My Tips on WordPress.com, a good summary of a lot of the features that launched last year which in hindsight was a ton.
Top Emails and more, 2009 Edition
As I like to do every year, here are the top 10 people who emailed me this year:
- Toni Schneider — 914
- Maya Desai — 672
- Mom — 475
- Raanan Bar-Cohen — 284
- Barry Abrahamson — 276
- Rose Goldman — 256
- Jane Wells — 193
- Michael Pick — 185
- Donncha O Caoimh — 179
- Alex Shiels — 167
Email is my most frequently used social network, so it’s always interesting to see the trends.
This year I got 11,459 emails consider “important” by my script, or about 34 a day, and 53,030 “other” emails, excluding spam, mailing lists, and junk.
For the first time, I’ve decided to take a look at my outgoing emails as well, of which there were 9,101 of to 2,087 unique people, and here’s that list. These are less accurate because an email can be “to:” multiple people, or cc:s, but only ever From: one person, so the stats aren’t entirely correct for the to-list.
- Toni Schneider — 524
- Raanan Bar-Cohen — 450
- Maya Desai — 428
- Barry Abrahamson — 243
- Rose Goldman — 212
- Alex Shiels — 203
- My Matt.WP.com moblog post-by-email address — 148
- Michael Pick — 139
- WordPress.com Support — 123
- Andy Skelton — 108
I obviously need to email my Mom more. Here are my posting statistics:
Posts | Avg. Words | Total Words | Avg. Comments | Total Comments | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2002 | 482 | 105 | 50,800 | 2 | 980 |
2003 | 559 | 130 | 73,009 | 3 | 1,723 |
2004 | 1,108 | 49 | 55,025 | 5 | 6,594 |
2005 | 703 | 43 | 30,485 | 9 | 6,343 |
2006 | 340 | 65 | 22,173 | 10 | 3,662 |
2007 | 360 | 56 | 20,408 | 16 | 6,091 |
2008 | 314 | 48 | 15,368 | 21 | 6,636 |
2009 | 182 | 80 | 14,675 | 23 | 4,280 |
My number of posts went down, but more words per post, so I’m posting less but meatier things. I made 391 comments myself last year, and it fell off rapidly after that. I would like to get more regular commenters next year, maybe by making the comment form more obvious on the photo pages. Photo pages draw the most repeat traffic.
I’m curious about travel stats, but haven’t gotten annual report from Dopplr yet.
Here were the top posts for 2009:
Google & China
Google is taking a new approach to China. This is a big deal, they’re basically implying the Chinese government has been hacking Google accounts to compromise human rights advocates. Interesting the note at the end where they say these decisions and investigations were entirely in the US, it’s almost like they’re trying to protect their employees there.
Custom CSS
There have been a few requests for the plugin that drives the custom CSS feature on WordPress.com. We wanted to clean it up before releasing, and ended up adding a feature that stores the CSS better (in the posts table) and also adds revisions so you can revert to an old version of your custom CSS. The plugin is now available on the WordPress.org directory, free for everybody. Enjoy!
Twenty-six
Today is my birthday! It is also, if you write it the right way, a palindrome: 01-11-10. (Hat tip: Mike Adams.)
Twenty-five was a very good year. I started out with a lot of goals and actually made progress or accomplished most of them, as well as some things I didn’t anticipate. Of my 14 resolutions last year 10 of them are solid or at least had significant improvement, while the things I never do I still didn’t do: Spanish, cooking, exercise. (I might post a more detailed review later.) The thing I’m most happy with this year has been quantity of reading — I’ve read more in the last year than the past several years combined, and have also started keeping up with periodicals (New Yorker, Economist, Atlantic, Wired) pretty much every issue which has helped me feel much better informed about the world. The most significant device to me in 2009 wasn’t the iPhone, it was the Kindle.
In some ways I’ve nested a lot in the past year, including the oh-my-goodness scary commitment of buying my first place, but at the same time I’m still addicted to movement. I saw the excellent movie Up in the Air recently and related to it more than I was comfortable.
I’d like for twenty-six to be an infrastructure year, laying down the groundwork for things to come. No open source resolution like last year, but here’s what I’d like to focus on in 2010:
- Minimize and simplify, try to de-cruft and streamline as much as possible, particularly with regards to physical possessions.
- Move, which hopefully is a good opportunity for the above.
- Eat, hopefully not too richly, and stop when I’m full. (I have so much trouble with that, I love food and I’m a completionist.)
- Watch Farscape from start to finish, since my sister gave it to me for Christmas.
- Bike and walk, more than drive.
- Learn more about captology.
- Showcase my photography, in print, somewhere.
- Redesign, this site, because it’s fun. 🙂
- Talk more, with the people I love.
- Eliminate “sort of” and “kind of” from my speech.
- Launch, launch, launch. (Code for me: JQ, OT, NA, MT, BB, UL, MA, VP, NT, 5L, 20, 70.)
This is the eighth year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22 (this one is funny), and 23, 24, and 25. Whew. Here’s to the second quarter century of life.
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
Secret History of Kubrick
The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet, a nice article by Tina Daunt.
Menu Mind Games
Author William Poundstone Dissects the Marketing Tricks Built Into Balthazar’s Menu, “how something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak.” I wish typography was that simple. 🙂
Fireside Chat
In New York last month I did a fireside chat with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts which is now available online. The video features myself, Liz Danzico, and the back of Jason Santa Maria’s head.
Veggies are People Too
Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too in NY Times. I eat lots of beef and BBQ because I heard cows have a big carbon impact.
Christmas Site Updates
First off, Merry Christmas everybody! I’ve been doing some tweaking here around ma.tt. The biggest thing you’ll notice is that I’ve imported about 12,000 photos from my old Gallery-powered gallery, which was broken since I upgraded to PHP5, into core WordPress, and you can see them under this category. I even managed to bring over people tags and comments from the proprietary system I had written. I feel so much safer now that all this data is in WordPress, I know it’ll still work in 10 years. I might have to change how “random” works, though, to exclude the really old photos, because they can be fairly embarrassing. 🙂
Everything is a Project
Everything is a project, even this, by Scott Berkun.
Permanently Deleted
“The WordPress people, as good as they are, don’t seem to ken why this ‘convenient’ and possibly life-saving feature creates repercussions and consequences. Like the Senate, it’s all a game to them.” Permanently Deleted : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits. Hat tip: Joe Clark.
Stealth Startups
Ask Matt: Essential Gadgets
Essential gadgets for life on the road:
https://videopress.com/v/KllQxFVq
Since recording this I’ve switched to the D3S, which is just like the D3 but with video. Everything else is the same! Video here done with VideoPress.
Why WordPress?
PHP Advent Article
Sorry for being quiet around here, I’ve been doing a ton of writing for other places. One went live today, Untitled as part of PHP Advent 2009. Since there are no comments on the site, I’ll accept them here.
Twitter API Support
You can now Post and Read WordPress.com via Twitter API, which was a pretty fun project. Everything doesn’t work yet because in some ways we’re overloading the Twitter API but it’s 90% of the way there to something really cool, and some relatively minor adjustments to the clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck can make this a really nice experience.
Mary’s opening and coffee
Mary’s show at the Rosenthal gallery (video here) and coffee at Four Barrel afterward.
First Core Meetup
Four pictures from the last day of the first core WordPress meetup in Orlando, Florida.
WordCamp Orlando
Snaps from WordCamp Orlando.