Those of you who I had given my address to as “333” please change that to “355.” Sorry for the confusion! I just got a heap of Christmas cards today that had gone to the wrong address.

Drew Strojny tells his story of his journey from professional football player to small business owner to full-time WordPress theme developer, all in three years. (And GPL, natch.)

Bad mornings are the ones where I sit at home compulsively unbolding things hoping that somewhere in there there will be the gem of connection and stimuli that gets me out the door.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea on a 2006 post called Twitter Curve. I really like the word “unbolding.”

So the plan is today Saturday at 2 PM at the Chaat Cafe on 3rd and Folsom we’ll have a WordPress late lunch for all the people in the area who are interested in the latest and greatest in weblog software. It’s not a meetup proper but should be fun nonetheless.

Twitter/X is testing charging users $1/year with the idea that will keep out bots and spam. It’s an appealing idea, and charging definitely does introduce a “proof of work” that wasn’t there before, but the history of the web shows this is not really a big deterrent. Domains cost money, usually a lot more than a dollar a year, and millions are used for spam or nefarious purposes. The spammers obviously thought their benefit would be more than the cost of the domain, or they use stolen credit cards and identities. Charging may cause a short-term drop in bots while the bad guys update their scripts, but the value of manipulating X/Twitter is so high I imagine there is already millions of dollars being spent on it.

Long term to keep a platform healthy you really have to take a nuanced look at behavior and content, like Automattic does with Akismet, and have a fairly sophisticated trust and safety operation with great engineers. T&S is really important, not an enemy of progress, which would have been my chief edit to the otherwise exciting The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen. (If you missed Marc’s Why AI Will Save the World, that’s also an excellent read with dozens of references you can go down a rabbit hole with.)

New Kleptones mix which I have temporarily mirrored locally from Andy. (Individual files.)

Just Blaze, hip-hop producer and WordPress user, has reviewed the iPhone. Includes a video of an AIM client at the end, is that ebuddy?

Earlier I noticed that FreeBSD has a WordPress port, which means you can install WordPress automatically, just like on Debian and Gentoo. Only with Free software. 🙂

Every human has an intrinsic right to put their creative work into the commons. Once freed, work can never be withdrawn, and it has the opportunity—but not the obligation!—for everyone to improve upon it.

(v1)

Announcing WordPress 1.5, okay now you should link it and spread the good word. 🙂 1,400 words and it still doesn’t cover everything.

The Web Spam Squashing Summit announcement has quite a bit of spam on it. Unfortunate, but an excellent illustration of the problem.

Forget the Mac triumvirate, I’ve got a new photo up reminding you to Think Different, just like everyone else in San Francisco. 🙂

A Firefox theme for the bling-inclined