WordCamp NYC 2009 This Weekend
I’ll be heading to WordCamp NYC this weekend, which at present time already has 607 attendees registered!
It’s not too late to buy tickets, so if you are in the area, definitely check it out.
A few highlights include:
- 8 tracks of content, to cover every WordPress-lover’s area of interest/expertise*
- Over 50 confirmed speakers for Saturday’s sessions
- Sunday morning unconference
- Sunday afternoon “Best of WordCamp NYC” Ignite-style recap
- Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com
- Theme/Plugin Competition, Project Runway style
- Fantastic shirts
- Yummy lunch on Saturday
- Door prize raffle
- Genius Bar to help people with their WordPress woes (meet the Happiness Engineers in person!)
- Hacker Room for hardcore developers who want to contribute to the open source project
Should be a great event, and looking forward to seeing lots of familiar faces and a few news ones too.
If you are trying to get in touch with me to meet-up during the event, feel free to drop me a note here.
I’ve Got Hurt Feelings
I haven’t kept up with this show, but this is hysterical — from HBO: Flight of the Conchords:
WordPress.com: The Hero Is In Your Pocket
We had our company off-site last week, and we worked on a ton of really interesting projects that will be launching in the coming weeks.
The first project is now live, and it’s the launch of mobile themes on WordPress.com to specifically format the blogs for smart phones, and also for standard mobile phones. It works automatically to detect mobile visitors, and even pulls in a custom header to make the look & feel unique:
So if you have a mobile device handy, check out raanan.com on your mobile browser to see it in action.
After the Deadline Joins Automattic
After the Deadline, a service that would have saved me countless hours back in the day, is simply an incredible ( and adaptive ) contextual spelling and grammar checker. The service, run by Raphael Mudge, is now part of Automattic and we turned it on live today on WordPress.com. If you are running self-hosted WordPress, there is a plugin at WordPress.org that you should download.
Best way to describe this service is by watching this video and checking out this example of the NYT.
done
Mesudarim: Best TV Show You’ll Never See
I’m way behind, but I just got done catching up on season 2 of Mesudarim from the Israeli Channel 2 Keshet network. What an amazing show – with a great opening:
Mesudarim which roughly translates to “hooked up / set for life ” is a show that in many ways is similar to HBO’s Entourage, but centered around an Israeli tech company that has a “big exit”, and focuses on what-happens-next. Mesudarim is supper funny, really well written, and even has political and social commentary weaved in just a bit. To top it off, Jeff Pulver even had a camaeo as Steve Balmer in one of the last episodes of the 2nd season.
So why is it the “best TV show you’ll never seen” ? Simple, like all top Israeli shows, and really any top shows outside the US, the only way it seems to garner a larger international audience is by getting an option deal and getting remade in english, like “In Treatment” on HBO which is based on another popular Israeli show “BeTipul”.
While that model is fine, it amazes me that this tiny country puts out some of the best music, TV shows, and movies, but the content itself is often not seen or consumed by people outside of Israel. Mesudarim should be a big international hit at this point. A few simple suggestions to address this:
1) why not start with simple subtitles (maybe even crowd source with a tool like dotsub) and VOD options for those living outside of Israel ? I know there is a bit of a VOD service for this show, but my guess is that it’s hard to access for most english speakers. And a personal request, that Ouriel and I have been chatting about for 2 years – please make the site works in multiple browsers and platforms, not just Windows/IE.
2) Make all these shows available on iTunes – lots of people would pay for ad-free shows.
3) Build an app for Boxee for top shows
4) Build a Hulu for Israel. Between Eretz Nehedert, Polishook, etc (and all the realty shows) there is plenty of content to consume – and with subtitles I think it would find an audience.
So what do people think ? Any chance of this happening ?
Here is a promotional clip for season 2, and lots more clips on YouTube — can’t wait for season 3.
WordPress for iPhone App Development Update
Lots of activity on the WordPress for iPhone app lately as you can see from the timeline.
A ton of work has gone on behind the scenes to make the app faster and make it work with nearly any WordPress theme, something the current app struggles with when it doesn’t find the required XMLRPC/RSD info. In addition, the app is receiving a pretty big UI update, as you can see from this screenshot below that I took tonight running the latest version in trunk. Keep an eye on http://iphone.wordpress.org for more details soon:
Google Maps Adds a Raanan.com Feature Request
Well, I’m sure there were other compelling reasons too 
Google today rolled out an update to Google Maps that adds crowd sourced traffic congestion data:
When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.
