Holy Shmoly! » Automattic

Delicious Grillmarkaðinn

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:24:28 +0000

If you ever find yourself in Reykjavik make sure you book a table in Grillmarkaðinn. Every single bite was a taste explosion. So delicious!

Monk Fish

Beef Sirloin

The ice cream dessert was actually a disappointment after the previous tasty dishes. As Lenny says, food in Iceland is damn good.

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Akismet Asteroids

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:49:05 +0000

Akismet, the anti comment spam service run by Automattic recently announced that they had stopped 25 billion spam messages.

It’s quite an achievement of course and worth worth celebrating with a game of Asteroids. I’ll let you find the game yourself, it’s not hard to do so!

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Sunset at Seaside

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:33:02 +0000

It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it…

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PollDaddy join the Automattic Family

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:59:50 +0000

You’ve probably heard the news that Lenny and Eoin of PollDaddy have joined Automattic. PolDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, but on a personal level we’ve been joined by two great Irish guys from Sligo bringing the Irish contingent of Automattic up to three. Lenny did completely trash me at Wii Tennis but I won’t hold that against him!

We’ve even taken over a house here in Breckenridge, calling it the Irish House. The Irish Tricolour is flying outside an Irish pub downtown. They might lend it to us if we ask nicely ..
Raanan is staying there too so I guess we’ll make him an honourary Irishman for the week!

As well as the great PollDaddy news, expect a few more enhancements to WordPress.com soon, and if I have anything to do with it, a plugin or two that will make it into the WordPress MU community too!

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Hold your breath

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:18:10 +0000

Life here in Colorado at 9,600ft is much the same as at sea level except for one major difference. The air is noticeably thinner at this altitude and takes some getting used to.

Thankfully we’re not here to train for the Olympics or do anything strenuous like that. Lying in bed is difficult enough! I tried reading last night and became breathless just because I was looking down at my book. Rolling on my side helped, but it’s scary when you can’t catch your breath. It feels like someone holding a bag over my head.

There’s an oxygen bar in a local town, and cans of oxygen can be purchased at the local store. Hopefully no more frights.

No previews of what we’re working on right now, but you’ll see the fruits of our labour soon enough!

For photos see the Automattic Group on Flickr and/or my Colorado Set.

PS. Check out the WordPress MU plugin contest winners. Well done to everyone involved.

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Gravatar enabled WordCamp Badges

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:04:25 +0000

Andy has the very exciting news that Gravatar icons will be printed on attendee’s WordCamp San Francisco badges this year!

On supporting websites, Gravatars have become a de-facto identity for comment threads and discussions so to carry through the identity to the conference floor is just a logical conclusion.

There is one caveat. Gravatars can now be up to 512×512 pixels. The bigger they are, the better they’ll print. If your Gravatar is a measly 32×32 pixels it’s going to look like a dirty smudge next to the shiny badges of the big boys. Andy has created a handy form for checking if your image is the right size. If not, please upload a new Gravatar before August 14th!

I won’t be at WordCamp this year but after seeing the line up of speakers I’m looking forward to seeing the blog coverage afterwards.

PS. Andy has a new post showing how to create those badges with the help of a PDF library.

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Sitewide tags pages for WordPress MU

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:00:57 +0000

For WordPress MU only. My latest plugin is the sitewide tags pages plugin.

This is the initial release of a plugin that creates a set of pages like the WordPress.com Hot Topics pages. It’s a lot more simplistic, but by feeding posts into one blog it also creates a sitewide feed of all posts plus feeds of any tags and categories too.

Sitewide Tags Options

WordPress MU is a multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com. If you use the regular version of WordPress this plugin is not for you and you can ignore this post.

PS. In other MU news. Raanan has a new post on the Publisher Blog about Nationen! blog, a new Danish blog site based on WordPress MU that looks rather nice!
The site was developed by Incsub who are also the guys behind wpmu.org where you’ll probably find all sorts of useful nuggets of MU goodness on a regular basis!

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WordPress Stickers and Badges

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:47:22 +0000

This was a nice surprise. While enjoying a lovely meal in the Castle Hotel in Blarney a courier rang me with a package. I wasn’t expecting anything but luckily he was close by and I met him in front of the local Garda station. Brimming with excitement I ripped open the package sending stickers and badges flying everywhere. Some landed in my burger, a few badges in my wife’s quiche and the baby grabbed a sticker or two before they fell on the ground.

No, I’m joking, but I did get a jiffy bag with a nice portrait of (most of) Automattic in Arizona and quite a few badges and stickers.

Before you ask, I’m not sending anyone any. I’ve already promised stickers to one person who’s been waiting a few months, and John probably thinks he’ll get his badges and stickers this year but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was him. Sorry!
On the other hand, if I meet you on the street, I may have a supply of badges and stickers in my camera bag so don’t be afraid to ask. I will of course have badges and stickers to give out at the Doneraile photowalk next month. If you’re around the area, feel free to join us exploring and photographing Doneraile Park!

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On Tuesday I join the Bebo Generation at BlogTalk

Donncha O Caoimh — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:54:24 +0000

Sigh. The local free newspaper, The Cork Independent, covered BlogTalk 2008 here in Cork and lead with the headline, “Bebo Generation descend on Cork”. Bebo? *mutter* *mutter*

Anyway, I’ll be sitting on a panel titled, From blog-style commentary to conversational social media which pretty much spans the entire blogging and social media experiences. On the panel with me will be Stephanie Booth who I have conversed with a few times on IRC but never met, Bernie Goldbach who I have met a number of times and always has something interesting to say, and finally, Jan Schmidt who I had never heard of but his bio suggests someone who will know a lot about the topic of social media!

How do I feel about the current crop of social media sites? I quit Facebook! Well, no I didn’t, but I will, soon!

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Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:35:52 +0000

I bumped into Tom Raftery in Cork Airport on my way to Arizona. As luck would have it, we were both on the same flight to London, although he was going to Munich for a conference.
Unfortunately we weren’t sitting near each other on the plane but in the airport he said he spends more time in Twitter than reading blogs. That came as a surprise to me, but I’m sure it’s happening to many other busy people too.

That’s one reason I’m excited about Prologue, the new Twitter-like theme for WordPress. Automattic is already using it internally as a private discussion tool and for a group of disparate people spread all over the globe it’s a really useful tool to find out at a glance what each of us is up to.

Tom lives and breathes social media all day long. I’ll have to ping him on Twitter to read this and get some feedback from him!

I’m already thinking it might be an easy way to introduce blogging, social media and networking and Twitter to some of my non-blogging friends who slave away in offices all day long. Set up a private blog on WordPress.com, activate the Prologue Theme and invite them all on as contributors. They probably use RSS aware browsers too so keeping up to date on what’s happening should be a simple task.

Prologue is a perfect fit for WordPress MU too. You’ve already got many users who probably chat on your support forums. Let’s get our thinking caps on and create some sort of group blogs so people can converse right within the blogging environment!

Interested? Download the theme and play with it. It’s GPLed. Also, keep an eye on Joseph and Matt who will be updating the theme.

Finally, Matt describes Prologue really well:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

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