Automattic – Page 3 – Something Odd!

WordPress Stickers and Badges

This was a nice surprise. While enjoying a lovely meal in the Castle Hotel in Blarney a courier rang me with a package. I wasn’t expecting anything but luckily he was close by and I met him in front of the local Garda station. Brimming with excitement I ripped open the package sending stickers and badges flying everywhere. Some landed in my burger, a few badges in my wife’s quiche and the baby grabbed a sticker or two before they fell on the ground.

No, I’m joking, but I did get a jiffy bag with a nice portrait of (most of) Automattic in Arizona and quite a few badges and stickers.

Before you ask, I’m not sending anyone any. I’ve already promised stickers to one person who’s been waiting a few months, and John probably thinks he’ll get his badges and stickers this year but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was him. Sorry!
On the other hand, if I meet you on the street, I may have a supply of badges and stickers in my camera bag so don’t be afraid to ask. I will of course have badges and stickers to give out at the Doneraile photowalk next month. If you’re around the area, feel free to join us exploring and photographing Doneraile Park!

On Tuesday I join the Bebo Generation at BlogTalk

Sigh. The local free newspaper, The Cork Independent, covered BlogTalk 2008 here in Cork and lead with the headline, “Bebo Generation descend on Cork”. Bebo? *mutter* *mutter*

Anyway, I’ll be sitting on a panel titled, From blog-style commentary to conversational social media which pretty much spans the entire blogging and social media experiences. On the panel with me will be Stephanie Booth who I have conversed with a few times on IRC but never met, Bernie Goldbach who I have met a number of times and always has something interesting to say, and finally, Jan Schmidt who I had never heard of but his bio suggests someone who will know a lot about the topic of social media!

How do I feel about the current crop of social media sites? I quit Facebook! Well, no I didn’t, but I will, soon!

Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?

I bumped into Tom Raftery in Cork Airport on my way to Arizona. As luck would have it, we were both on the same flight to London, although he was going to Munich for a conference.
Unfortunately we weren’t sitting near each other on the plane but in the airport he said he spends more time in Twitter than reading blogs. That came as a surprise to me, but I’m sure it’s happening to many other busy people too.

That’s one reason I’m excited about Prologue, the new Twitter-like theme for WordPress. Automattic is already using it internally as a private discussion tool and for a group of disparate people spread all over the globe it’s a really useful tool to find out at a glance what each of us is up to.

Tom lives and breathes social media all day long. I’ll have to ping him on Twitter to read this and get some feedback from him!

I’m already thinking it might be an easy way to introduce blogging, social media and networking and Twitter to some of my non-blogging friends who slave away in offices all day long. Set up a private blog on WordPress.com, activate the Prologue Theme and invite them all on as contributors. They probably use RSS aware browsers too so keeping up to date on what’s happening should be a simple task.

Prologue is a perfect fit for WordPress MU too. You’ve already got many users who probably chat on your support forums. Let’s get our thinking caps on and create some sort of group blogs so people can converse right within the blogging environment!

Interested? Download the theme and play with it. It’s GPLed. Also, keep an eye on Joseph and Matt who will be updating the theme.

Finally, Matt describes Prologue really well:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

I'll have a second helping, please!

One important element of a successful tech gathering is food. If you don’t feed the troops then your army isn’t marching. We’ve been very lucky this week with breakfast, lunch and dinner. We’ve been completely spoiled by David, the cook at the Ranch (and Diane too!)

I didn’t have a second helping today, there was a gorgeous cheese cake for dessert. Too tempting!

Biosphere 2

Can you imagine staying inside a sealed building for two years without physical contact with the outside world? That’s what happened at Biosphere 2 in 1991. It makes an interesting story and the Wikipedia page has a lot more on that mission and a second one that followed.

We visited there today, here are a few photos!

Matt wants us to go live in Biosphere 2, away from ~~the Nintendo Wii~~ distractions to help get WordPress 2.5 out on time.

I asked for a room with a view and they gave me this. WiFi reception is spotty but the view is stunning!

Blogging in Arizona

Most of the Automattic team are in the wilds of Arizona this week. Looking out the window I see an environment as alien to the green Irish landscape I’m familiar with as I’ll probably ever see. Cactus grows everywhere, dark green bushes cover the hills and the dirt on the ground is bone dry. The sun beats down out of a clear blue sky. It’s warm outside, but so cold in the shade. It’s still winter after all, even if it doesn’t feel like it to me.

It’s WordPress this, WordPress that. Despite the broadband going down yesterday there’s plenty going on here. Stay tuned for new developments!

PS. Act Two, Automattic Fundraising. Great news for Automattic and WordPress!

Donncha's Wednesday Links

Confusion reigns again. As promised yesterday, today is Wednesday’s Links! I really gotta get that plugin written so it’ll create these titles automatically. Happy Thanksgiving to all my US visitors!

Automattc Projects lists most of the commercial and GPLed projects Automattic has worked on. I’ll be looking at the secure admin plugin later. Should be useful for WordPress MU installs.
Lorelle reports on a new form of spamming and copyright theft called spinning. There are pay-for online services out there that generate nonsense content that search engines think is English, but is really fragments of content taken from other sites with words replaced to avoid the duplicate penalty. If you find someone scraping and stealing your content, you can get your own back on them. If they use Adsense, Daily Blog Tips recommends that you report them for copyright theft. Hopefully the thief will have their Adsense account suspended. Excellent idea.
George Barr has a great post on camera design. I love his opening paragraph.

Someone sent me a joke the other day – one of those, “how come” type – one line of which was “how come they put a man on the moon before they put wheels on luggage?”
Preventing ad blindness from DBT again. Useful ideas if you have advertising on your blog.
Pop culture will eat itself – what a great capture!
Happy Blog Birthday to Dave. 10 years young!
Everyone eats right? Even the cloned Storm Troopers in Star Wars needed somewhere to sit down and eat. Here’s what happens when Darth Vadar wandered down to the canteen. Via Emmet.

If you like that one, check out Darth’s hidden talent which I also got from Bifsniff.

Idiot spammers

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This post was written manually using Donncha’s fingers. Check out the Akismet anti comment-spam plugin to stop the idiot spammer at 75.126.132.23 using “Blog Comment Poster”.

Someone in London loves my luggage

On my way out to San Francisco my luggage was delayed in London and in similar fashion, when I got into Cork Airport it was again delayed in London. For all I knew my luggage was lost! I wouldn’t mind except:

Once per trip is enough, please British Airways, keep track. It’s simply not fair.
My flight from San Francisco arrived at 1pm, flight to Cork was scheduled for 2:15pm. It’s cutting it a bit tight but I’ve been in this situation before and my luggage came through. How close before? Let’s just say we had to sprint from one terminal to another in Heathrow to catch the next flight!
My flight to Cork was delayed for over an hour. First the flight captain fell ill in Cork and had to be replaced, thus bumping the boarding time to 3:15pm, then we actually started boarding at 3:25pm, before waiting on the tarmac for at least 40 minutes because repairs and tests had to be made to the plane. I finally arrived in Cork at 5:20pm.

Don’t you think British Airways could have moved my luggage from one plane to another in 2 hours? Not a chance. Thankfully it was delivered this afternoon, almost 20 hours later by Aer Lingus staff.

I guess someone in British Airways has a fetish for luggage with pink and blue ribbons. Yes, I bet it was the ribbons.

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.