Over on ThemeShaper I share Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory, which also links to all of the coverage from our announcement today.
West Wing Tour
The thing about the White House West Wing tour is they don’t really let you take pictures, except at the door before you go in and after, and at both places they have terrible lighting. Usually I ignore this and snap clandestinely but that seemed like a bad idea in this case and I didn’t want to get tackled by Secret Service. (I’m surprised they let me take my big honking D3S in at all!) The tour was excellent, very humbling to be in a place where so much history has happened, and might have happened just a few hours before you got there. Anyway here are some before and after shots of the tour.
Scoble muses on “Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service”.
Z-Type is a game that helps you practice typing. Fantastic to play when you’re switching to Dvorak. Hat tip: Lloyd.
I was on the Steppin’ Off the Edge podcast the other day and mentioned I don’t have a Wikiquotes page. Well, now I do. If I’ve ever said something you enjoyed or inspired you, drop it on that page.
Some good news today, TripIt is joining up with Concur. I’m excited about this because I travel all the time and I’m curious to see the TripIt approach and team working in the space with a larger team and more resources. 🙂
Twenty-seven
Today is a fun day — 2011-1-11 (not 1:11 PM anymore, I’m a slow writer) and I’m turning 27. This is the time of the year I always look back, and from last year’s resolutions I actually did pretty well. I was able to simplify a number of areas of my life, including reducing the number of computers running in my place. I bought my first apartment and remodeled it. I slowed down my eating by chewing more, a vignette that made Tim’s new Four Hour Body book. Redesigned this site. I didn’t bike at all, but walked a ton. I started exercising with a kettlebell over the summer and was pretty consistent about it until last month, with some noticeable improvements in strength and energy. Got all the old photo galleries imported going all the way to 2002.
I petered out on Farscape, and didn’t display my photography anywhere in print, so a wash there. I spent a week in the woods with Beau at Tracker camp. I joined the board of the non-profit Grist, and was able to expand charitable donations to cover more organizations than previously, including Charity: Water, FSF, Apache, Archive.org, Samasource, EFF, and GAFFTA. I had a tweet go viral and end up on Time and CBS (I still need to blog about that), and a blog post about shipping go viral and get over a hundred thousand visitors. (With an interesting traffic pattern too — lots of Twitter and Facebook like you would expect, but 92% of the traffic from the long tail or blogs like Daring Fireball.)
Speaking of launches, was lucky to hit all the big ones I had planned in the beginning of the year in that abbreviation-coded list: VaultPress, new Akismet, mobile WordPress apps for every platform, Ma.tt themes, Audrey Capital, WordPress Foundation. Also hired 28 new Automatticians, added 7.2 million blogs to WP.com, and had 38 million downloads from WordPress.org.
This year, along lines of simplifying, I have six main goals:
- Increase the release frequency of core WordPress, I think we can hit our goal of three major releases this year. (Only did one last year — 3.0.)
- Keep reading the New Yorker every week, and hopefully work in a few more books every month.
- Launch a new jazz-related site I’ve been working on sporadically.
- Finally upload my un-uploaded photos for 2005-2010.
- Keep exercising regularly. (The first time I have a health-related resolution, if you believe it!)
- Launch secret new thing, code abbreviation JP. 🙂
It’s not a resolution, but I think I’m going to spend a lot more time in Houston in 2011. As for some other stats: 208 posts here on ma.tt (up Y/Y for first time since 2007), 535 posts on my moblog, 4,456 comments, and posted 2,432 photos. The top five posts were 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number, Wildcard DNS and Sub Domains, The Headers of Twenty Ten, Change OS X Computer Name, and Sonos vs Squeezebox, but most of the traffic was to the home page. My top emailers were Toni, Rose, Paul, my Mom, and Raanan with 3,028 emails between them. I sent 10,813 emails to about 2,228 people.
According to TripIt, which I love and use constantly, I was on the road 227 days out of the year, traveling 122,066 miles across 59 cities and 17 countries.
27 is a really awkward age — I’m not young anymore but still before the looming 30. It’s inbetween. That said, I think 2011 is going to be a year where a lot of things come together and a lot of the foundations laid down in 2010 (and when I was 26) come to fruition.
This is the ninth year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22 (this one is funny), 23, 24, 25, and 26.
Rich Brooks on Fast Company asks What’s the Best Blog Platform?. That’s an easy one to answer. There’s still some disagreement over “What’s the best CMS?” but we’re trying to make that one easy to answer, too.
Scoble Interview
The interview I did with Robert Scoble at Big Omaha is now up. Here’s the embed:
Solar Eclipse
Nighttime pictures of the Bay Bridge and a few attempted shots of the full solar lunar eclipse on the winter solstice.
About.me and Wakemate
Today has been a very exciting day. First off, About.me has been acquired by Aol, as good friend Tony Conrad writes about on his blog. A great deal on both sides, I think Aol got a steal and a great team here. Second, one of Audrey’s earliest investments Wakemate has finally shipped their first version, which I’ve been using the past two nights and has been great. (I’m averaging 60 so far.) Reserve your Wakemate here.
40% of the tasks in Mechanical Turk are getting people to spam. Amazon should take a hard stance against these, as soon as possible.
City Equations
The first data set they analyzed was on the economic productivity of American cities, and it quickly became clear that their working hypothesis — like elephants, cities become more efficient as they get bigger — was profoundly incomplete. According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita.
A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation on NYTimes.com. A fascinating article about some constants between cities, and a bit at the end about how laws are different for corporations.
New Akismet
I’ve been really enjoying the new features in Akismet:
The always-excellent Big Picture blog sums up 2010 in photos, definitely take a few minutes this Friday and check out part one, part two, and part three.
State of the Blogosphere
But blogging perseveres–as it should. It is a place where context, thoughtfulness and continuity are rewarded with inbound links, ReTweets, bookmarks, comments and Likes. Blogs are the digital library of our intellect, experience, and vision.
Brian Solis on The State of the Blogosphere 2010.
Monet and Bulgari Exhibits
Visiting the Exposition Monet 2010 and the Bulgari exhibit in Paris, followed by some frog legs. If you enjoy jewelry definitely check this album out.