ExpanDrive, a program I’ve used for years, allows you to mount FTP, SFTP, or S3 accounts as local drives on your computer on Mac or Windows. They just released their new Windows version, and it’s fast and slick. They support key authentication, which is my must-have feature.

Four Cool WP .gov Sites

Asides

I was in Washington DC last week at the OpenGovDC conference where I participated on a panel about design. The organizers and many of the speakers were pretty Drupal-focused, but I did get to meet some folks and learn about the ever-growing use of WordPress inside the Beltway. Here are four:

  1. CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is the best-looking of the four, and 100% WordPress.
  2. MO.gov, Missouri State. Is there a LESS.gov? šŸ˜‰ The show-me state has a solid WP-as-CMS going here.
  3. Office of Compliance. As exciting as it sounds.
  4. NCCS.gov, National Center for Computational Sciences. Website is okay, but center is super-cool: they provide super-computing (tens of thousands of processors) for open scientific research.

Any other favorites? Particularly well-designed ones like consumerfinance.gov.

Six years ago on this blog we scheduled a WordPress meetup in Seattle which ended up including a number of folks who are still changing the web today, including Bre Pettis, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Matt May, Filipe Fortes, Andy Skelton, Scott Berkun, and Lee Lefever. We’re going to do an informal 2.0 tonight at 6 PM, Friday June 3 at Pike Pub & Brewery on 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle. Come by and share a beer, reminiscence about trackbacks, and talk about the future of the open web. It’s short notice, so please spread the word to your Seattle-area friends.

Louis Pasteur is credited with the observation that chance can only help the well-prepared mind. I also think that my long string of lucky breaks can be credited to my mode of paying attention: I look at funny things and never hesitate to ask questions. Most people would not have noticed the dirty blackboard, or looked at the article that my uncle gave me because he was not interested.

via Edge: THE FATHER OF LONG TAILS ā€”Ā Interview with BenoĆ®t Mandelbrot by Hans Ulrich Obrist. For extra credit and an exercise in brevity and clarity, link or write in the comments the simplest definition of “fractal” as used by Mandelbrot and Obrist in the interview.

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, youā€™re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about ā€œgetting down in the pit and loving somebody.ā€ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

Johnathan Franzen’s Liking is for Cowards in the NY Times.

The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, Iā€™ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.

Fantastic read over at Tweetage Wasteland : I Donā€™t Care if You Read This Article. Or put another way “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Hat tip: Mark Riley.