Cacti server monitor, to check out later.
Learn Faster
A Little Hair
Well so I finally did it. I’ve been flirting with the idea of growing my hair long, really long. Either that or I wanted to cut it all off, not quite bald but buzzed. I went in to the hair place not quite sure what I was going to do, either get a light trim just to clean it up or take it all off, and I ended up with neither. To satisfy everyone’s burning curiousity here is the obligitory before and after picture. What do you think?
Misconception
Just to clear up a common misconception, I am in fact not the famous rapper Jay-Z. If you write a letter to him in my comments it won’t get there. Leaving your phone number, however, reflects an optimism about the web I miss.
I thought I could skip this one, but have been getting lots of ribbing on the NY Times Bachelorville article that was in their style section yesterday. To answer the FAQs: 1. My eyes are not always red. 2. Dvorak really is a thing. 3. I, too, had to look up what they meant by “unreconstructed.”
WordPress Tags
Using tags intsead of categories in WordPress, includes patch.
Matt Kelly (and many others) have put together an official Facebook Integration for WordPress plugin, which is available in the directory as of today. Glad to see the company becoming involved directly in the WordPress community, and excited to see what’s next in that regard.
CMS Critic Interview
Lean Startup Talk
I spoke with Sarah Millstein at the Lean Startup Conference earlier in the week. After a bit of intro we talk about how Automattic iterates, approaches hiring, and management.
I was a weird kid.
I’d write and painstakingly edit endless paragraphs in which I’d riff on current events and major news items. Then I’d take a floppy disk to my local copy store where I’d print out the pages and bind them with card stock covers, before heading to the post office to mail the completed tome to just about everyone I knew.
Dave Pell: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Post Office.
New Contact
Contact page (finally) updated. Includes contact form and updated PGP key. Try out the form.
Teach when you are filled with wonder, before you become a boring expert.
— Mark Pilgrim
Mac-like WordPress
The day after the Apple news comes TUAW asking WordPress: Most Mac-like Blogging Tool?. The comments are interesting too, someone points out another Apple weblog using WordPress that I had never heard about before.
Archives Page Tip
I’m finally fixing all the bugs on photomatt.net, converting a lot of old stuff into WordPress Pages and generally tidying a few things. For my archives I wanted to display a list of recent entry titles like Hemingway does, but I ran into the problem that it would only show 10 at a time (or whatever you have set in your options) and then makes you page through the rest, which sucks. But, thanks to WP, the fix is easy! I added query_posts($query_string . '&showposts=1000&order=asc'); to the archive.php template right under the header call. Basically what this says is to take the current page query and add the part that shows a bunch of posts, in this case 1000, and also to sort it chronologically instead of newest to oldest. (Eric would be happy.) Since it’s in my archive template it doesn’t mess with any other pages. That’s all!
Skydiving
While visiting some friends in Utah we decided on a bit of a whim to go skydiving, which ended up being an amazing experience. I can’t wait to go again. I paid the extra for the photographer, so here are the photos and videos they took.
Open Insulin
One of my big themes is that open source will transform every industry, with key examples being WordPress in web publishing, WooCommerce in online commerce, Wikipedia in reference, and Bitcoin/Ethereum in finance. Medicine, though, has been relatively unscathed so far. Here’s a great video introducing the Open Insulin project, which for the past 6 years has been developing their own method of manufacturing insulin and is going to open source its process to the world for anyone to recreate.
It also reminds me of the What If? article in the Economist a few days ago about mRNA self-biohacking. Hat tip: Riaan Knoetze.
Bug Fixers
In San Francisco
I will be in San Francisco again this weekend, up to no good as usual. My schedule is a little tight Friday and Sunday, but if you are going to be in town as well please leave a comment or email. This looks to be a very interesting and fun trip.
Open Source Tax Credit
Is an Open Source tax credit a good idea?