There are a few things about this walk to make it notable:

1. I got up from my desk at 11:35pm and headed out for a brisk walk, mainly so that I could try to get over 6,000 steps today.
2. I measured my steps using a Fitbit, and had the specific target because it’s part of an internal fitness challenge Automattic is hosting through Keas.
3. I took the chance to compare Fitbit to RunKeeper for measuring walking (mainly looking at distance accuracy, but also at calorie burn).
4. A guy (probably high) most definitely lined me up to attempt to mug me, he even tried to walk with me/talk/engage to distract me and get me to stop, but I out-walked him and he kind of gave up.

So; fun stuff all around. Here’s the data, from RunKeeper:

and for the same time period from Fitbit:

What’s interesting here?

• FB reports that I burned 163 over RK’s 126; that’s a 23% difference.
• FB reports that I covered 1.22 miles, while RK reports only 0.76 miles. Almost 40% difference.
• Pace is barely even worth comparing when distance is so differently recorded. Time even shows as 40 seconds different, although I’ll give FB the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s rounding.
• You can actually see the part where the guy approached me, because I sped up. If you look at the map from RK, it was on Larkin St, between Broadway and Pacific. He tried to “walk with me” so that he could get me to stop, but instead I just walked faster. I topped out right there at 14.4 minutes per mile according to RK (just over 4 miles per hour).
• If I hadn’t been trying to meet a daily fitness goal, I wouldn’t have been walking around at midnight, making myself a target for getting mugged

Maybe I should run instead of walking, since high/homeless/whatever people are even less likely to give chase?

window.open('', '_self', '');
window.close();

Basically it reopens the window on itself, then immediately closes itself. Neat. Haven’t had any problems with it not working in other browsers, but I also haven’t super-widely tested it.

Quite a while ago (like, in at least 2009), I started thinking about regaining control of all the content I was producing online. I was posting photos to Flickr, saving bookmarks to Delicious. I started Tweeting. I was checking in. All fun and games, and all of those services offer great tools for interacting with them (let’s face it, tools that are much better than WordPress’, because they are focussed on one thing). So I figured, why not write importers for these services and pull my content back over to my WordPress. And keep doing it periodically, so that I could keep using those tools. I want WordPress to be my “home on the web”, my digital hub, but I want to use these neat tools with their fancy apps and what-have-you.

Very quickly, I realized that if I was going to do anything useful on most web services, I’d need to be able to authenticate with them. No biggie, right? I know my username and password… Oh. Right. OAuth. Turns out that most web services use OAuth (or something similar) to authenticate, and it turns out that that’s actually a bit of a bear to implement, when all you want to do is write a simple little Twitter importer. And then again for a Foursquare importer. And a Flickr importer.

What I needed was a shared, generic authentication framework that would do all the heavy lifting for me. I would tell it I wanted a connection to specific service, and if it didn’t have one, it’d walk the user through the process of getting one. It’d give me a standardized format of authentication credentials and abstract out all the complexity of making authenticated requests against those services. Then it would make me a coffee*. What I needed, was Keyring.

And so Keyring was born. Basically it’s a bunch of code that’ll handle external authentication with a web service so you don’t have to. It’ll store tokens/passwords/whatever, can talk to all kinds of different services, and is really, really extendable. It also has hooks. Lots of them. So if you want to do something custom, you probably can. It’s intended to be a foundation for writing other plugins, and really doesn’t do much interesting on its own.

