A short hike up to Cecret Lake and along Sugarloaf peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon near Alta, UT. The Wasatch Mountains are a great place to be outdoors. Guest photographer: Sheri Bigelow.
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Sync took a different tack, and started off with “what if we didn’t want the data? What if even having that data was a failure state?” That led us to cryptography. Sync uses strong crypto to encode your data before it is uploaded. The secret phrase is the key to this encryption, and we never send that anywhere to keep your data secure. This really means that Mozilla can’t see your data, giving you full control. (Which is great, because we really don’t want it!)
As I announced today at WordCamp Savannah, I’m releasing two of my old designs as themes for any WordPress blog. (See slides here.) If you’re one of the thousands of people who’ve asked me how I do my galleries here on this site, now you can look at the actual code in the Matala theme. (The talavera-looking design by Nicolò Volpato.) The second theme, Mazeld, is actually the last from-scratch original design I did here on Ma.tt (then photomatt.net) and is built as a 2010 child theme. Both themes are listed in the WordPress.org theme directory and available for download. This is just the first iteration, so expect some updates within the next few months as we iterate on the code and functionality.
Adobe partners with Typekit to bring legendary typefaces to the web — pretty killer. (I’m an angel investor in Typekit.)
Exploring Lisbon and Estoril with Automattic’s Happiness team, who had been having a meetup there.
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I was on the WordPress Podcast a few weeks ago and they just posted the first segment. Always fun talking to Joost and Frederick!
Filed under: Switchers
The biggest after-effect of the Thesis license violation episode seems to be raising people’s awareness of alternatives that are both fully GPL and have better functionally too. One theme that seems to be picking up a ton of new users is Genesis. We helped Laughing Squid and Paul Stamatiou make the switch, but Chris Brogan joined the party completely independently. (All formerly in the Thesis showcase. Scobleizer switched a while back.) I’m excited about this because I think Genesis is a better theme, particularly for its advanced support of WordPress functionality like child themes. (Child themes are the only way you should build your site on top of a framework.)
Even though Thesis has done the bare minimum not to be sued for its license violation and the code it copy/pasted from WordPress, lots of folks including myself still have a bad taste in their mouths from the episode, since there was no apology or contrition shown (like a donation to the WordPress Foundation, which would be a drop in the bucket compared to the millions Thesis made while breaking the GPL). But I think it’s best to focus on the positive.
There is a linkbait from a Thesis affiliate going around asking if I favor certain commercial themes — absolutely yes! Is that a controversial question? Themes WordPress lists on its commercial page go above and beyond bare compliance with the GPL and are full members of the community, sometimes even becoming active in core development like WooThemes has done. As a business, I would feel a lot more comfortable building my online presence on a real enterprise like Woo, StudioPress, iThemes, and many more rather than a one-man-against-the-world operation, regardless of how good its marketing is, or how many affiliates it has.
For Automattic’s part, our theme team has been taking the opportunity to update our blogs stuck on Cutline and Pressrow, which were abandoned by Chris years ago and don’t support any of WordPress’s new features. The first iteration of this is Coraline which is aesthetically is similar to Cutline but under the hood is way better, with multiple layout and sidebar options, color schemes, custom background, per-post custom headers, gallery and asides support, and a few other bonuses. (Unfortunately, the switch had a bug that broke widgets for some sites, but that’s being fixed. We’ll avoid that when switching Pressrow.) A lot of this was kicked off before DIYThemes dodged litigation, but it’s important to continue because we’re building better themes for users who honestly shouldn’t worry about this stuff, they should just have theme that’s current, flexible, functional, and beautiful.
People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
Paul Graham’s The Acceleration of Addictiveness.
The ability to access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser is my favorite feature that Google has added in a long time, even though I don’t use Gmail. I have some accounts I basically use for archival and search that I always end up having to open a different browser to access. Unfortunately, this feature breaks the already-fragile GV Mobile on my jailbroken iPhone 4. The two things I miss from Android are Google Voice integration, and the Navigation feature.
WordCamp Houston at the Museum of Natural Science, after-party at Caroline Collective, after-after-party at Christine Tremoulet’s studio, after-after-after-party at Spanish Flowers.
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