Rantings and Ravings

I'm a 30 year old internet junkie with a penchant for indie rock, and all things technology. I'm currently brandishing an iPhone and a smart ass remark or two. Wanna play?
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“

”

I’m so angry right now. Angry at the fact that people take advantage of good human beings by default, angry at the audacity, angry at the constant need to get one over on people who want nothing more than to be cared about.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but my heart is sad for those people. Those lonely souls who destroy lives with their lies and wreck havok on innocent hearts.
Sometimes, this world is too cold, too brash, too deluded and too cynical.

I hope to change at least some of that.

To play the part of God
We recruited Christian Slater
Because he was available
And for the part of Mary
We chose you
Because of your vindictive wit
It wasn’t very long before we figured out that
You weren’t playing that part
As much as hating the way we made you feel
And you tied your tongue to your teeth
Breathed fire and fuel
Lit mouth and yellow flame
And we wished we’d never met you
But instead talked about your charisma

typewriterblues: Email Me Formspring This is easily my favorite tumblog. Thank you, Mr. Shaw.

typewriterblues:

Email Me

Formspring

This is easily my favorite tumblog. Thank you, Mr. Shaw.

“ To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, ”

Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1


During the Automattic company meetup, Team 21* holed up in a cottage outside Québec to create a new set of features for a blog near you (literally!). Have you ever wondered where in the world a blog post was written? Where a commenter was located? If there were other WordPress.com bloggers near you? If so, hold on to your hat, because you’re going to love the geotagging and geolocation features we’re introducing.

Starting today, when you log in to write a post, you have the option of…


WordCampNYC shirt

This weekend, November 14-15, a whole bunch of the friendly faces from Automattic and WordPress.com will be in New York City to attend WordCamp NYC. If you’re a NYC area local (and really, with Acela service being what it is, doesn’t that almost mean anywhere from Boston to D.C.?), we hope you’ll join us at what’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting WordCamps of all time.

(Okay, I’m one of the organizers, so of course *I* think it will be awesome, but in this…


FirefoxNovember 9th 2009 is Firefox’s fifth birthday. Firefox and WordPress have grown up next to each other so we’ve always felt a brethren spirit with their team as we work toward the same goal, making the web a better place, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Just out of curiosity, I wondered how Firefox was doing in our browser stats compared to the posts I did in 2008 and 2007.

  1. Firefox — 45.7%
  2. Internet Explorer — 38.7%
  3. Safari — 8.75%
  4. Chrome — 5.2%

This is the first time…


Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.

Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.

An…


October was another busy and productive month. We released Publicize for Yahoo! Updates and Twitter, and upgraded the Theme Viewer for WordPress.com. Coming out of the Automattic team meetup in Québec City, we launched new image templates and mobile themes, and open sourced our After the Deadline proofreader. We also shipped WordPress 2 for iPhone and added support to VideoPress for Ogg, an open video format.

Many of us will be heading out to the Big Apple this month…


When we announced After the Deadline, the proofreading tool used on WordPress.com, many of you asked us to add proofreading to the HTML Editor.

The HTML Editor lets you edit the HTML in your posts and pages directly. It is also very lightweight.

We’ve been hard at work and now you can check your spelling, style, and grammar from the HTML Editor. Here is a screenshot:

AtD checks spelling, style, and grammar in the HTML Editor too

The proofreader for the HTML Editor has the same features as the one for the Visual Editor.

Click proofread to…


Last week you had fun with the WordPress logo. We received nearly 100 entries and many of you have been patiently waiting for news. You don’t have to wait any longer. Here are our favorites split into 5 categories. Cast your votes to pick the final winners. Voting will close on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 12pm EST. Click an image to see the large version displayed in the user’s blog post.

Brownie Bites

Brownie Bites

Needle Cushion

Needle Cushion


As strong believers in open source technology, we were excited when Firefox started supporting the new HTML video tag this past summer. It has the potential to transform the future of online video.

While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video…


As technology advances, mobile devices are playing a bigger role in our lives. Thousands of you have been using the iPhone and Blackberry applications to post and edit content for your blog, and over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices. New smartphones do a great job with most web sites, but older phones have many problems and may not display anything at all.

Today we’re launching a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be…


Our team loves photography and we hope you do too. While taking countless photos in Quebec, we thought it would be an appropriate time to update the image templates for all of the WordPress.com themes.

If you are using galleries or inserting one image at a time into your posts, you can take advantage of the updated image templates. Make sure to click the Post URL button in the Link URL area when inserting your images or configuring a gallery. When you do this, the images will then…


We dig Twitter over here at WordPress.com (check us out at @wordpressdotcom). With the launch of our newest Publicize feature, we dig it even more since you can now tweet your WordPress.com posts automatically.

Publicize - Twitter

You can stick with the default, automatically generated tweet, or customize it to your heart’s content.

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you…

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