July 2007 – Something Odd!

Dvorak vs Malik at WordCamp on video

John Pozadzides has released the first video from WordCamp and it’s sure to be one that will interest many. John C Dvorak debates with Om Malik on the subject of Blogging vs Journalism. It’s hosted on blip.tv and John has uploaded a high quality version there.

I won’t embed it here, go look at John’s post for the video! Thanks John for doing such a great job!

We spent a good portion of today at SFMOMA, where they have a really interesting photography exhibit, and some of the modern art on the first floor really caught my eye, especially the self portrait of Andy Warhol and the image containing the pencils across the room from it. Blew my mind they did.
Later we went for dinner but in between we relaxed in a local park. Here’s a photo Alex took of me and Matt. Alex has a neat little RF transmitter and receiver for his camera and flash. He lay the flash on the bench next to him while he shot this photo. Good fill flash and it’s not in-your-face like an onboard flash would be. I have to get my hands on an RF transmitter to go with my 580EX!

While on the subject, this is Automattic. There are quite a few of us now, and as you can see, we’re really getting into the formal “must wear a suit to work” dress code.

Fun with Automattic at the beach

For the next few days the header image above will be a collage of images from Automattic’s stay at Stinson Beach. Most of us are there so see if you recognise any faces!

(It’s a long story, watch Trapped in the Closet first!)

WP Tip: don't blog as Administrator

do not blog as administrator

The default user when you install WordPress is called “Administrator” and many people don’t change it which unfortunately leads to anonymous looking posts made by Administrator instead of by Matt, Mark, Lloyd, Joseph, Alex or your own name of course.

I would venture to say it’s a new user problem but I remember seeing Administrator posts by old hands at the blogging game so it might be worth double checking, just in case. Your template might not show Administrator, but your RSS feed isn’t as clever.

It’s simple to check and fix. Log in to your WordPress blog, go to Users, and then Your Profile. If you haven’t changed your first and last names, do it now. Click “Update Profile” and then change your “Display name” to a friendlier name.

One final tip, it’s probably much safer to blog as a non-admin user. If you’re logged in all the time, consider creating an editor or author user. If you leave your laptop unattended in a busy area for a moment it’s much less likely that someone will do real harm to your blog. (Presuming they don’t rob the laptop first!)

If you’re a WordPress.com user, then don’t worry about Administrator showing up on your blog posts, it won’t happen as your login name is your author name. Isn’t that nice?

Roaming in America

One of the problems with traveling is the cost of calling home. I enabled roaming on Meteor, but it’s a bit pricey at €1.39/minute or €0.32/sms. I checked roam4free as well but that appears to be more expensive yet at €2.50/min.

Enter Skype where I can buy credits and call an Irish landline for €0.02/min or Irish mobile phone for €0.184. It’s great as everywhere in San Francisco I’ve traveled to has WiFi access. This morning I roamed about the house with my laptop in hand, headset on and spoke to my wife Jacinta for over 18 minutes and it cost me less than €4. That’s pretty cool and it was great to hear her and baby Adam.

It’s not quite the same sort of roaming but WiFi is fairly ubiquitous in the United States, so Skype on my laptop is painless, and very cheap.

Later … Out of curiosity I checked how much it costs to ring a mobile phone from an Irish landline. I use UTV’s service and Skype is cheaper at all times except for the weekend. Crazy stuff!

Congratulations Donal and Celine!

I can finally reveal the good news that totally made my day yesterday. My brother Donal asked his girlfriend Celine to marry him and as he said, “She said yes!”

I want to pass on my congratulations to them both and I’m looking forward to seeing them when I get home, and to the big celebration party!

Sunday Morning Wordcamping

Barry spoke at length about High Performance WordPress this morning, and Matt came on stage to introduce and summarise the main features of the new Hyperdb. If you missed it you’re definitely going to want to watch the video when it comes out. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that Barry was out last night telling me, “ah you’ll have one more before you go..” 🙂
Great talk guys!

Barry’s talk is already online. That was fast!

Rashmi Sinha’s talk on “Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems” is fascinating. I agree with her observation that the Internet really isn’t democratic. Whoever is popular will get ever more popular, in general. There are exceptions of course but the well established bloggers like Robert Scoble are hard to dislodge from their pedestals.

Dave Winer talking at Wordcamp.

John Pozadzides is the guy with the camera on the balcony at Wordcamp. He’s going to post videos of the event online and is looking for suggestions about where that should be. I’ll suggest blip.tv, as it’s served me well in the past!

Liz presented research into the backend that will eventually make it into WordPress 2.4

Finally, Charles Stricklin has a great write up on the second day including the reminder that I sort-of promised to release that Paypal Instant Payment Notification code ..

There are literally hundreds of images from WordCamp on Flickr. Scott has posted a few too, and made them available under a CC license and here are a few photos taken by Alex who is just as mad about photography as I am!

Really finally this time. I had my photo taken and then they made a cartoon out of it. Thanks! 🙂

Saturday morning at WordCamp 2007

WordCamp 2007 has just started and I’m there! Photos and posts are already appearing online and probably the best way to track them is by subscribing to the follow page’s feeds:

Flickr’s wordcamp tag
Google Blogsearch for WordCamp (url changed, order by date, not relevance)

I’m posting photos to my WordCamp 2007 Flickr set. It’s growing slowly but surely and from my vantage point on the balcony I have a good view of the proceedings!