I already have importers written for Twitter, Delicious and Foursquare which are based on Keyring and so far they’re working pretty nicely. There’s a lot of work to go on this project though. For Keyring to be a truly powerful framework, I need to:

• Drastically improve the UI, which is a hodge-podge of hideousness at the moment
• Improve a few parts of the Core UX which are pretty clunky right now
• Put in some more failsafes/helpers for making sure things are up and running before allowing plugins to use Keyring
• Improve internal security
• Tighten up Permissions/Roles restrictions all over the place
• Handle multi-user blogs (especially around token storage)
• Work on Multi-Site
• Support more services (preferences? suggestions?)
• Figure out a good way of allowing people to drop in their own Service extensions (and not overwrite them with updates)
• Improve the handling of auth flows in other plugins, and preferably move as much of that logic as possible into Keyring Core

I’m slowly working on this, but it’s all kind of a personal project at this point, so it’s just a few hours here and there. My main goal is to get it functioning so that I can get my content back. Once that’s done, then I’ll spend more time tightening it up for other/platform use. I also have a couple of other “companion plugins” that I’m working on — auto-linking text for Twitter @mentions and #hashtags, mining posts and downloading remote media (e.g. Instagram images) and some stuff around geo for mapping things like Tweets and Foursquare checkins (all the geo-data is imported in the importers I wrote).

Next on the list is abstracting and then releasing the importers that I have. That will give people something more tangible to use as an example. After that I’ll be working on a Flickr importer, but that’s a pretty big project in and of itself.

So, what do you think? Useful? Waste of time? Massive, gaping, horrendous holes? LMK (in the comments) and we’ll see what we can do.

And you know the drill — patches welcome

* Sadly, Keyring will not make you coffee. Yet.

• A WordPress installation, with a group of people who all have accounts
• A small Mac/Windows app that lived on your desktop/menu-bar/somewhere easy to get at. Let’s call it… Guppy.
• All users download a copy of Guppy and configure it to point to the same WordPress install.
• Guppy now sits on their computer, waiting for them to interact with it.
• When they drop files on this copy of Guppy, it does some magic
  • Images will be uploaded and inserted into a Post, or set as a gallery (if there’s more than one),
  • Text files will be uploaded and rendered as pre-formatted text,
  • Other will be uploaded and attached to a Post,
• Double-clicking/clicking Guppy would open a small window where they could type in some text (and perhaps also drop files into that window and have them appear as “objects” within their text)
• Right-clicking Guppy would allow you to change options, jump to the configured website (like you didn’t already have it open in a browser tab!), create a new instance of Guppy, maybe some other stuff.
• All of this content is published as Posts on the connected WordPress install, and is automatically formatted beautifully (perhaps via an optional theme that’s geared heavily towards collaboration?). Comments are enabled, so you can discuss things on that site, right there while you’re looking at it.

In essence this is just a streamlined, simplified, beautiful WordPress client. There is nothing stopping someone from creating this today. There you go internet, 1 more free idea.

Today I had my first check-in (from home), and it was fun. It also felt good to know that I was helping the city keep track an emergency system that might save lives at some point. I checked in via the repeater at 443.100+ tone 114.8 and had a bit of interference, but it was clear enough for the net control to hear/understand me after a clarification. ”KJ6LFV, back to net control”

Most of my work for Automattic is done on a remote sandbox machine, somewhere in Texas. I’ll often jump in and make smaller edits over SSH via vi, but when I’m doing something bigger I much prefer to work locally, using TextMate (I’m on a Mac, obviously). To do that, I need to be able to access files as if they were local, which means either duplicating them to my machine (lame, annoying) or mounting them directly.

I’ve been doing that via one of the following options, and I’m wondering if anyone out there has a better solution.

• Mount locally using Transmit 4, via SFTP or
• Mount locally using Macfusion (which uses MacFUSE), via SSH

I’ve tried both for a while now. They both work. Except for when they don’t. Here’s what I’d found:

• Transmit seems more responsive, when it’s working
• Macfusion often crashes Finder the first time I access a newly connected filesystem (and is then reasonably stable)
• Transmit much more randomly just stops working and gives no indication, I just can’t browse any more and have to disconnect/reconnect
• Macfusion allows you to easily customize a neat icon for each filesystem
• Transmit seems to have more aggressive caching (or a longer TTL on it) of filesystem details (part of what makes it feel more responsive)

So, have you used one of the following methods? Is there a configuration option I’m missing? How do you go about solving this problem?

