In with a bang, and out with a burrito

Posted on 1 October 2011 by Terry Chay

In the crossfire between the landlord and the city, Automattic got evicted from their home on Pier 38 on Friday.

At the end of every week, some of the Automatticians have been having #burittofridays, so they made one last burrito run before closing the doors. As Beau, put it, “We came in with a bang, and out with a burrito.”

In with a bang…and out with a burrito Pier 38, South of Market, San Francisco, California Olympus E-P2, Lumix G HD 14-14 f/4-5.8 OIS 1/320s @ ƒ9, iso 200, 19mm (38mm)

One of the advantages of working for a distributed company is that now that we are homeless, we’ll simply be working from home. The Bay Area crew won’t get to see each other each week though.

And here is one last parting shot from our fearless leader:

Our fearless leader Pier 38, South of Market, San Francisco, California Olympus E-P2, Lumix G HD 14-14 f/4-5.8 OIS 1/400sec @ ƒ8, iso 200, 103mm (206mm)

He leaves us with a bit of= T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I’ll miss you guys.

WordPress Rocks (…err Swings)

Posted on 17 June 2010 by Terry Chay

WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious) update just went out:

The WordPress.org people have done a great job. There is even a new default blog theme (which if you haven’t gathered I’ve been using for the last half year).

I even broke out a bottle of this to celebrate. Which reminds me, I recommend you update the way you drink the beer: straight, no chaser.

Carpe diem vita brevis.

Camera bags for women

Posted on 28 May 2010 by Terry Chay

If there is one thing photographers have in common with women it’s an obsession with bags.

I have a lot of camera bags. I think about bags a lot. I find it’s difficult to find the right camera bag and when I add a laptop to the mix it becomes nearly impossible. But as difficult as it must be, imagine what it’s like to find a photographic bag for women?!

Continue reading about camera bags after the jump. →

OpenSearch on WordPress.com

Posted on 7 March 2010 by Terry Chay

A couple months ago, I did something so small it doesn’t really deserve mention. Nial and I got OpenSearch working on WordPress.com for individual blogs:

Search of the entire domain has always been working, but this allows you to add a special search for one blog. To activate this, open Firefox (or Internet Explorer), and click on the search dropdown and you’ll see a new entry to “Add your blog name.” Select that.

Maybe I’ll add a plugin to WordPress with this code. I’m not too sure there’s a need though since there are already a couple OpenSearch plugins and this one only works in WPMU and PHP 5. There’s also a couple of WordPress.com-specific features like tags, privacy flags, and blavatar support in this one.

TumblrPad

Posted on 17 November 2009 by Terry Chay

(Full disclosure: I work on Automattic, which makes software and services in the same space as SixApart.)

: Image via CrunchBase

Today, TypePad announced the launch of TypePad micro, which I found out about from John Gruber’s somewhat snarky tweet.

This marks the first time (to my knowledge) that SixApart is embarking on a free hosted blogging service, so it was definitely worth a look, especially given some of the things we’ve worked on, have recently got working, and will work on at here at Automattic. Besides, free is the price I like

Registering for a new account (especially with the Facebook Connect integration) was so easy, I thought, “Wait! Where is my Staples button?”

It only took seconds to create this blog using the default look and feel.

The blog, though there is some confusion as to the URL, has an aesthetically pleasing layout. It certainly seems to share a lot of influences from Twitter, WordPress P2, Pownce, etc. but the biggest influence has to be Tumblr.

Thoughts about TypePad micro after the jump

Vivanista

Posted on 17 November 2009 by Terry Chay

(Disclaimer: I work for Automattic which contributes to the development of WordPress, WordPressMU, BuddyPress, and bbPress.)

At this month’s Bay Area WordPress Meetup, there were four interesting talks. One of which wised me up to the Zemanta WordPress plugin, which I’m using now, any content creator (or Another Search Startup) should check it out—it’s quite clever.

But the presentation I want to focus on in this article, was Annie Vranizan’s Vivanista demo.

The Vivanista homepage

Vivanista is a social network for women focusing on philanthropy. Even if you don’t have a passing interest in such things, the website deserves a look, it’s quite an attractive website and built in record time—a couple of months.

Being a vertical, this is mostly the territory of white-label social networks, and more recently, Facebook. In fact, if you look at their team, it reads more like a group blog than a company.

That’s because it is.

What makes Vivanista so interesting is that it is built on WordPress MU blog publishing platform in combination with Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress plugin.

More about how Vivanista was created after the jump

Lolcats can never be FAIL’d

Posted on 28 October 2009 by Terry Chay

Last month, my friend and fellow kimchee-eater, M.J., had three books sent to me. FailNation, How to Take over Teh Wurld, and Graph Out Loud. That’s important that I have friends like her because I’m usually the last to know about the latest memes.

Three new books and their respective websites: FailBlog, ICanHasCheezburger, and GraphJam.

I mention this because if you happen to be in San Francisco today at 6:30pm you really need to go to the book launch party. I came to get their last book signed:

I’ll certainly be there in order to get the books signed (and then give them away later, like I did last time).

Ben Huh signing their first book.

See you at the party!

(Full disclaimer, I now work for Automattic—though I didn’t at the time M.J. sent me the books. ICanHasCheezburger, GraphJam, and Failblog are VIP customers of WordPress.com.)