I’ll be attending and volunteering at WordCamp Orlando next weekend, followed by a week of co-working near Cape Coral with the illustrious Barry Abrahamson.
Barry will be speaking on high performance WordPress and I’ll be helping with the Genius Bar, as I did at Wordcamp New York a couple of weeks ago.
Very much looking forward to it all! Telecommuting is awesome, but it makes opportunities for spending time in person with your crew that much more enjoyable.
First theme change since July 2007, I guess I was due. I had told Noël that I’d make the switch to his excellent P2 theme once he released the latest version. Since he did that on Friday, it was my turn to fulfill my end of the deal. I installed P2, made a child theme to start tweaking it to my liking with barely any effort and voilà: simple, clean, effective, I love it!
The first phase of the project my team and I worked on during our Quebec City retreat has just gone live!
WordPress.com allows you to geotag your user profile and posts. That means you can assign an earthly location to your account and to each of your posts.
WordPress.com will soon launch a Geo Search feature that will allow people to find your posts based on their locations. To show up in the search results, you need to turn geotagging on and start geotagging your posts.
Source: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/a-blog-near-you/
More coming soon on the geo-front.
Quick and dirty edit from the balcony at the Taz on Oct. 24th 2009. Max Vincent took that one! So much height and precision!
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/7254981 w=600&h=345]
Audio track is Galvanize by the Chemical Brothers. It was playing at the beginning of the finals so I thought it’d be appropriate.
Get or use your existing WordPress.com account, setup http://im.wordpress.com, http://p2theme.com, maybe even http://iphone.wordpress.org and our “Publicize: Twitter“, and you’ve got yourself one nice, quick, full-featured lifestreaming blog.
[wpvideo v3YfaTGM]
“At im.wordpress.com we have been experimenting with instant delivery of blog posts and comments. We started by providing a firehose for our partners but that was only the beginning. Now you can subscribe to WordPress.com blogs in your Jabber IM client and receive posts and comments the instant they are published. It is also possible to post to blogs from the chat client. In time we plan to add these real-time features to web pages. Soon the conversations on blogs will be as fast as chat rooms.”
It’s no secret that IRC is at the heart of all things WordPress and Automattic when it comes to realtime collaboration. I hadn’t used it in years, but am now back to being logged in for substantial portions of my days.
With this in mind, I set out to install the excellent ZNC IRC bouncer on my home Linux server yesterday, coupled with the experimental Colloquy Push module to send relevant messages to my iPhone when not in front of my screen.
Couldn’t have been any easier on Centos 5 (Note: actually, if you happen to have a Mac desktop or server that is powered on all the time, unlike my laptop, Colloquy has a built-in push bouncer that makes things even easier).
Install the Fedora EPEL repo as root:
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
Install the ZNC daemon and related packages (and openssl-devel and g++ which weren’t installed on this box):
yum install znc znc-extra znc-devel gcc gcc-c++ openssl-devel
Download compile and install the Colloquy Push module:
curl -LO http://github.com/wired/colloquypush/raw/master/znc/colloquy.cpp znc-buildmod colloquy.cpp cp colloquy.so ~/.znc/modules/
Generate an initial configuration file (with SSL and Colloquy push module):
znc --makeconf
Edit the said configuration file manually to add a flag so that it stops sending push notifications to my phone if I’m already connected to the bouncer: added -attachedpush 0 to the LoadModule = colloquy line in ~/.znc/configs/znc.conf.
Opened port 6697 (the one I chose, default would be 6667) on my home router.
And that’s pretty much it.
Now instead of connecting to the Automattic IRC server directly, I connect ZNC to it permanently on my server, and connect to the said ZNC bouncer (via SSL) from both my desktop IRC client, as well as the one on my iPhone (over 3G, Edge and/or wifi).
I’ll have to wait until Monday to confirm that the push notifications are working as intended, but beyond this, it’s been stable and awesome since yesterday.
Nice!
Update: The push notifications are working great!
Update 2: I forgot to mention ZNC also has a very handy web admin module. I strongly advise SSL once more, as well as considering the -noircport flag combined with a custom port.
Update 3: After a full workweek of use, the little time I spent on installing ZNC has already proven invaluable enough for me to more than recommend it. Push notifications work brilliantly, but most of all, the buffer replay option, is the BEST FEATURE EVER! My IRC user experience has now been changed forever. Awesome!
The videos from the first WordCamp Montreal, which happened July 11-12 2009, are now all available on WordPress TV.
Here’s my entry on the event when it happened and our Fearless Leader‘s Q&A session is embedded below.
[wpvideo LSaS4VTY]
Today is the most beautiful of days. I’m not talking about the weather, but about a feeling that is currently impregnating every single fiber of my professional being. See, today marks the beginning of my trial phase (contractor) as Automattic‘s newest full-time systems wrangler.
You read that right: I’ll be working for the company behind WordPress.org, WordPress.com, Gravatar, Akismet and many other innovative and industry-leading products, with its wikipedia-entry-worthy figures, multi-datacenters infrastructure, the whole shebang.
Don’t get me wrong, although this assignment represents, to me, the professional chance of a lifetime, it will also be the most challenging by far, the scale of it all mind boggling. Nothing is won yet beyond the opportunity and everything is still left to be achieved. Needless to say, I will be doing my very best (and then some) to own the said challenge and prove Barry, Matt and others I am indeed the right guy for the job.
WordPress.com, one of our flagship products if you’re not familiar with it (hint: this very blogs runs on it), hosts such sites as “CNN’s Political Ticker, Dow Jones’ All Things D, the National Football League’s Official NFL blog, Time Inc’s The Page, People Magazine’s Style Watch, Om Malik, official blogs for communities like Flickr and BBC’s Top Gear, and many other high-profile and high-traffic blogs“. Automatticians also happen to be amongst the most successful Free and Open Source software evangelists, users and providers in the Web industry.
