Jetpack by WordPress.com

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It’s been quiet around here. I’ve been busy, but I couldn’t let this one slip past no matter how much else I have to do.

Matt and company surprisingly released a new plugin for us .org users today. He actually hinted at a new project abbreviated JP in his new years resolutions, but who guessed it would be called Jetpack?

So, what exactly is Jetpack?

Jetpack supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com

Really, it provides a reason for me to stop second guessing myself about whether or not to host my blog on WordPress.com. Not that I would ever have actually done it, but I’ve often considered the advantages of using Automattic’s managed WordPress solution.

Besides practically bullet-proof servers, WordPress.com users have always had a few shiny things that have made the service tempting – even for people like me who want control over every single aspect of what is my website.

What do we get?

Initially we’re getting updates to WordPress.com Stats, the Twitter Widget, Gravatar Hovercards, WP.me Shortlinks, Sharedaddy buttons, LaTeX, After the Deadline, and Shortcode Embeds. And it looks like there’s more on the way. This is all packaged in one, nice plugin and updated and currated by Automattic.

Now, I won’t be using all of the extras, but right away the Stats and Sharedaddy links seem quite useful. I definitely won’t be using the Twitter Widget or WP.me Shortlinks, as I’ve got custom solutions that solve both of these problems in a way that I like. I haven’t been a fan of shortcodes lately, so I probably will skip that one as well. After the Deadline is something I’ll probably turn on for awhile and I’ve already got some ideas for ways to implement Gravatar Hovercards.

The Future

More than anything, this has me excited for the future of what this could mean for self-hosted WordPress. The additions that they’ve decided to ship with are cool, but I see a ton of potential for this product.

One thing that I’d really like to see is tighter integration into the WordPress.com network with a “WordPress bar” for users who are currently logged in to their WordPress.com accounts with subscription options, random post, shortlinks buttons, and the like. At this point, I can’t see anything stopping them from implementing these features. It would make that network instantly larger and more valuable.

Go get it

I definitely recommend everyone with a self-hosted blog go check out Jetpack. You can get it from the dashboard by searching for “Jetpack” in plugins or go to their website at jetpack.me

Instead of going with one of the Smashing Magazine Wallpaper Calendars for this month I decided to make my own. Photo Credit. Download

Kindle Review

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As many people know if you watch the smmas podcast, I recently got a Kindle 3. I haven’t been a huge reader. There have been a few books in the past year or so that I’ve taken time to read, but most of the reading that I do is on the web. Now, if I knew that wasn’t going to change, I probably wouldn’t have bought a Kindle, but there has been a small list of books growing over the past 6 months or so that I want to read, with more coming in the next 6 months. I also want to read more books in general and figured this would be a pretty good way to do it.

Quality

The first thing that I notice when I hand someone the device, even before commenting on how small it is, they ask if the words are real or if there’s something taped to the screen. I know exactly what they mean because I wondered the same thing when I first opened the Kindle and saw the Amazon Kindle screen. At first I thought there was a protector taped to the screen like you get with other types of devices. People are usually amazing when I then take the Kindle out of sleep mode and show them them that it is actually just what the screen looks like.

The letters are so smooth on the screen they almost look fake. It’s hard to believe any hand-held device could be so easy to read.

Content

There are several ways to get content on the device. The first, and most obvious way, is the Kindle Store. I believe Kindle books are in a proprietary Amazon format, but that doesn’t really matter because I don’t know of any way to get the books out of the Kindle. You can, however, install the Kindle application on any iOS, Android, Mac, or PC, as well as being able to sync with any other Kindle that you might own, so it’s not as though any books you purchase are stuck on this Kindle. They are tied to your Amazon account and are available in any Kindle or Kindle app. One of the really nice things about the Kindle store is that you can try any of the content before you actually purchase it. For books, you can send a sample to your Kindle and for Newspapers and Magazines you get to try the first 14 days for free.

Along with the Kindle store, you can also put any .mobi books on the Kindle. This includes all of Project Gutenberg and other sources like A Book Apart. I did notice that there’s a large collection of public domain books available from the Kindle store, so I haven’t had a chance to actually grab anything from Project Gutenberg yet. I did buy a couple of books from A Book Apart though, and was able to email the books to my Kindle, which worked great.

Before now, I haven’t been a user of Instapaper, but it works great with the Kindle and will automatically send unread Instapaper items weekly or daily just as a newspaper. It has been a great way to read some of the news that I’m not willing to read on my LCD monitor, or a good way to read when I’m out away from my computer or on the road.

Overall, it’s nice to be able to carry around this super thin, super light device with a full library of books, newspapers, magazines, and web articles, and be able to read all of that anywhere in book-like quality and readability.

My Mac Apps & SSD

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So I got a Solid State Drive for my computer this holiday season and wanted to do a completely fresh install of Snow Leopard since it’s been quite some time since the last time I did one of those. So instead of transferring the old data and apps over I downloaded everything and started from scratch. I was thinking ahead when I did this and wrote down the apps that I knew I’d have to install. The following is a list of apps that I couldn’t live without.

Also, the OCZ Vertex 2 is excellent. I’ve got a three year old macbook and it’s zippy again. This is easily the best thing you can do for a performance upgrade on any system.

