Apple Intelligence

WordPress

It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today. 

I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of society.

Apple is an exciting company because they push so much compute and capability to the edge with their devices, it gives people superpowers. The Grammarly-level editing and spell-check alone is amazing, on par with their math stuff. Some of these superpowers will be directed into blogging, and I can’t wait to see what people do with all these new generative tools at their disposal. I really love the Promethean model where all of us have devices in our pocket or desktop that can turn us into superheroes.

I think it’s actually going to turn the hosting world upside down because complex transformations that would be difficult to run on the server-side will be trivial to run client-side with these millions and billions of processors being distributed through people’s smartphone upgrades. This innovation should exist at the operating-system layer (I include browsers and WASM in this) not be replicated in every application. WordPress Playground plays into this trend. (Interesting that Apple has now started to adopt the playground terminology.)

Greatest Golf Photo

Personal

Saw this on Yahoo: Tiger Woods gives us the greatest golf photo you’ll ever see. Basically he mis-shot (which almost never happens) straight into a camera man who was taking a picture right that instant. Here are larger versions. I love how everyone is looking at the camera, Inception-like, and the guy with the cigar. “For camera buffs, Pain was using a Nikon D3S camera, with a 24-70 mm lens and a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second.”

Sometimes you have an idea, and the universe delivers. Hotel WiFi Speed Test let’s you speed test and search hotels by their internet speed, something I was wishing existed just last week. Since I work primarily on the road, I would pick fast internet over pretty much any other amenity a hotel could possibly offer. Speedspot also offers similar info. It’s funny how sometimes the less expensive hotels often have much better internet — I think this is because they try to do less with captive proxies and such.

The New York Times writes about how The New Yorker is overhauling its design and online presence, including experimenting with paywalls and this wonderful nugget:

The new site, designed to be cleaner, with new typefaces, will be based on the WordPress publishing system. It is expected to be easier to navigate for mobile users — among the fastest-growing segments of the readership.

The New Yorker is one of my top 3 favorite publications in the world, and I’m very excited they’ll be using WP for their next chapter.

Streak

Personal, WordPress

You might have noticed there have been more posts around here lately. Actually until yesterday (Oct 3) there was an unbroken string of at least one post a day since August 25th, 40 posts in total. It started with a tweet from Colin Devroe:

https://twitter.com/cdevroe/status/504630581117063169

Until now I forgot it was only weekdays, so I was doing weekends as well. Friends know I like doing personal experiments just to question assumptions or ingrained behavior, other examples this I’ve tried this year are giving up drinking for a month, going without a smartphone for 40 days, and more recently training for a half marathon with my friend Rene. I thought blogging every day would be a burden, but it actually became a great source of joy. It was more a shift in mindset than anything — every day I read things I think are interesting, share links with friends, have thoughts that are 80% of a blog post, and write a ton privately, it was just a matter of catching those moments and turning them into something that was shared with the world.

The tools besides WordPress that I found super-helpful in this were Simplenote, which was great for capturing thoughts and drafts when I was on the go, and I’ve been using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help me schedule drafts and keep an eye on my progress. The Editorial Calendar plugin is useful but I don’t love it — I wish the calendar view moved week by week rather than replacing the whole table, that it was responsive or worked on mobile, and that it would take over your publish button so you could define a desired posting cadence (in my case every 24 hours) and it would put a finished post in the next free slot, or let you bump something to the front of the queue and push all the other posts back a day. There were a few missteps along the way with timezones but overall I’m happy with how the experiment turned out.

So what broke the streak? It was actually one of the other experiments: running. I’ve never considered myself a runner, and never really done it in my life, but a few months ago I started trying it and have been training up for a half marathon on November 16. (It’s also a great opportunity to take photos.) Yesterday morning I woke up early around 5 AM and as the sun started to come up, and the weather was so nice after I rounded the Bay Bridge (planned turnaround point) kept going to Crissy Field where I saw the Golden Gate from afar and thought it would be fun to cross it. After crossing I was starving by and figured 3 more miles would be a half marathon and also put me in Sausalito. The last mile or two was really tough, definitely beyond what I was ready for and I walked a lot, but I was very proud of the result, finishing in around 2 hours 45 minutes. But I hadn’t planned to stay out that long, and the rest of my day was full of meetings. I had moved my scheduled post for the day out so I could talk about the new Childish Gambino mixtape (post coming tomorrow) but the rest of the day was so busy and I got exhausted so early I totally forgot to post.

So achieved one life goal while breaking the streak on another, which is not ideal, but today is another day and I want to see if I can break the 39 day streak next. Everything happens one day at a time. 🙂

Smart Quotes in PHP

Books

One of the true joys I find in reading different websites is when the author of whatever text you see has taken the time to make his text typographically pleasing to the eye through the use of proper typographical elements. CSS has enabled designers to shape text on the web in ways that allow for far greater control over presentation than the creators of HTML ever envisioned. However, I see many sites where it’s obvious that great pain has been put into the layout and presentation of the text, but there are still things like single and double prime marks being used instead of true quotes or apostrophes. Part of the reason for this is it’s a pain to enter the proper entities in when you type, especially if the entry is being added through a normal text box like most blogging software use. While I’m not going to go start a society (more) I still have written a small function in PHP that will hopefully make the world a better place, one curly quote at a time :). Thanks to my dad, Mark Pilgrim for inspiration and the code that got me started, and Barrett for help.

A little background: This whole thing started a few hours ago when I was writing a paper and when I looked back to proofread I saw that there were a number of occurrences of words like it’s, where writing out the HTML entities had become so ingrained in me from various situations where I hand code that it was now translating into my ‘normal’ typing. At that moment I immediately thought of ten other reasons why it’s probably better for the content to be entered into the database as a single or double prime and then translated to its proper character on display. Most of all, it’s just easier, and the free flow of ideas into your writing is not impeded in any way. My mind also went back to an entry I read on Dive Into Mark early last month which addressed a similar issue, but from looking at the code I saw no easy way I could drop that into my site. And thus this very generic function was born. It can be dropped into any PHP application anytime you want to make some text display worthy. Without further ado: Update: fixed a display issue, and a small bug.

Continue reading Smart Quotes in PHP →

Postiecon

Events

“So, PostieCon (a conference sponsored by PayPerPost) was among the most controversial things I’ve ever done. People really hated that I was speaking there. I got constant crap from my friends and foes alike because of my decision to speak there. But, it turned out they didn’t have enough attendees so they postponed it to November.” — Robert Scoble

You can’t go wrong with Amazon’s 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime. I’ve only read a bit over a dozen of them, and some of those in school when I probably didn’t appreciate them. I’ve never had a time in my life when I thought, “You know, I’m reading too much.” It’s a weekend — read!