Blackout

The blackout on WordPress.org is active. It is an interstitial, but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to get the clickthrough link. It will go away if you click that link and be replaced by the Stop Censorship ribbon for 1 hour, at which point the cookie expires and you have to do it again. We’ll run the blackout for 24 hours. Yes, it will annoy you. I wanted to shut everything down, so count your blessings.

The reason we did this instead of a full shut-down is that there are many businesses and people who help drive the independent web that need access to the WordPress Codex, forums, plugin/theme repos, and APIs. We wouldn’t want to penalize them in our protest, so we just made it impossible to ignore instead.

The action on WordPress.com has also started. The primary home page of WordPress.com has blacked out all of its normal “Freshly Pressed” content. The WordPress.com official blog is sporting a ribbon — if we blacked out the blog, then WordPress.com bloggers would lose access to the post telling them how they can black out their sites using the option we deployed this evening. We launched on option tonight for all blogs on WordPress.com to either blackout (8am-8pm EST) or add a ribbon. In the couple of hours since we launched it, it looks like more than 10k have chosen full blackout, and around 3k have added the ribbon. People who chose blackout will have a ribbon before and after the blackout. Ribbons will remain until January 24, when PIPA comes up for vote in the Senate.

Both the WordPress.org and the WordPress.com blackout pages include a short message that includes a text link to the sopastrike.com site, the Fight for the Future video, the email form, the call form, and the non-U.S. petition form.

These things are what I spent the last consecutive 18 hours working on.

For more information, check out americancensorship.org.

Happy Birthday, Matty!

Happy birthday, Matty! Where would I be without you?

Well, if we hadn’t met in 2003, I probably wouldn’t have learned the name of Maroon 5, so there’s that.

Since you stole me away from grad school applications in 2008 and it’s now 2012, I would most likely be trying to wrap up a PhD program in which I studied the effect of popular culture on perceptions of US history and/or the use of technology to improve public education (depending on which program I chose). I would have been in that program and tied to a campus, so I probably wouldn’t have been able to be there when my nieces needed me, so Morgan wouldn’t be living with me, and probably wouldn’t have become the person she is today. That also means I wouldn’t have been there to rescue the feral cat/kittens in Warner Robins, and O’Malley and Bailey would have been rough and tumble feral fighter cats instead of the furry yarn-attacking playmates that keep me company when I work at home. I wouldn’t have needed to find a new school for the twins, so I wouldn’t have moved to Tybee. I wouldn’t have moved my mother to Savannah when she retired, and the new lease on life that move gave her wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have met half the people who make up the bulk of my daily interactions, and some of my closest friends. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to give something like WordPress to tens of millions of people around the world.

So thank you for WordPress, and my cool job, and being one of my best friends. You can keep the Maroon 5.

Here’s to another 9 years — happy 28th birthday!

If you also are glad that Matt exists (and that WordPress does too), consider letting him know by donating $28 to his charity: water campaign.  

WordCamps Galore

I know I sort of disappeared from WordCamps last year. The whole #fakemom thing seemed like the more important responsibility. Now that my mom has moved down to Savannah and Morgan is doing well, though, it’s been okay to ramp up the travel again. I’ll once again be roving from WordCamp to WordCamp, meeting WordPress users, taking suggestions/complaints/bribes, and making sure things are running smoothly on the organizational front.  I’ll be hitting Birmingham, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix between now and the end of February.

If you are planning a WordCamp and want me to come to yours, let me know (or ask Zé/Andrea while you’re going through the approval process). Since we usually wind up with multiple WordCamps per weekend during the summer and fall especially, I usually try to make commitments based on who asks first. If two ask at the same time, the one I haven’t been to before will win. If I haven’t been to either, then I choose the one where there’s not someone else from core and/or Automattic already going. The one with better weather and less-annoying travel may also have a very slight edge.

And yes, once I’ve got my local meetups up and running for a couple of months, I’m thinking WordCamp Savannah/Tybee, maybe before the summer season really makes things crazy (and hot).

Starting a WordPress Meetup

2012 is going to be the year of the WordPress Meetup.

WordCamps are more or less running pretty well under the guidelines and policy changes of the past year. We have a few smaller pain points that we’re still working out like dealing with petty cash, some international shipping stuff, and the like, but by and large WordCamp Central is going great. But what about meetups? One of the adjustments to WC policy was the idea of a WC being tied to a local meetup or meetups — the pinnacle of the local community’s year, rather than a one-off event that is cool but doesn’t do much to build an ongoing community.