Anyway, this list:

  • Adobe CS5
    As a creative professional, there’s no way I could live without this suite. I mean, I probably could, I just wouldn’t want to. Photoshop and Illustrator are my main tools, but I get my fair share of time in Premiere, After Effects, and the rest of the suite. A hidden gem in this pack is the media encoder. Gold.
  • Audacity
  • BusyCal
    Now with TaskSync this one of the really important things I use on my computer on days that I need to get stuff doen. If you use Google Calendar, and you should if you want an easy way to sync your calendar everywhere, BusyCal is the way to do it. TaskSync is a bonus and will even work with normal iCal.
  • Chicken of the VNC
    I don’t use it all the time, but it seems to come through in those crazy situations where standard OSX VNC cannot.
  • Cloud
    Seriously the easiest way to share anything I’ve ever seen. Dropbox is nice, and there are some Mac scripts if you want to do this stuff through your Dropbox public folder, but Cloud app has been awesome so far.
  • Coda
    I’m wearing a Coda t-shirt right now if that says anything. For awhile I was back on the Textmate/Transmit bandwagon as my editor/ftp team, but Coda does it all. I’d love to see a version 2.
  • DropBox
    Nothing I can put here that won’t be incredibly obvious at this point. If you’re a student, activate your edu email address for double referrals and up to 16GB storage.
  • Firefox
  • Google Chrome
  • GrowlTunes
    Growls when a new song plays. Pro Tip: If you really like distractions, the music video is an awesome skin for this one. It’s actually not that distracting and all your friends will be amazed when song names are popping up music video style every time a new song plays.
  • iChat with Chax
    I know adium is the Chat client I’m supposed to be using in OSX, but there’s something I just don’t like about it. If you haven’t seen Chax, it handles the couple of things that I wish iChat did out of the box. Growl support is the big one.
  • HardwareGrowler
    Growls when I plug in hardware or mount a new dmg. That’s pretty much it. You can actually turn off the dock icon by editing the plist.
  • Kindle
  • Last.fm
    One of my favorite websites that I never go to. I’m seriously in love with stats and music and the combination is awesome. With almost 5 years of “scrobbles” it’s fun going through the stats that have been recorded.
  • Reeder
    My new favorite way to read the news. I’ve always wanted a desktop application for reading my Google Reader feeds and it’s nice because it all stays in sync on the web.
  • Remote Desktop
  • RightZoom
    Even though I’ve been using a Mac for 2.5 years, I’m still not satisfied with the default action of the zoom (green) button. This fixes it.
  • Skype
  • SuperDuper!
    Awesome backup program, although it doesn’t really make a ton of sense for me anymore since I’m split across two different drives for my OS and files.
  • TextMate
    The best text editor on the Mac. Period.
  • Textual
    IRC Client. Customizable and all the functionality makes sense to me. Simple layout that’s not too over-the-top for an IRC client.
  • Transmission
  • Transmit
    Seriously the best FTP client I have ever used. I still wish they would turn it into a Finder extension because everything about it is awesome for managing files.
  • TotalFinder
    Since Transmit is not actually a Finder extension, TotalFinder will have to do. It’s not half bad either.
  • Tweetie

WordPress 3.1

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Soon we’ll be seeing WordPress 3.1 and since I’ve installed the beta on my blog network, I thought I’d share some of the new features that I’m a fan of. Keep in mind, this is in a multiple user environment so some of the stuff that I’m talking about here is specific to that. I think most of it should apply to everyone though.

Admin Bar (#14772)

The first thing you’ll notice is the “admin bar”. If you’ve ever used wordpress.com, you’ll probably recognize it from there — although it’s not exactly the same. Since I’ve got multisite running on my network there’s a list of “My Sites”.  It also gives you a link to your profile, along with dropdowns for “Add New”, “Appearance”, and  a “Comments” tab. They take advantage of the new shortlinks api introduced in WordPress 3.0 by giving a short link tab on some posts and pages.

Network Admin (#14435)

In a multisite environment, the Network Admin tab on the left has been removed with a new link in the top right that will take you to a special Network Admin dashboard. This is pretty much all the same stuff that you’d get in the “Super Admin” options panel in previous versions. You can manage the sites, themes, plugins, all the normal stuff you’d expect there.

Custom Post Type Index Pages (#13818)

We’ve had custom taxonomies for a while now and 3.0 gave us custom post types, but in 3.1 we get archives for the custom post types. The work around for this previously was to create a page template with a custom query and use that as your archive page. Now we get a new set of templates to work with archive-post_type.php where post_type is the name of the custom post type.

The Rest

Those are some of the big ones, but here’s the rest of the list from the Beta 1 announcement:

  • Post Formats (#14746) is kind of cool. It takes the idea of “Asides” and makes them officially supported with any crazy hacks. It really becomes cool when you make special post types for photo galleries or videos. This is something that I’d consider adding to my blog to bring t.joshbetz.com right into my main blog. I think of it as the “Tumblr” feature.
  • Theme Search (#14936)
  • Internal Linking (#11420) means you don’t have to go out to your homepage and do a search or go to google everytime you want to cross link to another post. When you click the link button in the post editor, there’s a search built into the dialog.
  • Ajaxified Admin (#14579)
  • Updated Tiny MCE (#12574)
  • Multi-taxonomy Queries (#12891) are huge for developers as WordPress becomes more popular as a full CMS. Custom taxonomies and post types really let us include rich metadata in posts, and being able to query against that is huge.
  • Admin CSS Cleanup (#14770)
  • User Admin (#14696)
  • Password Reset Redux (#5919)