From our site’s first post:

This is the new web-based home of Jude & Mark. Our family has recently expanded and now includes an aging golden retriever and three-mode newborn baby boy, Benjamin.

We’ve got family and friends scattered around the world, and we will be using this fancy little website to broadcast news, photography, and more from our home at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Enjoy!

It’s not surprising because I never really understood Twitter from the beginning. I never learned what “RT” meant, why a “#” was prepended to certain words, and why Direct Messages only showed up in my email. For the 195 Tweets I posted, I can only think of a few instances when I had something to say in less than Twitter’s max 140 character limit. I followed acquaintances on Twitter — people I knew but don’t know — as well as real-life friends. I can’t knock it (I don’t think) because Twitter has millions of users who seem to Tweet all day and all night. But something’s wrong. Twitter’s two founders can’t figure out how they’re going to make money off their invention. Pogue can’t figure it out. And there are rules and snobs. It’s just too much.

In the end, I’m with Pogue: it’s just another time drain.

More at BraveNewCode.com.

Since I started using Mint, I'm now past the 10k mark.

Introducing the first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in just seconds. 

via TUAW.

I’m still running WordPress — which is even better than ever now in version 2.6 — and have applied WP Super Cache for public-facing pages, plus Google Gears for local “turbo” mode. Overall, the pages are on this new site are startling fast. The Flickr photos in my footer are cached smartly, too, thanks to FlickrRSS.

The biggest switch of all is the move to a new domain: markhealey.org. I own the .com and the .net variations, but the .org suffix is most perfectly suited to this new site. It was fairly easy setting up .htaccess files to handle the heavy lifting for the many hundred of permanent redirects needed to get from markhealey.net to markhealey.org. One side affect of this switch, is that your RSS reader might show a few dozen “new” posts — sorry ’bout that. There shouldn’t be a single hiccup but be sure to let me know if you experience any issues. 

Drop me a line and let me know what you think of the new digs. The old site now lives at v4.markhealey.net.

It’s timely because Zimbabweans went to the polls today (7am local time) to “vote” for only one man on the ballot.

Photographing a Wedding and then an Earthquake

Can you imagine what it was like to have been photographing a wedding in Sichuan, China when 7.9 earthquake hit and shakes for three minutes? (via Kottke and un.be.lievable)

Zappos.com’s unique hiring price includes “The Offer”

“If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit! (also via Kottke, The Master of the Setup)

Xcel Energy’s First Ever “Smart Grid”, right here in Boulder, CO

Fascinating.

Practical Traveler

It’s no wonder that a lot of travelers are talking about just staying home this summer.

AfriGadget.com

An entire website dedicated to African ingenuity… and how everyday problems are solved. Africans are the masters of making something entirely useful out of nothing at all.

American Airlines to charge $15 for checked luggage

An announcement today made by AA comes at a time when crude closes at an all-time high ($133), and the DOW is down 200 points two days in a row. Forget that it’s a fucking stupid idea to begin with… planes are over-crowded as they are and now everyone is going to carry-on hand luggage. The Times has more.

1. Use them to store loose change.
2. Drill holes in the red bottles and use as hummingbird feeders.
3. Fill with dirt and plant flowers or use as a vase.
4. Store nails, screws, and more.
5. Recycle. Many recycling centers now accept these #7 plastics.

I was anxiously awaiting the release of WordPress 2.5 and after taking less than 10 minutes to upgrade, the collective fraternity of coders and designers at Automattic and Happy Cog didn’t disappoint. After a momentary refresher course of what my plugin installation looked like, I added a few more from Mike D’s list and I’m off and running.

Look for more soon.

Just go: http://tumble.markhealey.com or grab the feed.

Forgive me if I sound harsh, but if your skill set is basically HTML and CSS, then I think you are worth maybe twelve bucks an hour. HTML and CSS are extremely simple languages anyone can learn in a weekend by picking up a good book or two.
…
So what is valuable? Judgement. Logic. Creativity. Ability to learn quickly. Ability to work under pressure. Experience. Empathy. Design theory. Design history. Opinions. Decisions. And so on. I’d like to think that a good 80% of what my employer pays me for is for these things. Hopefully only a small percentage of my salary is because I know CSS and Photoshop.

Via Inman.

One of the first posts, “New Space“, shows off Wall Street On Demand’s newest digs. The company is growing at a sizable pace, and overflowing into this new office was natural — or so I’m told (I started here just days after the official move-in). Our creative director said:

It was interesting to take an IA perspective to physical architecture and design the space from a usability perspective. Our goals were to foster communication, help make new relationships, provide quiet in the storm, and give people a workspace that was professional (sorry, no dot-com foosball tables) while being adaptable and flexible to the myriad of uses that our team finds for their space.

We tried for art gallery + laboratory + library.

Check it out.

Another cool thing about the casing is that if you hold the iPhone correctly in bright sunlight, you can shine the reflective Apple logo onto a wall like the Batman symbol. I played around with this for about 20 minutes on the seatback in front of me on a recent plane ride. The person next to me didn’t get it.