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I need to be able to do this over the open internet (securely), where I’m not connected directly to the same network as the server.

If there’s one thing that travel has done for me lately, it’s made me recognize and accept how addicted and reliant I am upon my smart phone (in my case, an iPhone).

When you travel (internationally), you have to make a hard choice — do I shell out big $$$ to AT&T to get an international data plan, do I shell out even bigger $$$ to use roaming data, or do I sever the umbilical and disable roaming data. Roll the dice on being able to get wifi. Or worse yet — don’t use the internet at all. Gasp.

Traveling with others, I get this feeling that some people who don’t get an international plan are hopping from connectivity bubble to connectivity bubble, holding their breath in between and hoping they make it to the next one alive. There’s a sense of relief when they can get back online. Check Twitter. Check email. Check in. Check a map. OK, now hold your breath and hope we can find somewhere else with wifi before it’s too late!

I’ve found myself more and more often opting to not get any data access at all, and to actually relish the experience of not having connectivity for the most part. When I was in Chile, it was rough at first, not having access to maps, Google, etc. But I got used to it. It was like taking a step back in time. I talked to people. I used a paper map. It wasn’t so bad. It turns out that not having connectivity to the world wide web forces you to live in… the world right in front of you.

That’s not a bad thing. Try it.

A while back, I got a Wakemate and was pretty gung-ho about it being a great device for monitoring your sleep and helping you feel a bit more refreshed when you wake up. I recently picked up a Fitbit as well, so as a bit of fun, I thought I’d compare the 2 devices for sleep monitoring and write up a bit of a review. Here we go.

Getting Started

Once you’ve got yourself a Wakemate ($59.99) and a Fitbit ($99.95), you’re ready to get started. There isn’t much initial setup with the Wakemate, since it just interacts with your phone. You have to pair it like any other device but that’s about it. For the Fitbit, you’ll need to actually install an app on your computer (I did it on a Mac, running OS X Lion). The app that is installed handles syncing your data when you’re in range, or when you plug the device in to recharge.

Sleep “Session” Handling

I prefer the way that you use the Fitbit for tracking sleep. It has some intelligence built into it so that when you record an “activity” overnight, it takes that as your sleep. To do that, you just hold down the (single) button on the device for 2 seconds. When you wake up, you need to hold the button down to stop your “activity” again, which I sometimes forget to do.

With the Wakemate, I need to load the app on my iPhone, make sure Bluetooth is on (sometimes I turn it off to save battery), turn on the wristband (I constantly have to turn it off because the battery life doesn’t seem very good), make sure it’s connected, then hit the button to start a sleep session (and make sure it initiates properly, because I’ve had problems with that as well. Once your alarm goes off, you need to wake up enough to enter your code to unlock your phone, then hit the “I’m Awake” button. Sometimes this can be tough if you’re half asleep

Between the two devices, I think Fitbit wins here for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s really easy (push button on, push button off)
2. No additional devices involved (doesn’t require interaction with my phone)
3. The wristband is more comfortable

Sleep Data

Both devices give you a website where you can review your data. Both devices also now have native iPhone applications which include access to your data (current and historical). The Fitbit app is a lot more full-featured, but that’s because Fitbit in general is targeting a lot more than just sleep. Here is a side-by-side comparison of data collected from each device, on the same night, wearing them on the same arm:

Wakemate Data

Fitbit Data

Features/Functionality

A big point to note here is that the 2 devices are fundamentally intended for different purposes, they just happen to cross over a certain amount. The Fitbit fundamentally measures steps (through motion) and will give you a distance and calorie approximation as well. The design of the device allows you to clip it just about anywhere on your both or clothes. The Wakemate tracks your sleep through the same mechanism, but does not give any measurement other than “movement” while sleeping. Since it is a wristband, your options on how to wear it are pretty limited. The Fitbit also allows you to view your current (for today) data right on the device (via an integrated OLED display) which is  a really nice touch. Being able to check how many steps I’ve done in a day is a great motivator to get up and do some more.

