Some friends have asked if WordPress and Automattic will be participating in the Open Web Foundation. It does look like a brilliant initiative, but as far as I know we weren’t invited. That’s really unfortunate, because I don’t think there could have been a greater gesture of co-operation in the blogging industry than David Recordon of Six Apart inviting us to be founding members.
Don’t worry, it won’t stop us doing everything we can to support the open web.
WordCamp San Francisco is less than a month away. This year it’s one day, Saturday, August 16 at the Mission Bay Conference Center.
I’m putting together a genius bar for people to be able to have their questions answered one-on-one for WordCamp. Are you able to volunteer your WordPress expertise? You don’t even have to be physically there, but then no brisket for you.
Do you have a question you hope to have answered at WordCamp SF?
If you get “Error establishing a database connection” when trying to set up WordPress.org on your Mac, are sure that the database name (DB_NAME), username (DB_USER) and password (DB_PASSWORD) are correct, the solution is very likely that you need to set mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock in /etc/php.ini.
I’ve been looking for sources for (consumer) technology news with a Canadian perspective. Not rivers of news, but filtered streams of information. My in-laws put aside the July/August 2008 issue of Backbone magazine for me. Backbone is delivered with the National Post. It’s quite good and all of their articles are also online.
An article about my friend Joshua McKenty’s BountyUp is in today’s Times Colonist.
Bounty Up is a service to collect online donations for a project, like the wildly successful MyFreeImplants.com, but for the rest of us — I wish I was kiddin’ about that site’s success. The tagline on BountyUp is “Ask for what you want, let the crowd pay for it.” Like the tagline, I’m being tongue in cheek, BountyUp has actually been used for a lot of wonderful projects.
It’s awesome to see an article about BountyUp’s service in the Times Colonist. The TC is Vancouver Island’s only widely distributed paper and is owned by CanWest Global Communications.
Read, read, read
Filter, filter, filter
Focus, focus, focus
Do, do, do
Measure, measure, measure
Refine, refine, refine
Only Apple can get away with not telling you how much you actually paid:
The “Order Acknowledgment” email you receive later includes the taxes paid. Not a big deal when purchasing an “APPLE WIRELESS KEYBOARD-USA”, but I would think it would be annoying if you were purchasing a laptop or another big item.
Last night the team pushed the button releasing WordPress 2.6 onto the world. This is a nice polishing release (”stronger better faster”) with a surprising number of features. The features I expect to continue to take the most advantage of are Google Gears, image captions, and plugin update notification. This is a special release for me, because I had very little to do with it 
Rannie Turingan created this beautiful video slide show of 20 couples on twenty couches. He is an incredible Canadian photographer, who I previously heard about through mutual friends across the border in San Francisco.
Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
Testing Open Source