Sunday Morning Wordcamping

IMG_2801.jpg

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, Iterative Design in Agile Environments

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 at Wordcamp

Dave Winer talking at Wordcamp.

John Pozadzides, Wordcamp Cameraman

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 Danzico, Usability Analysis of WP

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!

ocao7-500.jpg

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 at Swedish American Hall

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:

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!

Lorelle at WordCamp

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?)

self help for cats

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:

img_2715.jpg

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!

Matt & Matt

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!

googlespam.gif

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!

Oh Facebook! I feel so dirty!

I finally joined. I’m always the last one in. I haven’t even got a myspace or a bebo account, but that’s probably a good thing. Apparently Facebook is a popular site. Bah! Where’s my Orkut login?

Anyway, thanks Nicole for the invite!

I’ve been really adventurous today. I also took a peek at Tumblr and set up an account to track Holy Shmoly!, In Photos, del.icio.us, donncha.stumbleupon.com (not sure if that’s working), and it might finally make me use Twitter again as my Twitter account is added too, with friends. (Which leads me to another problem, do I have permission to post twitters from other people there?)

Blame Damien for blogging about it in the first place.

Have you completed your WordCamp registration?

I'm going to WordCamp

Well, I’m off to San Francisco in a few days time for WordCamp and I’ll finally meet some of the newer members of the company. Actually, that would be almost half the company. Did I mention that Automattic is a rapidly growing organisation?

Anyway, registration for WordCamp is now closed, but a number of people still haven’t filled in their details, despite having paid for tickets! If you paid your $25 but never filled in a form with your tshirt size and blog URL then check your email. There’s a link there you should click! Your name will also appear on the attendees when you are done. I’m going to send out reminder emails tomorrow but please save me some time copying/pasting of emails and ID codes and fill in the form first!

See you at WordCamp!

PS. If you live in Ireland, leave a comment here. I’ll pick out 5 comments at random and once I’ve verified that your mailing address is in Ireland, I’ll pop a couple of WordPress stickers in the post to you.

Around Ireland in 80 links on July 13th 2007

Unlucky 13? Oooer!

  • What would you like to know about me? Apparently a company in Dublin is selling private information.
  • Paul’s friend was dumped over Facebook when his ex-girlfriend changed her status to “single” and “up for it”. Paul, that was mean to laugh! 🙂
  • I would love to see the referers to this post when it makes it’s way into Google. I’m sure Grandad will oblige in a future post.
  • Online photo sharing on pix.ie via Czajkowski. Anyone else tried them?
  • Kae says php.ie could be coming soon!
  • Firefox 3 talk by Marcio Galli in Cork on August 8th. What’s in store in version 3?
  • I got my first Facebook invitation. Should I sign up?

Fred the Band played in the Opera House in Cork recently, after a tour of the US where the following video was shot (after the jump). Their first album was great, the second album was so-so being a bit more of the same thing. You can hear a portion of their new single on their website above. They are absolutely brilliant live however. I took photos of them last year in the Spiegeltent. I never did post photos of the crowd surfing …

Way back in March I took photos at the shooting of a music video for Stanley Super 800. Finally, you can see the resulting video for yourself. No, I’m not in the video, I was in the background with my camera! They did a great job of it, and if you’ve been to Cork, watch out for Scotts on Caroline Street, Patrick’s Hill and the alley across from the College of Art on Emmet Place. Great stuff!

Continue reading “Around Ireland in 80 links on July 13th 2007”

Stumble upon WordPress.com

Nice! I just noticed that Stumbleupon support WordPress.com by adding the WordPress.com favicon to the SU taskbar.

stumbleupon-wpcom.png

Of course, it’s not the only way to browse WordPress.com, you can always use the Next link to jump to a random blog. The beauty of Stumbleupon, is that someone recommended the link. I’ve found some interesting blogs including the Doorways Around the World blog which is errr, full of photos of doorways.

Here’s my stumbleupon page. You’ll notice I’ve stumbled some of my own posts. I don’t want to spam my account and stumble everything, but if I’ve spent longer than usual writing some posts, it’s a good way of driving a few extra visitors to those special posts. Stumbleupon is definitely my favourite social bookmarking site. Install the plugin and start stumbling!

PS. I’m not the only one who likes Stumbleupon!

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.