Sound familiar ? In April 2007, I wrote about “Why I love in-car GPS, and how it can be made better“:
What we need, in my opinion, is an opt-in, open standard for sharing in-car/traffic information that any device and any opted-in person can tap into…
And as GPS is incorporated more and more into our mobile phone devices, that should give us a huge installed user base of in-car and mobile devices sharing information about traffic and other conditions. That would be infinitely better than participating in the manufacturers small group of users, and would dramatically increase the chances of having tons of good data on the highway you were looking to avoid b/c of traffic
What’s also really interesting to watch for me is how companies like TomTom, who now have a compelling iPhone app, will deal with Google Maps. My hunch is that they’ll incorporate Google Maps and their own navtech/maps database into some kind of hybrid best of both worlds model. They’ve done a bit of integration already with their TomTom on Google Maps.
DataSF.org
We (Automattic) hosted an event today with Mayor Gavin Newsom for the beta launch of DataSF.org.
Really smart initiative around providing public data to the citizens of San Francisco:
The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency
The Mayor, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O’Reilly all spoke about the need and benefit of Open Source and Open Data. I’m exited to help and see how this progresses.
Here is a quick pic from a few minutes ago:
Gavin Newsom, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O'Reilly at Automattic Lounge
Google Apps and Gmail Fix “On behalf Of” Issue
When I switched to Google apps for my personal email back in January 2008, my #1 wish list item was to:
* Fix the “on behalf of” issue. If you use multiple email addresses, gmail and google apps are easy to setup to receive those emails. But when you send out using those non gmail/google apps addresses, certain recipients – especially those using Outlook – will see a “on behalf of email@gmail.com” in the “From” field.
This past Thursday, Google announced that they had fixed this issue, by allowing you to send out from your domain’s smtp server, thus dropping the “on behalf of” portion.
This is good news
I’ve been using Mac Mail and Thunderbird for a while in conjunction with google apps, so after tweaking my settings, I decided to try a few days of just Google apps for all my email accounts. Here is what I learned:
The good:
- Love having just one single inbox
- The Archive button is even more useful for work emails since the volume of email for me is pretty insane on most days
The bad:
- The signature feature is pretty weak. You can’t set it per account, and you can’t have different versions. I did find this Firefox add-on, Black Canvas, that looks promising — but it doesn’t seem to work in google apps right now
- If you rely on the google built-in mail fetcher to retrieve email, you’ll be waiting 20-60 minutes for new email – which is a problem. The work around is to have your other accounts forward all you email to your main gmail or google apps account, that way it shows up instantly
- Address book issues. I haven’t sync’d my contacts with Google contacts yet, so finding an email address is a bit clunky. I have everything in my OS X address book sync’d nicely with my iPhone right now, so I haven’t gone down the Google contacts road yet — plus I’ve heard some stories of problems of late, so thinking I’ll wait a bit
- No Gravatar support, so i can’t see the avatar/photos of the people I’m emailing with. I tried my colleague Jon Fox’s greasemonkey script but it’s not working — could be again b/c I’m in google apps. Would be nice to see Google support the Gravatar service, and other avatar services, natively ( Google folks, feel free to contact me if you’d like to chat about this )
Wish List:
- While google apps email search rocks, I actually miss my desktop client search feature where as I type I see results. In general I think google could do a better job with search on email, such as having “did you mean” based on my index, and better snippet highlighting, as well as some kind of live results
- Native iPhone app. The safari/mobile web version is getting better, but you can’t top the speed of a native app right now
Search / Sync Tip:
If you’ve been using a desktop mail client via IMAP like Thunderbird for your other accounts, google apps/gmail won’t have any of your sent messages. I find that I’m often searching for emails that I’ve sent, so this was something I needed to address. What I’m testing right now is a way to copy my sent messages into google apps. I loaded up all my accounts and the google apps account via IMAP in Thunderbird, and then started copying my Sent Folder messages from my other accounts into my google apps sent-mail folder. So far it seems to be working, and syncing up nicely.
Conclusion:
Very promising so far. If I can get the signature issue sorted out I’d be happy and may switch to this setup for all email.
Testing:
I’m also testing out an interesting desktop/web hybrid app called Mailplane on my colleague Andy Peatling’s suggestion. Their tag line is “Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop”. I haven’t used it enough yet, but it integrates nicely with your OS X address book, growl for notifications, and in beta is gears/offline support as well as HTML signatures. Checkout their 2 minute video overview for a good summary.
The Perfect Home Office Chair
I’m in the market for a new home office chair. My 8 yr old Herman Miller Aeron chair is on loan, and my backup $50 chair is totally busted.
Anyone have any recommendations ? It needs to be useful for those regular 18 hour days
I’m a bit on a budget, but chairs are usually good for a few years so I don’t mind paying a bit extra. I also have a pretty big discount I can use on any Steelcase chair, so I’m looking at those more carefully.
