Category: Blogging

Transparency Report Update and a Closer Look at Turkey

I’m really proud of my team and legal colleagues for all the work that resulted with the latest transparency report at Automattic. Between 2014 and 2015, Turkey had an increase of 2725% in takedown demands!

Our latest transparency report is hot off the press, complete with data and details about the intellectual property infringement notices, government takedown demands, and government requests for information we received between July 1 and December 31, 2015.

[…] Turkey came out of the woodwork for the first time with 4 demands in 2014, jumping up dramatically with 113 in 2015.

 

366 days of posts

I’m committing to publish one post per day in 2016.1

In my last post, Bryan’s Purge of 2016, I wrote:

One of my goals in 2016 to is reduce my physical and digital belongings.

There are several Lightroom catalogs—along with the corresponding photos—before 2011 on my second generation Drobo (USB 2.0), and the remaining Lightroom catalogs on my current laptop. I’m confident that the natural byproduct of purging will surface photos that I’ll be proud to publish.

I’d also like to be more open sharing what I read, learn, and do. People will either follow my blog, continue coming back for more, share it with others, or let me know how I can do better.

Yes, I’m choosing to ignore the possibility of followers leaving, because ultimately:

I’m…talking about myself, really. 🙂

Publishing daily will also subject everyone to my latest quirks, which I’m sure Amy will appreciate. 😉

In practice, I think I’ll schedule a block of time every morning to schedule posts.

On The Daily Post, the post The WordPress.com Editor: Five Quick Tips describes calendar-based scheduling. I’ll aim to fill up each month with dark blue circles (scheduled posts) and light gray circles (previously published posts).

For less important (superficial) reasons:

  • I’d like my 2016 WordPress.com annual report for this blog to have more recent posts with the most views for the current year. (In 2015, three posts with the most views were published in 2005, one post was published in 2010, and one post was published in 2015.)
  • It’d be rad to hit or beat the number of views in 2012.

Amy said she’d hold me accountable, but I’d love to hear your ideas for suggested posts to give me momentum! Please send them through my contact form. Thanks!2

  1. In 2015, I published 87 posts, 57 short of my goal of 144. ↩
  2. The Daily Post also has a great resource on the Postaday section. I’ve added the badge to my sidebar. ↩

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 41,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 15 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Daily Blogging for 104 Days

While doing my weekly review this evening, I was reminded that I set a personal goal to publish a total of 144 posts this year, through a manageable average of 12 posts per month. That average shrinks today:

  • Posts published in 2015: 40
  • Posts to publish between now and December 31: 104
  • Days left in 2015: 104

I’m glad I checked!

I’ve added a bunch of post ideas (to-dos) in Things, in the Area aptly named Blog. While the exact number isn’t displayed, I doubt it’s close to 100. I’ll be fine.

As White Goodman asked in Dodgeball, “Are you ready for the — woo! — hurricane?” Of posts, that is. 🙂

April Blogging Challenge

Fellow Automattic colleague, Justin Shreve, challenges us to publish a post on our blog daily for the month of April. On one of our internal sites, I said I’d participate to hold myself accountable.

A few things:

  • I published notes from several speakers at Write The Docs EU the last two days, and ran out of steam near on the second day.
  • I write my ideas in Simplenote with each item tagged “blog”.

While it’s minutes after midnight in Budapest, I’m going by the Pacific Daylight Time since I live in the Los Angeles area. I’m two for two this month. Yay!

Interested? Possibly intrigued? Read his post for more details, join us, and leave a comment. Ignore the date and give it a try for the rest of the month.

You can publish from any site, but we’d also love for you to setup a free blog at WordPress.com. I’m proud of our work, and we’re always happy to help. 🙂

Tip: Need ideas? Check out the free eBook 365 Writing Prompts by The Daily Post at WordPress.com.

Enjoy!

How I organize my life with Simplenote

I meant to blog about something geeky and exciting. After starting to re–organize my slew of notes in Simplenote1, I decided to write about this instead.

Let’s call this a very tiny weekly review. 😉

(No, come back! Phew. Thank you.)

Simplenote feels like the perfect fit, and it doesn’t hurt that the guys that started it are super rad. (Hi Mike and Fred!)

So, I love the speed and flexibility of plain text, as well as Markdown. I’m also really glad WordPress.com finally supports Markdown, too.

Here are a few ideas on how I use Simplenote:

  • Agenda notes for coworkers, family, friends.
  • Tasks (personal or shared).
  • Blog post drafts.
  • Inventory.
  • Tracking data that doesn’t need to be displayed in pretty graphs.
  • Health notes, so you can discuss issues to your doctor, dentist, or optometrist with a shred confidence.
  • Restaurants. (A whitelist. These dishes are delectable! Or, a blacklist. That place was not good.)
  • Business hours of places you frequent (e.g. stores, malls, mechanic).
  • Late–night sparks of inspiration.

I also love how you can use other apps with Simplenote, like:

  • nvALT for Mac, which I previously used.
  • Listary for iOS, which Amy and I use to share a few todo lists.

Things is still my main task manager. When talking with my coworkers, in the flow of typing within Simplenote, I sometimes slip the word “TODO” inline with the note, which I can quickly find later and import to Things with more context.

Pro tip: Date everything. You never know if you’ll need it later, and you can always cull or delete later.

Brett Kelly raves about Drafts for iOS (which I finally bought last month and still use), and it feels like Simplenote opens and works just as fast.

If you’re curious about “embedding” images and files, I’d suggest uploading them to your favorite file sharing or hosting service — like Cloudup! — and paste the link into your note.

Is your brain percolating? Do you have any other ideas to get the most out of Simplenote? I’d love to hear them. 🙂

  1. The Simplenote Mac and iOS apps are gorgeous! ↩

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 46,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Roll Your Own Photo Blog – WordCamp Los Angeles 2013

Wow, I had a blast speaking at WordCamp Los Angeles 2013 (WCLAX) explaining how to set up your own photo blog. Thank you all so much!

I described my talk as such on the WordCamp LA site:

Refusing to tie your content into third–party services like Instagram, Flickr, or Google+? Setup your own photo blog — no developer needed! You’ll learn how to organize your photos on your blog, look into image processing, and even delve a tiny bit into image metadata and copyright.

I just uploaded my Keynote slides to Scribd, but some slides are messed up.

If you’d like me to clarify anything, leave a comment here or send me an email through my contact form (especially if another service is better). I’m happy to discuss things over. 🙂

Thanks for your encouragement before and after my talk, listening to my thoughts and suggestions. Also, I wanted to give a special thanks to my wife, Amy, for being super helpful with preparing and rehearsing — and choosing cute photos of our cats. 😉

My Blogging Mission for 2012

I’m setting a few guidelines for my blog this year. If I don’t, it’ll be easy to neglect All Narfed Up for another year.

  1. Post at least three times a week. I’m in favor of quality over quantity, and scared to hold myself to one per day. I’m going to aim for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
  2. Categorize and tag my posts. I have over 1,500 uncategorized posts from the move to WordPress.com, so a target of 15-20 per day should get those organized in a few months. (Quick Edit will be my friend.)
  3. Share long form articles. I think I’m a heavy Instapaper user. Rather than configure Instapaper to post my likes to Twitter, I’ll link to those here with a short quote that caught my eye.

Furthermore, if you’d like me to write about something, head over to my contact page and bug me about it. I appreciate the ideas!