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!)
Tag Archives: Automattic
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! 🙂
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!
WordPress.com stats for your own blog
Andy announced a new WordPress stats plugin that uses the polished WordPress.com traffic graphs on your own self-hosted WordPress blog. I’ve been testing it here for the past few months and it’s worked fine. I must download the new plugin and install it to see what other goodies Andy has added since.
Eventually I’ll get around to releasing my own referrers plugin, but as our newborn Adam is taking up so much of our time it might be a while before I get around to it!
Is Flickr under attack by spam?
Has anyone else noticed an increase of spam comments on Flickr lately? I noticed my first spam comment there only last week, complained about it, and the comment and user were both deleted shortly afterwards. I thought nothing more of it.
This morning I got an unwelcome shock when I checked my Flickr comments through Bloglines. More spam comments. There’s a screenshot below. When I clicked through to the photos in question both comments had been deleted but later on another spam comment appeared and I now suspect any comment left by users with usernames starting with “a” with a mixture of upper and lower case characters and digits. Maybe it’s time they invested in an Akismet license for Flickr.com? Thanks Lloyd for the reminder!
We are live from BarCamp South East!
Here I am blogging away at BarCamp South East. It’s been a great day so far. My talk was scheduled for 10:50am which was a relief to get out of the way. Feedback has been positive too and horrors of horrors, I actually enjoyed the talk! Video and podcasts will be online eventually and I’ll update this post when they’re available. Elly left Bernie’s dictaphone on the seat next to me, Joe and Conor had video cameras so I’m sure you’ll get to hear or watch me talk about WordPress one way or another if you’re interested!
Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post. I’m hopeful that things will return to normal sooner or later on inphotos.org!
Now, I’m off to look around and mingle with the rest of the attendees!
Just spotted on Lifehacker, is How to manage kids in the home office, a topic brushed upon in my talk.
I’m sitting in the Drupal talk now by Alan Burke and Stephane Corlosquet on the laptop. John Handelaar is showing off his voter site written in Drupal. It’s a great presentation on the power of Drupal and it’s plugins.
Ken McGuire has a review of the day, and apart from everything else, and it was great to talk to Justin Mason finally.
Great day. I think everyone’s looking forward to the next one in May!
Conor O’Neill has posted videos of my talk on his blog. I could embed them here, but he went to all the trouble of uploading them, so go visit his blog and check them out. There are bits there about scaling WPMU by hashing blog_ids and partitioning databases, as well as how to get past the 32,000 file limit of ext2/ext3 in the blogs.dir files directory. Also, if you work from home I discuss my experiences doing the same, and communicating within a virtual company.
Bernie has posted the first podcast of my talk. He’s posting the second half tomorrow about working from home and in a virtual company.
The second part of Bernie’s podcast is online today! In this part I talk about working from home and balancing work and home life. Should be of interest to everyone working from home!
The Schneider Interview
Robert Scoble talks to Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic in this video interview about WordPress.com, Automattic and lots of other stuff. I’ve only watched the first 10 minutes, Toni talks about some of the features of WordPress.com – paid features, making money, adverts, fighting splogs and more.
Do you like Akismet? That’s covered too. Make sure you set aside some time today to watch this interview if you use WordPress!
BarCamp Ireland – September 30th in Cork
I found out from Damien that BarCamp Ireland now has it’s own blog. Their press release gives a quick overview, but if you want to know who’s going and talking you should take a look at the BarCamp wiki where you can signup to attend. There are twelve speakers so far with topics ranging from running a start-up, Web 2.0, OPML, Ruby and more.
Should be fun and interesting, and it’ll be great to meet up with some of the folk I met at the Web 2.0 Conference again. See you there!
Working at home, with children
I hope Ryan sees this, but 6 tips for working at home with children lists 2 good work habits that anyone working at home should follow:
- Maintain a good work schedule, and stick to it.
- Take a long lunch and enjoy your opportunity to work from home.
I haven’t been able to do either. I usually get up early (sunrise at 6.30 is quite spectacular from my office!), straight to my desk to post a photo, check email, irc, web stats, and then shower, breakfast, back to desk, bring the dog for a walk, work, break, work, quick lunch, work. Suddenly it’s 6pm and I’m wondering where all the time has gone.
That’s a normal day, but sometimes I need to get out and do some chore. Then I can be catching up the hours until late into the night.
Automattic is a 24-hour company. Podz and I are in Europe and the rest of the guys in the US, I wonder sometimes what it would be like to work on hours more closely tied to the other side of the Atlantic? The 8 hours difference between here and San Francisco is unrealistic, but maybe 4 or 6 hours. Then I laugh and think that Jacinta would kill me because we’d never see each other!
Working from home? It’s the best thing I’ve ever done! (via)
What’s my name?
Gather around, let’s all say it together.. it’s Donncha, not Donna, never have been a Donna, never will be. It’s weird how people reply to my mails or comment on something privately, saying, “Hi Donna” when there’s no mention of such a person on this site or any other I run, well, apart from this post of course.
How do you pronounce Donncha? If you’re an English speaker, it sounds like “dunaka”, not dunka, or donsha or bert or ernie. Err. Not sure how that will sound in other languages but there ya go. Best I can do for the time being.
For future reference, here’s a pic of me with Podz and Andy taken in San Francisco a few weeks back. I’m in front holding the camera with the insanely wide lens. If you see me on the street with my 20D just say hi. I won’t bite (much).