Half way through the day and I must say I’m enjoying Lorelle’s talk the most. (Edit – here’s a great write-up on her talk). I’m not very interested in podcasting but Dan Kuykendall’s talk on the subject might make me install his podpress plugin just to see what it’s all about.

Om and John Dvorak’s talk made me feel sick. I can’t imagine that most of the audience have problems with moderating too many comments. I know I’m overjoyed when anyone comments! And that comment about using the default WordPress theme made me angry. It’s not only new users to WordPress who use it but at least one established and respected blogger uses it and it hasn’t hurt how his writing is perceived. I felt a huge gap between what they were talking about and what I think about. Anyone else feel the same way? (eh Lorelle?)

The Blog Monetization talk is just finishing up but I went downstairs for a walk about and took a quick look at the stickers and card table. This card from Self Help for Cats is definitely the best card down there. Go visit them for feline help!

While on the subject of making money, here’s Jeremy’s tips for making money online:

New! Add your photos to the WordCamp Flickr group! Tag them with “wordcamp” and “wordcamp2007” too!

OMG! Robert doesn’t know who Lorelle is! Shocker!

The Matt Cutts talk is great, I’ll post snapshots of his slides later! Biggest tip I’ve learned so far? Use dashes or underscores to separate out the words in categories or tags. Don’t join words. Update – text link ads are a definite no-no. Sites will be penalized.

Funny cartoons of Wordcamp 2007 participants and visitors: bodyabcs.com! Oh yes, hey hot stuff!

I'm in San Francisco, luggage is in London

Thanks BA, this is the second time I’ve flown to San Francisco, and it’s the second time my luggage has been delayed in London. Notice a pattern? Don’t you like my name? Grrr. My luggage is supposed to be delivered tomorrow night to the hotel, but i need to do some shopping this afternoon for essentials.

On a lighter note, almost all of Automattic are downstairs in the lobby and it’s good to finally meet many of them! Mark and I had an uneventful flight, and even fixed or discussed a few bugs on the way! Desktop Tower Defense is no easier at 36,000ft than it is at sea level however. Oh well!

See you all at WordCamp!

Overdue update! Luggage was delivered around 4am on Saturday morning so I picked up the case and had a change of clothes just in time for WordCamp!

Around Ireland in 80 links on July 18th 2007

Anthony found Pixar’s new short cartoon, Lifted. It’s quite fun!
I’m amazed that Drogheda Library wouldn’t let a student charge his laptop. “Doing a ryanair on it” alright!
Kathy Foley’s festival of mud and horrors tries to understand the fuss over Oxegen. I stay well clear of RTE these days so I missed the hype, but I have to agree with her about the mud .. WHY?
Justin wants the vigilantes to stop polluting the phisher’s sites. It makes it harder for investigators to find the real victims.
Granny Mar posted a few days ago about July 12th in the North. That’s one hell of a tall pile of tires! Can you imagine the black oily smoke off that heap of rubber? Her daughter Elly was in touch asking if someone could help move her mom’s blog from Blogspot to a shiny new WordPress install. I have my hands full but perhaps some kind soul could get in touch, please?
Paul is plugging new “Internet nanny” service Glubble. The Techcrunch write up is fairly positive, but I can just see Adam with a Linux boot disk in a couple of year’s time bypassing all my carefully constructed whitelists to check out the dark side.
My Harry Potter post is getting an insane number of hits today. Looks like lots of people looking for the online version!
Finally, it’s not Irish news, but Joseph has blogged about the WordPress.com and Facebook integration! Barry blogged about keeping track of the 300 servers Automattic use, and I have to add that if you use any of the premium products on WordPress.com you might see a renewal notice in your Dashboard when your subscription runs out…

I did the online check-in thing this morning and I have an aisle seat. Mark is sitting across the aisle so we both have room to sort-of stretch our legs on the long journey to San Francisco tomorrow!

PS. so nobody wants WordPress stickers? Read my WordCamp post below to find out how you might be able to get a few ..

Why not let Google filter your spam?

I’ve been running Spamassassin and Postgrey on my mail server for the past few months. It was only since the server was upgraded that I had enough juice to run the very intensive SA processes (even using spamd), but still on occasion the server would grind to a stop when a particularly nasty Rumpelstiltskin attack was underway.

So, last week I met Mark for a coffee and he showed me his Nokia N90 (or N80, I can’t remember) and the gmail app that was installed on it. He collects his gmail email on his phone, after it’s filtered for spam, and what with the cost of GPRS data, that’s quite a saving. I don’t intend reading my email on my phone (I hate my W810i anyway), but he did give me the idea of sending my email through Google and then popping it off into Thunderbird!

Now, I have a simple .forward to send on my email. I was able to shut down Postgrey and Spamassassin and email is delivered quickly and with few false positives or spams getting through. When I think of it, I can use the web interface to check what’s due to come down the line. You also get the added bonus of encrypted pop3 data, useful when you’re at a conference or simply on public wifi.

I’m sure everyone else has been doing this for ages and ages but hopefully this will inspire at least one person to follow suit and rid themselves of spam once and for all!