How to disable GreaseMonkey, now if only Google would let us disable Autolink.
Security Advice
Security advice from Bruce Schnier:
“If possible, don’t use Microsoft Windows.” There are some other good tips there too, like microwaving CD-Rs and deleting cmd.exe.
Mesh Conference
Toronto was so nice, I'm going to head back for Canada's Web 2.0 conference, aka Mesh. It's a really underrated city.
Leo Loves Blogging
Buzz Kill, where Leo Laporte describes the re-ignition of his love affair with blogging over micro-blogging.
Last Meals
Dead Man Eating is a weblog dedicated to documenting the last meals of death row inmates. Morbidly fascinating. There seems to be a lot of fried chicken. The weblog also includes things people have sent in as what they would have as their last meal, which generally seems to be enough food to feed a small village.
A Great Day in San Francisco
Is this picture of Bay area bloggers going to be the Harlem photo of a new revolution? It was nice of KRON-4 to host the event, and I got interviewed for a short while about a few things — hopefully the footage makes it somewhere.
Saigon
Traveling to Saigon, small night market, and BBQ dinner.
I’m really excited about Simplenote for Android, better than any similar app I’ve seen on the platform.
On Sphere
Sphere has found a home at the prescient AOL, as talked about on their blog, GigaOM, and Techcrunch. Sphere is a great company and the folks who made this happen at AOL will look like rockstars as the team continues to execute on their vision of tying the web together through lateral navigation. Disclosure, as it says on my about page, I was an advisor to Sphere and we’re cousins in the True family.
Next Web, day 2
Second day at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Samattical
Today is the day! The first day of my sabbatical. What an experience it has been. On Thursday I delivered my very first Ignite talk on the subject! Here it is.
The Ignite format is a tricky one as a speaker! I will do better next time. My friend Connie has delivered seven Ignite talks now and I thought hers and Adam Savage’s were the highlights of the ones I saw. (I didn’t see everything because I was popping in and out.)
Preparing for this sabbatical has been the most fun I’ve had working at Automattic, ever. It brought so much clarity to things, we’ve been able to resolve in hours things that have lingered for months, including two acquisitions, several hires, big strategies, and more.
After this talk I caught a redeye to NYC to meet with the WordPress.com leadership team and hand off my leadership there to Daniel Bachhuber.
It is a beautiful symmetry that the first-ever sabbatical taken at Automattic was by its CEO at the time, Toni Schneider, which gave me the opportunity to step in and try on being a CEO, and it’s an incredible gift that Toni is returning to be CEO of Automattic while I’m out for the months of February, March, and April.
What am I going to do with all this free time? Blog a ton. So follow along if you want to see this journey. I’m going to try to open source all the things. š
Update: I ended up extending this to May 15 since it got a late start.
Pueblo Nuevo
A little more Latin, this time Peueblo Nuevo from the Buena Vista Social Club, a delightfully chill song to slow down for a few moments and enjoy.
Comment Spammer Interview
The Register has a great interview with a comment spammer. Why can’t News.com do that type of story?
Fred Again Tiny Desk
You think you’ve seen Tiny Desk performances, but you haven’t seen this.
Dodgy Mouse and Keyboard
After several days of mysterious mouse jumps, keys getting “stuck” on the keyboard and repeating over and over, and varioun non-responsiveness of my computer, I was extremely frustrated. I tried moving the wireless reciever five different places, re-compiling synergy, scanning for spyware, etc. Of course everything was fixed by putting new batteries in the wireless mouse and keyboard. Noticing a theme? I should get sponsorship from Energizer.
In victory you deserve champagne.
In defeat you need it.
— NapoleonĀ Bonaparte
WordPress.com Private Stats Now Public
We’ve decided to open up 99% of our internal aggregate stats at WordPress.com to the world, really everything except our PayPal graphs. There are still some todos, such of the language signup information we track, but all of that will come with time.
CNET Networks Site
CNET Networks has a new corporate site where you can see the new logo I’ve mentioned before. What I found fascinating was the advertising rate card, I wonder what Jason would give for $111 CPM? I’m not sure what half of those ad units mean.
Best and Brightest
The Best and Brightest, Glamorous Life #33. Who says Zeldman gets linked less?
Zeldman has had a profound influence on the way I think about the web. I started taking web craft seriously because of Zeldman. WordPress exists because of Zeldman. I am where I am today because of Jeffrey Zeldman. This isn’t hyperbole, just statement of fact.
I think now is an excellent time for people to take a walk through his archives and highlight their favorite articles, something I’ll do myself at least once a day every day this week. If you’re doing something similar leave a comment so I can follow along. It’ll be interesting to see what people were most influenced by from one of the most influential fathers of today’s web.
WP and Safari
This ZDNet article says Safari doesn’t work with WordPress as well as IE. I’m assuming he’s referring to the quicktags which just can’t be done in Safari because of JS limitations, but is anyone else having issues using WordPress with Safari?