Verdict

Overall, I think the Fitbit is a better purchase, even though it’s nearly twice as much. Since it is a more general-purpose device, and since you will be more likely to wear it all the time, you’ll end up with a lot more, valuable information. With a longer battery life, simpler daily use and a more refined appearance in general, it’s just a better product.

Now that I’ve tried these, I’m really curious to see what the Jawbone UP is like…

I’ll be at WordCamp Orange County, presenting a session on plugin development, specifically looking at some of the more advanced things we did in Jetpack. It will be fun — you should go.

Jetpack is a new plugin that delivers a bunch of popular features from WordPress.com (the hosted site, which Automattic runs) to self-hosted installs of WordPress (such as the one that runs Dented Reality). Once you install Jetpack, you get some of the cooler things available on WordPress.com, automatically enabled on your own WordPress site. The modules you get today are just the beginning though, there are a lot more planned for future releases. We’re going to be targeting some of the biggest features that are easier for us to do on our massive grid/cloud infrastructure, but harder for folks to do on their own shared-hosting accounts.

We also managed to partner with a bunch of leading web hosts, so if you’re doing a one-click install on Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, or Network Solutions, you’ll get Jetpack as part of your install. This is huge for people installing their own WordPress.

This has been the coolest thing I’ve worked on at Automattic so far, and it’s been awesome to be involved in a project that has seen so many contributions internally (over 40 people were involved in everything from UX to design to internationalization to testing and debugging) and so many iterations since its inception. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, and hope that it sets a new bar for the design of WordPress plugins (I really think Jetpack is beautiful, amazing work Joen, Hugo and MT!).

So – check out Jetpack if you’re running WordPress on your own server, and let us know what you think!

Which features would you most like to see in Jetpack? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do

PS: This post proudly proof-read by After The Deadline, as delivered via Jetpack

Since I’m mostly using them on an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I have 2 extra requirements on my earphones (in addition to sound quality etc).

1. Full remote (Play/Pause, fast forward etc)
2. Inline microphone for hands free use on the phone (and for Voice Control)

Recently, my Klipsch earbuds suffered the wrath of the TSA when they were munched in the rollers of an x-ray machine. Time for new headphones. I ended up ordering a set of ZAGG Smartbuds. At literally half the price of my Klipsch, I didn’t know what to expect, but have been so far pleasantly surprised:

• Interesting design — hang down from behind neck so you can easily take out one or the other (I normally only have 1 in at a time around the city) without them dangling all over the place.
• InvisibleSHIELD on the cables makes them less prone to tangling and apparently pretty tough.
• Microphone seems to be pretty good on calls.
• I like the right-angle/low profile plug.
• Sound quality is great (I’m no pro, but it sounds good to me and I listen to all sorts of bass/highs etc).
• I’m using the foam-style buds and they are really good at blocking out background noise if you put them in properly. Even on a plane they’re solid.
• They look pretty cool (as far as ear buds go).

But it’s not all rainbows and puppy-dogs — there are a few things which continue to bug me about these buds after a few weeks of heavy use:

• Separate volume/remote units on the cables feels overdone.
• 2 adjustment beads between volume and remote seems like overkill.
• The adjustment beads need rubber lining or something to prevent them from moving around. If I put them in a position, I don’t want them to just jiggle their way down the cable 5 minutes later.
• The volume control SUCKS. Seriously. It’s one of those generic slider/resistor type ones that will work on all audio sources. I’d rather just pay an extra $10 or something and get real up/down buttons that talk to my iPhone.
• Lots of cable to juggle (since there is “double” cable for a lot of the length, so it can do the around-the-neck thing).

Despite these niggles, I’m enjoying these buds and will continue to use them. I might end up just sticking something in the beads to prevent them moving around, and the volume control is I guess survivable (but annoying).

