Drew Strojny tells his story of his journey from professional football player to small business owner to full-time WordPress theme developer, all in three years. (And GPL, natch.) ∞
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Drew Strojny tells his story of his journey from professional football player to small business owner to full-time WordPress theme developer, all in three years. (And GPL, natch.) ∞
The voice feature is now live on WordPress.com, using Twilio and implemented by Nick. Check it out: Phone Your Blog. ∞
While walking home at the jazz festival earlier we stumbled across a hip-hop show by a female artist named Dessa who has a new CD out called A Badly Broken Code. It’s not often you see hip-hop at a jazz festival, and it was an excellent show. Also, her blog is WordPress-powered! ∞
Filed under: Quote
Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis:
Most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.
- If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work.
- If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige.
- If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.
Hat tip: Derek Sivers books page.
JP Mangalindan interviews Jeff Bezos for Fortune. (WP.com-hosted article.) ∞
WordPress is NOT Just for Blogs says Bronson Quick. ∞
Filed under: Meta
As has become the tradition around here, today I’m launching a new design to celebrate the new year. (See also 2006, 2008, 2009.)
As you can tell, it is very inspired by the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, an idea that came to me while visiting the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. last year, and again at SFMOMA in November. The idea was beautifully executed by designer Nicolò Volpato (who has now done 3 of the past 4 designs for Ma.tt) and coded up by Otto.
The header is a lot smaller, the graphics should load much faster since they’re simpler, and there have also been a few tweaks throughout the site to make it feel a bit speedier. Instead of image hacks like I’ve used in my past few designs I’m now using Typekit for pretty much everything, which feels nice.
Please take a look around, stroll through some of the recent photo albums, and generally make yourself at home. Let me know what you think in the comments. On to the next one…
Overcome Writer’s Block With Plinky Prompts — Automattic has bought Plinky and is promoting it from WordPress.com. See also: Thing Labs (makers of Plinky and Brizzly), TechCrunch, The Next Web. ∞
WordPress 3.0, released last Thursday, has already passed one million downloads. 
∞
I never expected I would leave San Francisco and experience a quake in Montreal. It was pretty slight here, but I definitely noticed something. ∞
Brad Burnham did a cool post on Web Services as Governments which I mostly agree with. In my talks I often refer to the GPL as software’s Bill of Rights. If you think of web services as governments, the need for a Bill of Rights fits right in. ∞
Filed under: Humor
So this morning I started got a SMS from a number I didn’t recognize and the conversation that ensued was interesting:
Spent a hour or two tonight trying to get Ubuntu running on my laptop, unfortunately I ran into all the problems described here. The blank-screen experience was a little overly minimalist even for me. Tomorrow I’ll try going full-screen with VirtualBox, like some people in that thread had luck with, as a baby step to a full Linux switch. ∞
Filed under: Essays
When planning and designing Twenty Ten, the new default theme in WordPress 3.0, we knew that the header would be a really prominent feature, a focal point, and wanted some good defaults to excite people about the theme. Some of the most popular themes on WP.com like Misty Look, Chaotic Soul, Ocean Mist, and Cutline all feature prominent photo headers.
It can be a pain to find appropriately licensed imagery for Open Source projects, so I asked MT to explore a bit from the random photos page on Ma.tt and see what he could find. Here are each of the images he chose, in header form and linked to the original, with the location and story behind each photo.
In December 2005 Automattic had just gotten started and I planned a Europe trip to raise awareness and also meet some of the community there. It started with Les Blogs in Paris, then to London where I met Mike Little (co-founder of WordPress), Mark Riley (then known as Podz), and Khaled for at a WP meetup. Finally I went to Ireland, specifically Blarney, where I met the first employee of Automattic Donncha O Caoimh in person and learned how to pronounce his name. We went on a photowalk together and I caught this lonely figure walking up a private road to Blarney Castle.
When I was in Houston last week I visited the Houston Chonicle for a chat with Purva Patel which ran in yesterday’s paper. Yes, I am wearing a Drupal sticker in that photo. ∞
The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks. This story gets even more interesting. ∞
The WP Dev blog got a ton of traffic today because of the 3.0 release announcement. Here are the top referrers: WordPress Dashboard, Twitter, Slashdot (huh?), Digg, news.ycombinator, Lifehacker, Google Reader, Reddit. So far today Slashdot is ahead of Twitter. Didn’t realize they were even still around! They’ve got staying power. ∞
Marion Maneker at Slate’s site The Big Money chatted with Toni and I the other week, which turned into this article: The Son of Gutenberg. Not a bad overview “Mullenweg says, with the tone of an idealistic 26-year-old.” I hope people still write that when I’m 36. ∞
Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, a pretty fascinating read. I think the main subject of the article, Kord Campbell, is the same guy who used to run a photo sharing startup I thought about working at 6 or 7 years ago. ∞
As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to Montreal for about a month and a half, maybe two months. I posted to my moblog about packing and Hanni asked what the final manifest would look like. Here is a breakdown of everything I’m taking for the 1.5-2 month trip, which is about 4x what I normally travel with. ∞