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.
MU Goes Gold
Just announced the 1.0 release of WordPress MU, and also put a plug for bbPress in there. Releasing feels so incredibly good, it’s almost indescribable. We should do it more often.
Mac Theme Development
Paris Day 2
Drinks with core WordPress France folks at Centre Georges Pompidou.
Leo Laporte
I missed it at the time, but Leo Laporte has switched to WordPress as his primary blogging platform.
July 4th Picnic
At Maya’s for a July 4th picnic.
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.
WordCamp Signup Open
WordCamp San Francisco 2008 Signup. Signup is now open for WordCamp SF, and it’s $5 cheaper than last year even though we’re at a bigger venue (with more comfortable seats, based on your feedback) and should be packing more awesomeness. Who’s going to be speaking on what? Well that’s still a surprise.
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.
How To Get Lots of Links and Traffic
No More Websites
BlogSavvy, which I’ve been enjoying lately, asks Why on earth would you want a website? “This time round that hadn’t even popped into my mind… of course I was going to use WordPress to put it together, why would I waste my time and expend my energy on doing it any other way?” James really “gets” a lot of topics.
WordPress for Dummies Book Review
WordPress for Dummies Book Review. Happy Thanksgiving! I’m stuffed.
Fall in Luxembourg
Exploring Parc de Ville with its Fall colors, the city center of Luxembourg, and the Sonny Rollins concert at Philharmonie.
du -sH
du -sH
“du: WARNING: use –si, not -H; the meaning of the -H option will soon
change to be the same as that of –dereference-args (-D).” Now why on earth would they change that?
USPS and Speaker.gov
Jim Amos just wrote in that Campbell-Ewald launched a new WordPress-powered site for the US Postal Service, called Deliver Magazine. Congrats to Jim and Naoko McCracken! Ryan noticed the other day that Nancy Pelosi has a WordPress blog at Speaker.gov called The Gavel. Cool domain name, and good to see WP being used in the political realm, especially since none of the Presidential candidates for 2008 are using WP (yet). If you come across or instigate WordPress being used someplace cool, be sure to write in.
International URIs
Internationalized URI support in WordPress. Does your weblog tool do that? (This means you can have characters like جØخدذ in your URIs.
TEDMED
I’m going to be attending TEDMED this year. I think we’re at a crucial juncture for health, where in my lifetime we’ll look back at our treatments today with the same wonder as we have when contemplating medicine before the understanding of germs. I have a feeling TEDMED will be the best spot to get a glimpse of this future.
New Spam Stats
Akismet has a new spam and ham stats zeitgeist page, guess which is bigger. Not an inspiring trend.
Irrational Finance
Two excerpts from Rational Irrationality: The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.
What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.
Here is another on financial innovation, which made me think of my bank post:
Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”
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.