Table Prefixes

Did you know that WordPress supports to use of a different table prefix for each installation? You may not really have noticed but it’s even an option in the wizard-style installer if you don’t manually configure your wp-config.php file during setup. This means that you can modify the names of the tables used for a specific installation of WordPress to avoid clashing with other tables that may already exist within your database. It also means that you can easily run multiple copies of WordPress from a single database by using a different table prefix on each install. I just use a different prefix for each major version of WordPress (wp28_, wp29_, wp30_) and then I can install them all in a single database and have easy access to everything.

For the sake of my own sanity, I opted to install WPMU in different databases (named according to the version I was installing) since it creates lots of tables.

Multiple Installs

Apart from the table prefixes trick, I like to use the version of the install as the name of the blog (“WordPress 2.9″) so that I always know what I’m looking at. I’ll set all of the admin accounts to the same details, and then import the same set of test content (via a WordPress Export/Import). That gives me a consistent environment to work from.

Symlinks

So now you have a bunch of different installations of WordPress, all using the same database (although different tables). You need to get your code in place so that you can test it on each version. One option would be to put a copy of your plugin in each wp-content/plugins directory, but then that quickly gets out of control if you make changes to any of them while you’re debugging/developing. A better option is to put your code in one place, then symlink it into location in all of your installs. I use something like this:

ln -ns ../../../dev/pluginname pluginname

(executed from within the wp-content/plugins directory of each install, and assuming a directory called dev/pluginname containing the plugin, at the same top level as all of your installations). This links wp-content/plugins/pluginname from each install back to the same set of code, and allows you to modify it in any of them and have that change be reflected in them all.

Capability Checks

Rather than checking for a specific version of WordPress (which is actually easy to do), I usually prefer to test for specific functionality. For example, to see if you can use the WP_Http() API (introduced back in WP 2.7), you could do something like this:

if ( function_exists( 'wp_remote_get' ) ) {
    // Can use WP_Http()
}

If you really want to check for a version of WordPress, then you probably want something like this (note that the $wpmu_version check in this case is to make sure we’re NOT using WPMU). You might need to declare it as global if you’re doing this within a function:

if ( version_compare( get_bloginfo( 'version' ), '2.7', '<' ) && empty( $wpmu_version ) ) {
    // do stuff
}

Tracking Major Changes

The other big issue is keeping track of what changes from version to version and how that might affect your plugins. Probably the easiest way to at least get a cursory glance at this is using the announcement pages on the Codex. For example, here is the announcement page for Version 3.0. If you need more detail, you can also try getting a report from Trac, like this one which covers everything in 3.0. Combining these, you can come up with a bit of a list of things that are likely to affect your plugin, depending on exactly what it does. As usual, the more you stick to the documented APIs, the less likely that your plugin will break over time. I personally use this to find new/better ways of doing things and harnessing new features that are introduced more than anything else.

The latest intersection of these 2 things is that I’ve been forgetting (or not bothering) to set my status as “Away” or “Back” on all the communications apps I have running when I leave the computer. This is something that a computer should be able to do itself, and something that I’m horribly bad at remembering to do.

After a little bit of Googling around, I came across this awesome little application called Proximity (for Macs) which pairs up with a bluetooth device (e.g. my iPhone) and performs one simple task. All it does is executes an AppleScript when that device is in range, and a different one when it returns to range. This is exactly what I was looking for; with some custom AppleScripting, I was able to put together a solution that does the following:

• Detects that my iPhone is in range/nearby (which I always carry, so it proxies as “detecting me”)
  • Sets me as “available” on IRC (Colloquy), Adium (all chat networks) and Skype
  • Presses “play” on iTunes
• If I walk away?
  • Set me as “Away” on IRC, Adium and Skype
  • Press “pause” on iTunes
  • Triggers the screensaver (which I also have configured to require my password to unlock)

I also have it logging to a text file when I am “away” and “back” just for interest, and I’ll see if there’s anything fun I can do with that later.