I’m still laughing. This guy cracks me up.

For now, note my RSS 2 feed has changed location:

http://markhealey.org/feed/rss2/

Wrong. Not a single link was appearing on my site. Oddly, no MySQL or PHP errors were thrown; the template tags get_links() just weren’t rendering my list items.

Here’s the deal: Running upgrade.php moved all my link categories into the global category table and gave them new primary keys. Of course I didn’t even think about the category ids in my queries (why force this change in the DB without telling us?), but I soon realized what the problem was, and turned back to my templates, swapped out the old link category ids for the new global category ids, and voila!

Now that MediaTemple has sorted out their MySQL issues, and WP 2.1′s now cruising on a faster code-base — overall — my site is performing better.

Life is good.

“With a near obsession to figure out how to offer reliable, high-performing, low-cost MySQL services, the (mt) Media Temple GRID architects went back to the whiteboard to completely redevelop the database strategy. What resulted is a new container system which will give each GRID customer their own dedicated MySQL server. This is great news for our customers because they will now have their own unshared copy of MySQL with their own dedicated RAM and CPU space which allows for a more stable, predictable, understandable MySQL application environment.”

Finally.

This version, fourth in the latest collection of WordPress-driven sites, is full of fresh code, content, photos, and — most importantly — me. If you want yours to go, I’ve even worked in a smooth print style sheet (but please print to PDF and save some paper if you’re just testing).

Since I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for the past few weeks, I have a backlog of great posts for my blog I’ll roll out soon. Stay tuned.

As time ticks later here on the east coast and my original content engine is in the garage for the night, I wanted to quickly tout a new forum package delivered as my early Christmas present from the folks over at WordPress. Called bbPress, they say it’s “simple, fast, elegant” — and from the less-than-3-minutes it took me to install it and give it a quick test drive, the software is certainly all that.

I’ve got a client that could use something just like this as their phpBB install is bloated and plagued with SPAM. I’m not going to hold out for bbPress’ coming-soon template system — I think I’ll dive right in and get customizing.

This is a colossal moment in this nation’s history. In 1967, the U.S. population was a mere 200 million and it’s only taken 39 years to reach a third of a billion. CNN, the New York Times, and many other prominent news agencies published editorials discussing the growing population and the shrinking landscape all asking one simple question: where is everyone going to fit? Like many, I certainly don’t have the answer, but some of that wide-open farm land in the west is looking mighty tasty.

In today’s world there’s living and dying. And, for some, it’s not all it should be. See below in this edition of Monday’s links:

This American Life: Then & Now

By the numbers, with pictures. CNN.com

Bono launches U.S. Red campaign for AIDS in Africa

Red iPods, cell phones, t-shirts, shoes and more. All for the fight against AIDS.

To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered

I’m married, and I love it. But for the first time ever, us folks who are hitched are in the minority.

A Soldier comes home, too early yet too late

The war in Iraq reaches all the way to the farthest stretches of the U.S., in Barrow, Alaska

For many, Zeldman is their leader. He’s done so much for this industry over the years; he has essentially set the standard for the way the world should build websites. Seemingly countless people have jumped onboard the accessibility bandwagon—myself included—and now produce sites using nothing except pure CSS and the ever-accessible XHTML. I applaud what Jeffrey has been able to accomplish, especially against odds as big as Microsoft’s world domination campaign (read: Internet Explorer). Basically, the guy just kicks ass when it comes to this web stuff.

But this is where it gets weird for me.

“After 4 years, I’m still blogging, but not as often. And I have to admit that usually I’d rather be doing something else like being with my family. It makes me feel better to know that you–whom I’ve looked up to for a long time–feel the same way.”Andy

Evidently, Zeldman’s had a child. Or a second one. I don’t really know. But, he wrote in “Blahg” that he’s now going to spend more time with his family than with his blog. And you know what? That’s fantastic. I’m thrilled for him. What’s more important than family? Apparently, though, there were a couple of folks just waiting for this news to break. As of 8:30 this morning, 35 people had replied all pretty much saying the same thing: they were done blogging, too. It didn’t take very long for Kim Krause Berg tell the world she didn’t need her blog anymore. And Andy Knight said:

“After 4 years, I’m still blogging, but not as often. And I have to admit that usually I’d rather be doing something else like being with my family. It makes me feel better to know that you–whom I’ve looked up to for a long time–feel the same way.�

Huh. Okay, Andy. I guess this isn’t as surprising as I originally thought. People have been following this guy for a long time now. Why should today be different? I wonder if the blogosphere is seeing the light at the end of its tunnel.

As for me, will I keep blogging? My blog is entitled “Often Daily”, and I suppose it’ll continue to be just that — once in a while, a few times a week, or maybe not. Tomorrow’s a new day, the sun will rise, and anything’s possible. For now, I’m headed back outside and away from this blog.