I’m back in San Francisco. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except I left at the beginning of December. It has been an exciting month, and I had the pleasure of meeting WordPress users from all over the world in person. I also learned a ton about efficient traveling and getting work done on the road. All great fun, but I am so happy to be back in my own place.
Red Button Meeting
Those of you who know what the Red Button is, and those who are curious, should come to today’s meeting of the Red Button Fan Club at Tropioca at 12:30. The Creator of the button will be in attendance.
I used to use three 27″ monitors vertically, then switched to two 30″ Dells, nowadays I’m on a 13″ Air screen most of the time, and occasionally plug into a Thunderbolt Display. Here’s a cool article on how to increase productivity per square inch of your screen by Peter Legierski.
Cappadocia
Arriving at Museum Hotel, underground cities, rock-cut temples and ancient churches.
Too Much Salt
While linking the NY Times anyway, check out this article about concerns over salt consumption in the US and the industry’s response to it and try not to hear all the quotes in the voice of Nick Naylor.
Original Indiana Jones
For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was. Indeed, so confident was Himmler of finding the Grail that he’d already prepared a castle – Wewelsburg in Westphalia – for its arrival. In the basement, surrounded by busts of prominent Nazis, was an empty plinth where the Grail would go.
The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the temple of doom. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Usability Testing
We’re doing some usability tests in New York City, want to join?
WordPress Spike
I’ve noticed WordPress downloads and newsletter subscriptions are about 60% above the daily average the last few days. Maybe people are making new year resolutions to switch?
Kindle Thoughts
Seth’s Blog: Random thoughts about the Kindle. I agree with most of this. I’ve been meaning to write a Kindle review forever. I’m probably not going to get to it, but I will say that it has fundamentally changed the way I read and buy books. It has also increased my book reading a non-trivial amount.
Foto Mateo
In the interest of expanding the Photo Matt audience we’ve commissioned a team of expert translators to create Foto Mateo. Update: To clarify, this is a joke. It just is a Google translate proxy of this site. Read the comments for more. Thanks for everyone who emailed in that it was, in fact, a very bad translation.
Rockstar
There’s a new WordPress book available: Rockstar WordPress Designer.
Leo Laporte
I missed it at the time, but Leo Laporte has switched to WordPress as his primary blogging platform.
Mac Theme Development
WordPress Collaborative Editing
I’m really excited about the new Google Docs integration that just launched — basically it builds a beautiful bridge between what is probably the best collaborative document editor on the planet right now, Google’s, and let’s you one-click bring a document there into a WordPress draft with all the formatting, links, and everything brought over. There’s even a clever feature that if you are copying and pasting from Docs it’ll tell you about the integration.
I think this is highly complementary to the work we’re doing with the new Editor in core WordPress. Why? Google Docs represents the web pinnacle of the WordPerfect / Word legacy of editing “pages”, what I’ll call a document editor. It runs on the web, but it’s not native to the web in that its fundamental paradigm is still about the document itself. With the new WordPress Editor the blocks will be all about bringing together building blocks from all over — maps, videos, galleries, forms, images — and making them like Legos you can use to build a rich, web-native post or page.
We’re going to look into some collaborative features, but Google’s annotations, comments, and real-time co-editing are years ahead there. So if you’re drafting something that looks closer to something in the 90s you could print out, Docs will be the best place to start and collaborate (and better than Medium). If you want to built a richer experience, something that really only makes sense on an interactive screen, that’s what the new WordPress editor will be for.
One final note, the Docs web store makes it tricky to use different Google accounts to add integrations like this one. To make it easy, open up a Google Doc under the account you want to use, then go to Add-ons -> Get add-ons… -> search for “Automattic” and you’ll be all set.
Paris WordCamp
At WordCamp Paris and dinner afterward.
Slash Happy
Slashdot linked to Browse Happy (an excellent project beautifully designed by Ethan, by the way) but what makes it interesting is that I host browsehappy.com. The bad news is I had to bump MaxClients to 800. The good news is after the initial bump (settings too low in httpd.conf) it’s running along just fine. And then it got huffy when I went to dinner.
Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.
From Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are.
July 4th Picnic
At Maya’s for a July 4th picnic.
Dating a Developer
Dating an Apple Developer, which is somewhat generally applicable. Hat tip: Mr Haughey.
On Microbiomes
Your body has about ten times the number of microbial cells as it does human cells. Collectively this bacteria weighs about three pounds, about the same as your brain. The evolution of our understanding of these bacteria has been evolving rapidly over the past twenty years, and I expect its findings to be the most impactful on our health and wellness in the coming decades.
The New Yorker has a fantastic article by Michael Specter that starts and ends with our changing perception of heliobacter pylori, linked to gastritis and peptic ulcers, but whose absence in children (it used to be universal, now fewer than 5% of children in the US carry it in their guts) is linked to asthma. It also has consequences for weight:
There is equally convincing evidence that destroying H. pylori could alter metabolism in ways that increase the risk of obesity. Several research groups, including Blaser’s, have found a strong relationship in humans between the bacterium and two stomach hormones, ghrelin and leptin, both of which play central roles in regulating our appetites […] The more ghrelin you have in your bloodstream, the more likely you are to overeat. Leptin functions in the opposite way, suppressing appetite and increasing energy levels. For people whose stomachs are infected by H. pylori, ghrelin became far less detectable after a meal. For the others, levels of the hormone remained high, and the effects are evident. […]
That finding was not a complete surprise. Roughly three-quarters of the antibiotics consumed in the United States are fed to poultry, cows, and pigs, not to treat illness but as dietary supplements to promote faster growth. […] Until recently, the biochemical reasons for that weight gain, and its unsettling implications or humans, were murky. […] “A lot of things are happening at once,” he said. “The rise in obesity, celiac disease, asthma, allergy syndromes, and Type 1 diabetes. Bad eating habits are not sufficient to explain the world-wide explosion in obesity.
The environment inside our body is as complex and varied as the one outside our body and responds just as unpredictably to wholesale changes to its ecosystem. I’d recommend reading the entire article, unfortunately it’s not available in its entirety on the New Yorker’s site, however here’s a PDF of the entire thing.