Now I’m looking for more things to tie into these two scripts (below) to make life a little bit easier. Suggestions?

My “Away” script — Download

-- Adium : set away message
if appIsRunning("Adium") then
        tell application "Adium"
                go away with message "Away"
        end tell
end if

-- Skype : set as away
if appIsRunning("Skype") then
        tell application "Skype"
                send command "SET USERSTATUS AWAY" script name "Proximity"
        end tell
end if

-- Colloquy: change nick to [current-nick]|away
if appIsRunning("Colloquy") then
	tell application "Colloquy"
      set aC to every connection
      repeat with conn in aC
         set aR to (every chat room of conn)
         repeat with room in aR
			set nickname of conn to "beau|away"
         end repeat
      end repeat
   end tell
end if

-- iTunes : pause music
if appIsRunning("iTunes") then
        tell application "iTunes"
                pause
        end tell
end if

-- Bump Screensaver
activate application "ScreenSaverEngine"

-- Log Movements
set logFile to "/Users/beau/util/proximity.log"
open for access logFile with write permission
write "AWAY: " & current date & "\n" to logFile starting at eof
close access logFile

-- Helper
on appIsRunning(appName)
        tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning

And when I come “Back” — Download

-- Adium : set as available
if appIsRunning("Adium") then
        tell application "Adium"
                go available
        end tell
end if

-- Skype : set as available
if appIsRunning("Skype") then
        tell application "Skype"
                send command "SET USERSTATUS ONLINE" script name "Proximity"
        end tell
end if

-- Colloquy: change nick back to normal
if appIsRunning("Colloquy") then
	tell application "Colloquy"
      set aC to every connection
      repeat with conn in aC
         set aR to (every chat room of conn)
         repeat with room in aR
			set nickname of conn to "beaulebens"
         end repeat
      end repeat
   end tell
end if

-- iTunes : play music
if appIsRunning("iTunes") then
        tell application "iTunes"
                play
        end tell
end if

-- Start Screensaver (which locks the screen)
tell application "ScreenSaverEngine" to quit

-- Log Movements
set logFile to "/Users/beau/util/proximity.log"
open for access logFile with write permission
write "BACK: " & current date & "\n" to logFile starting at eof
close access logFile

-- Helper
on appIsRunning(appName)
        tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning

Apologies to any names I’ve misspelled, product names I’ve left out, etc.

Ideally, your page should be structured with an h1 tag around the title of the most important concept on the page, an h2 around a sub-topic/concept, etc. On your home page, the h1 usually ends up going around your logo/site title, since that’s the over-arching concept. Then under that, you might have a listing of recent posts. Each of those posts should probably have their titles in an h2. No problem so far, right? You just set up your template like that and you’re good to go.

In the content of each post however, this means that you’re down to an h3 if you have sub-sections within the post. No problem, just use that markup and everything’s golden. Until you view a single-post/page and then your structure doesn’t really make sense any more. Ideally, on these pages, the title of the post would be an h1 and those h3s would now be h2s. What to do?

Easy, drop the following code into your functions.php file (within your theme, or I guess you could turn it into a plugin if you were into that) and it will dynamically adjust your headings for your homepage (and archives, tag pages, etc).

function beaus_dynamic_headings( $content ) {
 if ( is_singular() )
 return $content;

 $content = str_replace( array( '<h5', '</h5>' ), array( '<h6', '</h6>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h4', '</h4>' ), array( '<h5', '</h5>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h3', '</h3>' ), array( '<h4', '</h4>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h2', '</h2>' ), array( '<h3', '</h3>' ), $content );
 return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'beaus_dynamic_headings' );

So when you’re writing a post, write to target a single-page view, where the title of the post/page itself is h1, and your structure within the post should start from there. The code above will take care of fixing it up for the homepage, archives etc (bumping all heading tags “down” one level).

Now running WordPress 3.0. This is going to be a game changer.

I'll be at WordCamp SF, 2010