Aside Archives

A federated Wikipedia by Jon Udell talks about the ossification happening in the Wikipedia community, caused in part by its attachment to rules that were created with the best of intentions. All open source communities, including WordPress, have to be vigilant against this. Sometimes we have to throw out what worked before to create what will work tomorrow.

I write novels. And with just about every novel I write, I try to do something new or different that I haven’t done before, in order to challenge myself as a writer, and to keep developing my skills. In The Android’s Dream, of example, I wrote in the third person for the first time; in Zoe’s Tale, I had a main character—a sixteen year old girl—whose life experience was substantially different from my own; with The Human Division, I wrote a novel comprised of thirteen stand-alone “episodes.”

And now? With Lock In? What new thing have I done to stretch myself as a writer and teller of tales? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s something I’m really proud of, actually:

I’ve written a novel entirely free of semicolons.

John Scalzi in Pacing Doesn’t Just Mean Wearing a Groove in the Floor.

He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?

The Guardian on Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches. Definitely the coolest pope in my lifetime.

“Fasting for as little as three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as ‘remarkable’.” — Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds.

Harper’s had a great article on fasting a few years ago it’s not online at the moment but here’s a PDF of it. It’s also common in yoga and folks trying to live longer. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but perhaps will at some point this year — I like the idea of doing something by doing nothing.

“They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. […] The book’s central point, much criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash. So were they right?” The answer lies in Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.

Over on the BruteProtect blog they have a look at the Jetpack Bloat Myth, and find that counter-intuitively even though Jetpack has more comprehensive functionality it’s faster than using individual plugins to do the same things. There are economies of scale to Jetpack’s approach, and it doesn’t even include the impact of doing things more advanced and complex like Related Posts. There’s a reason why some web hosts like WP Engine ban most related post plugins but encourage the use of Jetpack.

The performance of the plugin code, though still faster, is still a small difference when compared to the benefit of offloading certain tasks like image resizing, related posts, stats, video transcoding, and more in the future to the WordPress.com cloud (which is now across 11 datacenters worldwide).

Of course if you don’t need the functionality at all it’s always faster to have nothing, but that’s a shrinking minority. There are still more optimizations to be had, and in line with a performance focus in 2015 look for more improvements to come in the future. In the meantime, check out the Jetpack benchmarks.

Life Hack: Put leftovers on top of your Mac Pro to keep them warm.

“We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the web.” — David Fleck, general manager of advertising at Disqus. Translation: We’re tracking everyone who visits a website with Disqus enabled and building a profile of them based on the content of the sites they visit and any comments they leave. “Deeper” than Facebook.

“So I’m particularly excited to announce that we’re bringing our native advertising product, Sponsored Comments, to the world of programmatic and we’re doing it on a global basis. […] Starting today, Xaxis clients, which include some of the best brands in the world, will buy and place Sponsored Comments advertising across much of the Disqus network.” Translation: It’s not comment spam if we’re getting paid for it.

I was just reading some comments the other day and thinking how it’d be great to see some sponsored brand content there instead of users, like there already was on the rest of the page. Glad there’s a solution for that on a global basis now.