Jul
18
5

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scatted light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be disolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

From A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.   ∞

1

The Karma of Bug Killing. “We’re all pretty quick with the fly swatter and the folded newspapers.”   ∞

Jul
11
7

Fifty Million

Filed under: WordPress

As noted on TNW and Adweek, yesterday we passed over 50,000,000 websites, blogs, portfolios, stores, pet projects, and of course cat websites powered by WordPress. I had the good fortune to celebrate this milestone with a few hundred WordPressers at WordCamp Montreal yesterday. (During my Town Hall I wasn’t aware we had passed the number until someone shouted from the audience.) It’s always fun to pass a big round number and over the weekend many libations were consumed with friends old and new, but ultimately the press has always been more concerned with those top-line numbers than we have in the WordPress community. More sites being created is a good benchmark for our adoption, but ultimately WordPress matters not for the blogs it creates but for the lives it affects. We have some huge opportunities this year, particularly around making our software more accessible to the next 50 or 500 million people who want to have a voice online, something I hope to talk more about at WordCamp San Francisco next month.

Jun
25
0

The Robustness Principle Reconsidered in the most recent ACM Queue. Hat tip: Mark Pilgrim.   ∞

18

Here’s an update on WordPress woes in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. As far as I know we’ve had no contact with KazakhTelecom. Typically this happens when they don’t like something a blog is saying, so they block or degrade service for everybody. The footer of the site links to Global Voices Anonymous Blogging with WordPress and Tor guide, which is still excellent all these years later.   ∞

0

Mark Jaquith writes WordPress local dev tips: DB & plugins.   ∞

Jun
22
3

ExpanDrive, a program I’ve used for years, allows you to mount FTP, SFTP, or S3 accounts as local drives on your computer on Mac or Windows. They just released their new Windows version, and it’s fast and slick. They support key authentication, which is my must-have feature.   ∞