Tim Bray On Blogging
Tim Bray (when he worked at Sun) was someone who inspired me and incented me to start my own blog; his insistence on writing in a parallel work world was one reason I rolled the Snowman over to WordPress. As I was vamping on the goodness of WordPress as a platform, Tim went meta and [...]
A Decade of WordPress
WordPress celebrated its tenth birthday last week, neatly marked by Matt Mullenweg’s warm and wise words. Ten years is an insanely long time in internet years. It’s web services to cloud, or client-server to web services with Java, XML, and the dot com boom as points on the line. WordPress got me back into development, [...]
“Professional WordPress: Design and Development” 2nd edition
My five-year love affair with WordPress hits another milestone on January 9, 2013 when the 2nd edition of the book I co-authored with Brad Williams and David Damstra is released into the wild. You can pre-order it from Amazon now and you’ll have it the day it’s released. Not as exciting as getting “The Deathly [...]
Five Network Services You Need To Use
Here are five network services that I use, consume, promote and on which I rely heavily. My affiliations with them are purely tangential (I’m on the board of the MIX, which does indirect business with kiva.org; and a friend works for Evernote) and this isn’t paid or promotional; I just felt like vamping on where [...]
Instagram Is About Context
There have been lots of bytes written about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, with the eigenvectors of sentiment pointing in roughly these directions: keep it away from Google, pick up wickedly smart engineers, build on their mobile expertise, get a rapidly growing user base at a reasonable cost per user. The real answer (in my network-centric [...]
Networking Killed Kodak
I’m watching with both sadness and bemusement (perhaps the definition of schadenfreude) as Kodak limps toward bankruptcy. The company that gave us song titles (Kodachrome), vernacular (Kodak moment), iconic Olympics television ads, and made it possible for the consumer to chronicle his or her life is now about to end its own corporate lifetime. Disclaimers: [...]
Sandy, Steve, Scott and Succession
I had a rare, unexpected and completely random treat a few weeks ago – forty-five minutes of informal conversation with Sandy Weill sitting in an airport lounge. When the people at the Red Carpet Club denied Mr. Weill entry, I offered to host him as a guest, and was sharply reminded by the staff that [...]
Concall Blues: The Album
After another evening of later-night concalls, punctuated by the Bubba on lead guitar (with adequate doses of crunch, fuzz, wah and phase shifting), I mentioned in passing that blues guitar accompaniment makes conference calls that much smoother. His response: an all-blues album of songs about conference calls. Here’s my proposed track listing: 1. 65 minutes. [...]
Steve Jobs and Buzz Lightyear Changed My Life
Social media is lit up tonight from the warmth of words expressing sympathy, sorrow, and condolences over the death of Steve Jobs. Everyone has their story of how Jobs changed their life – in a chance meeting in the elevator, at a conference, through his insistence on insanely great product design. Steve Jobs indeed changed [...]
Do Facebook Lists Leak Personal Information?
Since Facebook introduced Lists a few days ago, I’ve had two people comment to me about actions I’ve taken adding them to pre-defined lists — actions that should have been completely and totally private. This makes me believe that the Facebook lists feature bleeds private information or actions. Background: Facebook will pre-define lists for you [...]