Aside Archives

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.