There are some great meetups out there, and obviously there are millions of WordPress users that are potential meetup participants all over the world, but how do you get one going? It can be intimidating, I know! To show that it can be done — that YOU can do it — I’m going to start two meetups this month and document the process of how I did it, which I can then turn into a Field Guide to Organizing a WordPress Meetup.

Meetup #1: I live in Tybee Island, a tiny little town on the ocean, about 20 blocks long and 5 blocks deep. There are 3 or 4 thousand residents, plus a booming summer tourist trade. There are no tech companies based here, there aren’t a bunch of other meetups, there’s not a great local community website… in short, this is a small town, where I’ll have to actively go out and find people to join this meetup, and there aren’t that many people to choose from. It will be work. It may not, er, work. But this situation is similar to that faced by people in other small towns, so it will be a good example.

Meetup #2: The nearest city is Savannah, GA, about 20 miles away. As it happens, I now belong to a co-working space there and I go work from there once or twice a week (to be around other people vs working from home, alone, 24/7). Savannah has a burgeoning tech community, a handful of freelancers building WordPress sites, a lively downtown, lots of meetups and a very social culture, and a population of just under 140,000 people. There are groovy coffeeshops with wifi, an art college (SCAD), and pretty much everyone has a website. Getting this meetup going will hopefully take a little less effort if I’m smart about where I do the early publicity.

At the same time I’m acting locally, I’ll be thinking globally. I’ve wanted to do more to encourage, support, and facilitate local WordPress meetups via the Foundation for a while, but until we had the WordCamp program running smoothly there just wasn’t time. We’re now looking into a number of options (talking to meetup.com, looking at rolling our own plugin, thinking about working with schools/universities, etc), and I’ll be reaching out to current WP meetup organizers over the coming weeks to find out their pain points and the things that have worked or not worked for them.

The goals is meetups, meetups, meetups. Whether you call it a meetup, a wordup, a hackfest, a dev day, whatever… if you’re bringing together local WordPress users and/or developers on a regular basis, we want to support that.

Wish me luck, and watch this space to see how it goes. I’m scheduling the first Tybee WordPress Meetup for next Wednesday — if I get even one other person to show up and work on their wp site, that means it’s working.

 

“Back in the Saddle” Scarf: Part III

Back in the Saddle Scarf

Ran out of yarn, but decided to just cast off rather than buying another skein of this. It’s kind of cool, but spendy ($18/skein), and the texture varies from thin cotton thread to puffy, fluffy wool, which made it hard for me to keep a steady gauge. Also broke the last end, so couldn’t cast off the last 4 stitches, and wound up tying off instead. I don’t mind that — looking homemade is fine by me — but I’m going to try blocking tomorrow to see if I can even out the selvedges any where the weight changes had more of an effect than I liked.

“Back in the Saddle” Scarf: Part II

A couple of pictures of the progress so far (about 18 inches). Ripped out 3 times during first two inches, but back in the rhythm now. A little too uneven for a present, but it’s getting me back in shape. Some color segments of this yarn are a little thin/hard/inelastic compared to others, which makes it tough to keep an even gauge (the palest gray-blue especially). Would recommend sticking to a softer yarn for this pattern.

“Back in the Saddle” Scarf: Part I

Project Name: Back in the Saddle Scarf

Pattern: My So Called Scarf by Allison Isaacs at ImagiKnit
Needle: US 11 – 8.0 mm
Yarn: Noro Furisode
Colorway: 20 (turquoise/brown variegated)
Dye lot: 20 A
Purchased at: Unwind Yarn & Gifts in Savannah, Georgia

I haven’t done any knitting for about 8 years (the last thing was a hat for Maggie Berry, also from an ImagiKnit pattern). Purling is harder than I remember! Making this scarf as a birthday present, but have a feeling I’ll pull out the first 3-4 rows at least 5 times before I get my rhythm/tension back.

Savannah WordPress Happy Hour on Friday

The WordPress core team will be working together from downtown Savannah tomorrow afternoon as part of the annual get-together, and we’d love to meet local WordPress users, developers, designers, consultants, etc. after we call it a day. Come meet us!

We’ll meet up at Jazz’d at 6pm and will be the group wearing an assortment of WP shirts. If for some reason Jazz’d turns out to be a poor choice, the backup plan will be to mosey over to The Jinx.

So please, come out and say hello! If no one comes we’ll be forced to come to the conclusion that no one in Savannah likes WordPress very much, and we’ll just give up and take up miniature golf instead. And I really suck at miniature golf, so please come  have a drink after work tomorrow.

See you there? See you there!

Timing

Doing the core team meetup on Tybee is great, because it means I don’t have to abandon the kid for a week. Doing the core team meetup on Tybee is rough, because even after staying up working late with the guys, I still have to get up at 6am for the morning routine.

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