For the past few months, my team at Automattic (Team Social FTW!) has been working on a super-secret project. Today, almost perfectly synchronized with the NASA space shuttle landing (total fluke, but awesome regardless) we launched Jetpack!
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
Random update, possibly TMI, but we’re all friends here, right? 
I’m on a bit of a “body modification” kick since reading The Four Hour Body and also Born to Run, and am making some changes and testing the waters in a few different things.
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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).
- Full remote (Play/Pause, fast forward etc)
- 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: Read the rest of this post…
The age of the quantified self is coming, whether you like it not. I’ve recently started experimenting with a few aspects of this idea, with sleep being one of the first that I was interested to look at, since I’ve had a quite a lot of trouble with getting good sleep over the years.
My theory has always been that after I had glandular fever about 12 years ago, sleep has never left me feeling rested or fully revived. That’s been very difficult to quantify or keep track of though, other than saying “I feel crappy in the morning.”
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When I was growing up in Wagin, almost all of the meat that we ate was home butchered by my Dad. He is the kind of guy who looks at most things and says “I can do that” and then just does it. I remember raising our own goats and slaughtering/butchering them. We had pigs at one point. The farm my Dad worked on provided us with endless sheep. I even helped out with some rabbits once in a while.
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I didn’t really think about it until I successfully finished putting back together my sink, but yesterday was a very manly day:
- Woke up in a tent, in the rain,
- Ate meat (and eggs) for breakfast,
- Drove home in a truck,
- Ate meat (as a burger) for lunch,
- Took apart and cleaned my camp stove,
- Pulled apart and put back together my sink,
- Ate meat for dinner,
- Drank beer,
- Oh — and I did all of the above, with a beard, which makes everything more manly.
Not bad, even if I do say so myself. I’m almost getting used to the beard thing as well.
I was walking (in the dark) to catch a train this evening, when I saw a man sitting in car, obviously tinkering away on a phone or something. For some reason it inspired me to write the following:
The cold blue glow
of a smartphone, or perhaps an iPad
illuminates his face from below
casting ghoulish shadows of distortion.
Moments of otherwise peace
spent mindlessly striving.
Inbox Zero.
But only for a moment.
Catching up on email.
Only to fall behind again.
Is there an end?
Is there a point?
You have new mail.
My Mum and Peter were here to visit recently, and rather than hang out in San Francisco (they’ve been here a number of times, and done all the normal tourist things), we decided to go on a bit of a road trip. They were flying out of LAX, so we figured we’d take the Coastal Highway down from SF and see what we could find along the way. Oh, and since Peter was involved, we of course had to figure out a way to make a bunch of car-stuff be a part of the trip
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This weekend I got together with some friends and headed down to Big Basin State Park to go camping for the weekend. We headed down on Friday, taking our time by going down Hwy 1 (beautiful coastal drive) and stopping for lunch (Burrito Friday!) in Moss Beach, then going through Pescadero and visiting Harley Farms Goat Dairy (awesome!). From there we wound our way in to Big Basin and secured our 2 camping spots, which turned out to be fantastic. We got a pair of walk-in spots right next to each other, all the way in the back of the available sites (away from the parking lots/noisy people).
Apart from all the awesome food we ate (we really ate like kings!), we went on a most excellent hike on Saturday that wound up (for Rick and I) being around 11.5 miles. Here’s very very roughly what it looked like (I recorded a few waypoints using MotionX-GPS, then pieced this together on Google Maps):
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