tricky to do the main graphics of this site (might just be easier to do a new design) but if you visit any of the photos on ma.tt on a retina display you should get double-resolution images, it really shines on photos like this one from South Africa, this one from Napa Valley, or this one from Ethiopia.
VHX has come out of stealth about their funding, it’s a new startup that aims to democratize video distribution, through methods much like Louis CK and Aziz Ansari did those recent online-only special. VHX is an Audrey company.
Some sites, like WordPress, where I’m typing this right now, pushed out retina upgrades right away. The result is amazing. I’m typing this, and it looks like I’m typing out printed words. Text is so crisp.
From MG’s review of the new Retina Macbook Pro. There is more news on the retina-WP front coming soon. My review of the Macbook Pro Retina: best computer I’ve ever used. Amazing screen, great speakers, I’m willing to put up with the extra size and weight after being on 13″ or smaller laptops for… 8 years I think.
A nice article in Techcrunch today about the Unreasonable At Sea 100 Day Journey in 2013.
One of the cornerstones of Automattic’s web-scale infrastructure is a project out of Russia we started using in 2008 called Nginx. Don’t let the sparse website fool you, Nginx (pronounced engine-ex) has been taking high-end websites by storm, and is used on 24% of the top thousand websites (a good chunk of them WordPress). I was very proud of our team helping sponsor and debug SPDY support in the latest release. Hopefully this accelerates the adoption of technology like SPDY that improves the user experience of the web.
Ten Years of Blogging
I got an inkling to check my archives today, because I faintly remember started blogging in the summer, lo and behold today the 16th is my tenth anniversary of blogging on this site. Hooray!
From Friendster to Flickr to Facebook I’ve always been active on other sites, what we now call social media, but as my interest in those has waxed and waned I’ve always come back to my home on the web, powered by Open Source software on a domain I own. This is definitely the longest sustained activity I’ve done, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t continue the rest of my life, however long or short that may be.
A little of my personal history with blogging: the first blog I remember reading was Zeldman.com, who also introduced me to building websites as a craft rather than an output of a program. His site was personal (and still is) but mixed in technology with a flair and often linked to the other strong voices on the web of its day, like Anil Dash and Jason Kottke. (Both still blogging today.) Everyone seemed to be using software called Movable Type, so I fired that up on matt.mullenweg.com and began haphazardly publishing. (I might dig up those entries and import them here at some point, though it would be really embarrassing.)
WP 3.4 and Jetpack Comments
It’s been an exciting week for WordPress so far — version 3.4 was released and already has over 730,000 downloads, and also Jetpack Comments (which I’ve been testing here) are now available publicly. Jetpack comments lets your users comment with their WordPress, Twitter, or Facebook identities, as well as as a guest like before. This has been a top-requested feature, and it works very smoothly. Check them both out!
What If Mayors Ruled the World? From Atlantic Cities.
Ray Bradbury passed away last week, leaving a legacy large and full of gems like this 2001 advice to writers. Care of Elise Hu, here is a snippet of a 2002 interview Bradbury did on NPR, portions of it unaired, relevant to our culture of distraction thread:
But if we finally correct this in our school system, what kind of student should we deliver to the world? A student who has wide ranging tastes — all kinds of literature, and basically, we should head in the direction of having young people read science fiction.
Why? Because we live in a science fiction time. The last century we invented flying, we perfected the railroad system, we made telephones available to everyone in our culture, and then we invented radio in 1922, and it began to dominate our culture. Then television came along in 1945. So we’re surrounded by all these devices.
We are a device oriented culture. So how can you not want to read about what these things are doing to you and to others and to the world?
And we invented atomic power in the middle 40s, and that became a Christian invention. Why do I say that? Because it prevented wars after the first big dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. After that we were able to back Russia down and make the wall in Berlin fall, all because of atomic power. All this being true, you can’t neglect it, you must write about it. And the mainstream writers of our time didn’t write about it. So they became very boring.
Young people graduating from high school should be curious about the impact of the fax machine, of the telephone, of atomic power. So you write stories for them. And during the last 20 years, science fiction has come into its proper place and is being taught in middle schools and high schools and colleges, because people are curious about a world where we promised to go to the moon, and we finally do.
Matt Kelly (and many others) have put together an official Facebook Integration for WordPress plugin, which is available in the directory as of today. Glad to see the company becoming involved directly in the WordPress community, and excited to see what’s next in that regard.
Cryptography breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists — I find the shadow cyber-war being fought right now endlessly fascinating, and a nice opportunity to brush up on CS concepts I haven’t thought about in a while.