To top it all off, the position means 100% telecommuting, a mandatory requirement for me to work for a US-based (but internationally staffed) company since my wife, 3 children and I are happily residing in Montreal, Canada. An ideal proposition for a professional like I, who applies as much emphasis on his family life and welfare’s as he does on his career (even if often with little moderation in either :p). Balance being the path to a full and well-lived life, in my humble opinion.
In conclusion, I’d like to extend my deepest and most heartfelt thanks to Matt and the entire Automattic family for presenting me with this opportunity, as well as for welcoming me in their midst as we start and learn to work together.
Aim high, reach higher!
Update: Not a contractor any more. On staff since September 21st. 🙂
Today was Presence BMX‘s summer jam here in Montreal, and since I had an iPhone on me, I thought I’d post updates on Twitter all day (easiest updates+videos+pictures on the go).
Here’s how it went for my angle, as seen on my twitter account or in their search tool:
T’was a good day. Mad props to Jeremy Deme and the gang for being such a tight crew and keeping BMX in Montreal fresh! 🙂
It all started with a simple, frank message to Thrasher Magazine on Twitter last Wednesday:
@thrashermag: got anyone covering the @ZooYorkInst AM Getting Paid contest in Montreal by any chance? Tell them I’ll buy them a beer if so.
If it wasn’t blatantly obvious yet, despite being a web geek and dad of three, I’m also a life long skateboarder, bmx rider, snowboarder, and so on. I’ve resumed spending my spare times riding most of them a few years ago, now that (at least some of) my son(s) are old enough to follow along. These sports bring me balance in a life which could have otherwise turned “static”, to say the least.
In other words, the latter tweet was a humble attempt at ceasing a symbolic opportunity to show my gratitude and appreciation to this iconic magazine, for having been such an integral part of what makes me… well, me.
I’ll assume you will understand how I could barely contain myself when I received a direct message back, stating they had in fact no one on location and asking if I might want to cover the event or know someone who could.
Nothing out of the ordinary if you work in the publishing industry, which since it is far from my case, turned into an all out challenge I just couldn’t refuse. Project and team management is not only what I’ve done most of my career, it’s my true vocation. I happen to practice it in the software and web industries, but projects are projects, and I truly felt this was something I could manage with the crucial help of my oh so precious network.
Through the software/web world as well as through being a regular at most of Montreal’s riding spots, I’m very often given to interact and become friends with very skilled and talented photographers, cameramen, filmmakers, such as Eva Blue, Jereme Deme (Presence BMX) and many others.
I also realize that I’m very lucky to know an ever increasing ratio of the people who make up the local (and inter/national, online) extreme sports community and industry to be able to succeed with such a task, out of the blue and with only a couple days notice.
So armed with all this, and with the help and guidance of High Speed Productions and Thrasher’s creative director Kevin Convertito, I embarked on a mission to round up the right people to score the best possible footage and photos, planning on focusing on the organizational aspects such as getting full access press passes to the event for all of us, and everything else my team might need.
Unfortunately, being summer and all, it turned out that all of my contacts in this realm, except for Eva, were either already long booked on other events and/or out of town altogether… This could have put quite a wrench in the operation, but Eva and I decided that we wouldn’t even let it slow us down. I’d be handling the video footage, as well as the final video editing.
And shoot we did! We both spent most of Saturday and Sunday at the Taz, taking hours of video (over 16GB) and thousands of pictures (over 20GB combined), thanks to the freedom accorded to press passes, provided to us by Philippe Jolin through my friends Charles Deschamps and Marc André St-Jean.
Eva took some amazing photos and provided us both with mid to high end still camera equipment, but I had no choice to resort to using my recently acquired, cheap, barely appropriate pocket HD cam to handle the video. I mean, aaak, pistol grip form factor, low end processor and fixed lens, no fisheye, no real means of (or time to) color correct the video, etc. A challenge to say the least, but quite an ode to “gettin’ her dun, no matter how”.
And then of course, came the tedious, but rewarding, post-processing of all that media… Eva and I processed our photos Saturday and Sunday night, while I was also scrubbing through all the raw footage for valuable parts. There went a couple of 4AM bed time nights. Not that unusual for both of us, being night owls.
And finally, I ended up *forgetting* to sleep entirely in the night of Monday to Tuesday, as I painstakingly edited the videos (1, 2) and photos you can see on this blog. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone! I hadn’t done any such editing in over three years, and never beyond the obviously amateurish realm.
All that to, in the end, getting scooped by the Zoo York pro crew releasing their edit only a few hours before I was able to send them to Thrasher, and only because of my aging MacBook pro chocking on the final exports, upload time and the fact that I do have a day job that keeps me busy busy bee-zay. Oh well!
All in all, the entire experience was nothing short of a BLAST. Can you feel the hype on that bold uppercase? Can you? 🙂
Given the opportunity, I’d do it all over again on a moment’s notice! Actually, scratch that, I’d do it all again with a bit more advanced notice next time, so I can really make the most of it and book the best people for the job instead of improvising it all. Seeing what we achieved in the short time and with the means we had, just think what we could have produced with even the smallest of budget: real-time online reporting, interviews, professional-level editing, the whole nine yards.
So if you’re a skateboarding, BMX or snowboard brand and are looking for a Montreal hookup to cover such events, you know who to ping. 🙂
Note to self though: next time, get a quick and dirty edit out extra fast, then work on a nicer cut. Heh heh, lesson learned. 🙂
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