I found a gem of a blog the other day, Darth Mojo. It is written by BattleStar Galactica Visual Effects Designer, Adam “Mojo” Lebowitz. The blog’s tag line is “the dark chocolate side of the force”. As well as in depth BSG insider info, he geeks out on Star Trek, Star Wars, and all things sci fi.
With the release of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), the simple, elegant, fast web browser Safari 3 is here.
Very soon we will release WordPress 2.5, and about the same time WordPress.com will be updated.
With Safari 3 and WordPress 2.5 you should finally have a great experience if Safari is your preferred browser.
Matt Thomas, our brilliant web designer on team Automattic, has been very busy working on WordPress 2.5 .
On Sunday, Mozilla developers reverted a change to cookie handling that was going to make web mashup and widget developers’ lives horrible in Firefox 3 — it would likely have been a disaster for Firefox and Mozilla. Thank you team Mozilla for addressing this in such a timely manner!
My boss, the Ma.tt in Matt is keynoting Northern Voice in Vancouver, Saturday February 23th! The title of his talk is “Blogging & Social Media: Where do we go from here?”
Yesterday, Anderson Cooper 360° Blog relaunched on our WordPress.com. CNN was one of our first VIPublishers and has more than 40 blogs with us — their team is among my favorite to work with.
Matt, now Ma.tt, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two” and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.
By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.
This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.
The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.
I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.
I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.
The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.
I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.
But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!
But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.
I’ve long known that YouTube embeds aren’t XHMTL because, ironically, embed isn’t valid XHTML. I knew there must be an easy solution, object, but I never made the time to figure it out.
January 16th update: here is The Steve Jobs 90 Minute Keynote (in 60 Seconds):
The final month of WordPress 2.3 development is upon us! Download the first beta of 2.3!