We’ve lost two incredible souls this week: first Dan Fredinburg in Nepal and now Dave Goldberg has unexpectedly passed. I encourage you to Google articles about their lives, like this one about Dave Goldberg or this on Dan, because both were unique and incredible individuals. In an example of how software can have unintended effect on emotions, I just realized I had a pending friend request on Facebook from Dan, probably years old. 🙁 Going through a lot of emotions, but a good reminder that life can be fleeting and to make time for friends and those who you love, something both of these men were great at. May they both rest in peace.
Aside Archives
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!
Two big releases today: WordPress 4.2 with lots of interface improvements and emoji support, and the 3.5 release of Jetpack with a new menu editor.
I’m going to try out intermittent fasting for a few weeks, after hearing about it for several years from fit-minded friends. It’s tough to find a link on it that doesn’t have some sort of newsletter popup or sell an ebook, but Tim had a good guest post on it in 2008 which ends on a skeptical note, and this beginner’s guide to intermittent fasting by James Clear is awesome for its graphics and straightforward way of introducing the concept and ways to approach it. I’m going to aim for a late lunch and a normal-timed dinner, since like James dinner is often my most social meal.
Update: I also forgot that I wrote about this with a few more links and some good comments in January.
What is music? There’s no end to the parade of philosophers who have wondered about this, but most of us feel confident saying: ‘I know it when I hear it.’ Still, judgments of musicality are notoriously malleable. That new club tune, obnoxious at first, might become toe-tappingly likeable after a few hearings. Put the most music-apathetic individual in a household where someone is rehearsing for a contemporary music recital and they will leave whistling Ligeti. The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis writes on why we love repetition in music and the neurological effects repeated songs have on us. Hat tip: Brian Groat.
Read through this amazing horror story constructed of actual sentences (with links) from reviews of the Apple Watch. (Hat tip: Laughing Squid.) As for me? I tried on the Watch yesterday and was very impressed, I’ll be getting one as soon as I can once they’re available. I would have picked up one of the new Macbooks as well if it was available, but the stores had them on display but none in stock.
The CEO of Automattic worked with the co-founder of WordPress directly, mediated by the head of the WordPress Foundation. Matt Mullenweg said the meetings were very productive.
As inside-baseball WordPress-focused April Fools go, this one is pretty funny: WordPress to be bundled in Jetpack with mission to power 50% of the web.
Fun read by J.D. Andre: What Calvin and Hobbes taught me about mindfulness. I’ve been practicing daily with the Calm app.
Are you in or near Tokyo? I’m going to be in town and doing a meetup this Sunday, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with the local community. I’m told you can read about it on this link: WordBench東京 3月スペシャル『春のマット祭り』 – WordBench東京.
One of my favorite essays of all time is by David Ramsey in Oxford American on Lil Wayne, called I Will Forever Remain Faithful. I’m used to movies, books, even songs making me tear up occasionally, but not essays, but this one does every time. It’s worth Googling the songs mentioned and quoted in the headings, it gives an interesting soundtrack to the writing and after listening the essay is worth re-reading. I miss that old Lil Wayne, too.
I don’t think I’ve said it publicly before, but Ramsey’s essay was actually the inspiration for my 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number which is one of the most popular pieces of writing I’ve published.
I’m very honored to be chosen as part of the
World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders class of 2015 alongside some really amazing folks. I spoke at Davos a few years ago and it was a very interesting experience — I think they snuck me in on a media badge, which is why I wrote a post about the fifth estate for them.
Since the Title II ruling from the FCC there’s been a lot of partisan rhetoric about the government taking over the internet, even in the comments of this very blog. I just came across Brad Feld’s post, Some Final Thoughts on the FCC and Title II Ahead of Tomorrow’s Vote on Net Neutrality and he does an awesome job breaking down and addressing each of the misconceptions.
We’re organizing an exciting new conference series focused on blogging, called Press Publish. The speaker list has some really awesome folks on it, and will include notable WordPress bloggers telling their stories as well as Automattic employees teaching tutorials and workshops. Plus, WordPress.com Happiness Engineers will be ready and waiting to help people one-on-one with their blogs.
The first two events are in Portland on March 28 and in Phoenix on April 18, and if you register with this link in the next week or so you get a discount, special for Ma.tt readers.
There’s the smart publishers, and then there’s the ones going out of business. WIRED is one of the smart ones, and just launched an awesome redesign on WordPress. From their editor-in-chief:
Back in 1994 we launched Hotwired, the first site with original editorial content created for the web. It was a digital home for reporting on the future of science, business, design, and technology. You’ve come to trust us over the past two decades, but our growth online has sometimes come too quickly and with some pain. When I took over as editor in chief in 2012, WIRED had an archive of more than 100,000 stories. That’s good! But they were spread out over more than a dozen different databases, sections, and homepages tenuously connected by virtual duct tape and chewing gum. The cleanup process—onerous and without a shred of glamour—took almost 15 months. But finally, last year, our engineers rolled out a newly unified site architecture built atop a single streamlined WordPress installation. And you didn’t notice a hiccup. Maybe you saw that pages loaded a touch faster. Stories looked more WIRED.
The story of the engineering behind it from Kathleen Vignos is also cool:
The redesign gives us the third incarnation of our Curator application, which started years ago as a separate Groovy on Grails application maintained by a single Java developer. Curator once consumed articles from 35 different blogs for curation on our homepage. When we migrated our 17 active WordPress blogs into one WordPress install, we also rewrote Curator in Cake PHP to match our WordPress PHP backend. After this, anyone on our team could maintain Curator—but the architecture remained the same and lived outside of WordPress. Using this version of Curator, our web producer team manually constructed the homepage throughout each day as various stories were ready to be promoted.
Our new and improved Curator is now a custom WordPress plugin—and it’s artificially intelligent! This allows our homepage and section landing pages to be both automated and curated at the same time. Stories flow through automagically based on editorial criteria, but editors can take control of the flow by locking stories in certain slots in our card system. This means our homepage and section landing pages are constantly changing with new stories all day long.
Curator sounds cool, as does the coming “longform feature article builder.”
It’s been a long road, but the WordPress mobile apps are finally making some major strides. WordPress iOS version 4.8 includes a visual editor so you won’t see code anymore when blogging on the go. (For anyone curious at home, WordPress originally shipped with WYSIWYG in version 2.0, and it was highly controversial at the time.)
A June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.
Did you know pink and blue implying gender is relatively new, and all babies used to just wear white dresses?
I enjoyed this Ars Technica look at USB 3.1 and Type-C, which is probably the cable/connection change people will notice the most over the next few years. (As I look with despair on my dozens of USB devices and cables.) I also dug their retrospective, A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. Remember serial ports?
To make it a full New Yorker weekend, here’s a longread from Michael Pollan, best known for his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, on the reopened research on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics. While we’re on Pollan it’s worth repeating his advice from Food Rules, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
I had the great fun the other week of hanging with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, an episode he titled Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies. His previous guest was Arnold Schwarzenegger (!) and if you dig into the podcast archives there are some really amazing episodes, I’m working my way through them now.
The Pun-Off, held annually since 1978, matches the peculiar energy of a place where the unofficial slogan is “Keep Austin Weird.” This is the city, after all, that organizes Eeyore’s Birthday Party, an outdoor costume party honoring the depressed donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh. […]
It’s a reunion of legends past. Steve Brooks, a country singer with a mop of gray hair, is the only other person besides Ziek to have won both Punslingers and Punniest of Show in the same year. Retired from competition, he now serves as a judge and emcee.
Everything about this article about the World Pun Championships in Austin is amazing, I want to quote the entire thing.