I’ve had the opportunity to talk about Gutenberg at two great venues recently. The first was at WordCamp Portland which graciously allowed me to join for a Q&A at the end of the event. The questions were great and covered a lot of the latest and greatest about Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0: Last week I […]
Category Archives: Asides
WP Dev on Chromebook
Dan Walmsley has an interesting walkthrough on getting set up for WordPress and Calypso development on the new Linux mode on a Chromebook.
Seth Godin on Customer Service
This morning I’m enjoying Seth Godin’s classic on Customer Service. Hat tip: Andrew Spittle.
Responsibility of Technology
There’s fascinating and terrifying feature article about Facebook, Duterte, and the drug war in the Philippines, written by Davey Alba. My first trip there was actually to Davao, and having been to the country several times and met so many bloggers there it’s hard to imagine what’s described. There are definitely echoes of the Wired […]
Gulf Coast Soul
Brett Martin has an excellent longread in GQ, Houston Is the New Capital Of Southern Cool. I moved to San Francisco when I was 20, I hadn’t ever even been old enough to drink in Houston, but when I returned in my late twenties and really made it my home I was blown away at […]
Distributed Office Politics
This week I spoke with TechCrunch about one facet of distributed work that differs from physical offices — the idea of “office politics.” I can’t claim that distributed work will solve everyone’s personal differences, but I do think it relieves some of the pressures that might come from forced cohabitation and environments that are prone […]
Light Heretofore Unknown
Yes, it is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall soon flow in inexhaustible streams the most abundant and most marvelous liquor that has ever flowed to relieve the thirst of man! [….] A spring of pure truth shall flow from it! Like a new star, it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, […]
My Recode Decode Interview with Kara Swisher
“We want to make the best tools in the world, and we want to do it for decades to come. I’ve been doing WordPress for 15 years, I want to do it the rest of my life.” The last time I chatted with Kara was in 2013 in the back of a pedicab in Austin. […]
Work and Play
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine […]
Mass Unsubscribe Mailchimp
I’m a huge fan of Mailchimp, but dang does the service get abused by folks aggressively opting you into mailing lists. I have a very early, very generic Gmail address that people put as a filler address into every possible service and it gets tens of thousands of list and spam mails. A good trick […]
Atavist & Automattic
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, and an interview about on the WP.com blog, Automattic has acquired the Atavist platform, magazine, and team. Looking forward to working alongside the team: we’re keeping the magazine going and it’ll complement Longreads, and integrating the best of the platform’s CMS and publisher features into WordPress.com and Jetpack […]
WordPress in Uber
I really love this thread and the replies sharing stories about Val Vesa’s experience talking about WordPress in an Uber / Lyft ride:
Link Roundup
The Atlantic on today’s masculinity being stifling and imagining a better boyhood. When Deportation is a Death Sentence is one of the most devastating articles I’ve read in a long time. A review of the Cy Twombly show, he has an amazing museum in Houston and I enjoy learning more about him. The Great Anthropologists: […]
Chinese Bikeshare Photos
I find myself frequently returning to this Atlantic photo essay on the Chinese bike share companies flooding the streets with bikes. It’s strangely beautiful.
Rent-A-Family in Japan
Elif Batuman, who was recently a Pulitzer finalist for her novel The Idiot, has a stunning story in the New Yorker on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, “People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.” You think from the title it’s […]
Abstract Aluminum
You probably haven’t thought much about beer cans, Abstract Aluminum Space, the Midwest Premium, and how it all ties into Goldman Sachs, so you should read how the Goldman Sachs aluminum conspiracy lawsuit is over.
Russell’s Treadmill
From Bertrand Russell’s A Conquest of Happiness. It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take […]
Don’t Like Change
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. General Eric Shinseki I actually heard this on the Farnam Street podcast with Patriots coach Michael Lombardi, but it seems like General Shinseki said it first so attributing it there.
Back to Blogging
I really enjoyed Tom Critchlow's post Small b blogging.
Commuting Time Saved
On Automattic's internal BuddyPress-powered company directory, we allow people to fill out a field saying how far their previous daily commute was. 509 people have filled that out so far, and they are saving 12,324 kilometers of travel every work day. Wow!