Chris Messina

WP-Imagefit proportionally resizes images to fit your blog template

I’m happy to announce the release of my second ever WordPress plugin called WP-Imagefit. (My first, which I’ve neglected for sometime, is called WP-Microformatted-Blogroll).

WP-Imagefit is extremely simple and serves one purpose: to get images in blog posts to fit inside the columns that contain them. In fact, this plugin is used on this blog, so if you see ever images load wider than the column and then quickly snap to fit the container’s width, it’s this plugin that’s doing that.

I originally discovered this trick thanks to Oliver Boermans‘ NetNewsWire Ollicle Reflex style. Working together, he extracted the resizing code into a jQuery plugin called jquery.imagefit.js and made it available to me for use in my EasyReader NetNewsWire theme.

I had hacked it to work for my blog theme but decided that I should turn it into a WordPress plugin so I could use it elsewhere (and given that CSS’s max-width attribute not only wasn’t cross-browser, but also shrunk images horizontally, I needed a better solution). So, there you have it.

Go ahead and download it. Installation and setup is standard as long as you have an hAtom-compliant theme like K2 or Sandbox.

I have a WordPress.org project page setup, the source is available (released under GPL), and if you want something to look at it, here’s the official homepage.

Feedback/feature requests/patches certainly appreciated and encouraged!

Apple source code pointing to social features?

File this in the wild conjecture/handy-waving category.

I did some random digging today and stumbled upon something that could be pretty interesting, or, could be nothing more than the equivalent of the human appendix of Leopard: remnants of a good idea that somehow along the way never got completed, but traces of it still exist in the modern state for no apparent reason than to confuse and confound those with too many mental faculties at his disposal.

But let’s go with the what if? take. What with my interest in getting people into software in interesting ways, this one seems, like cave paintings, to point to earlier attempts at some fundamental type of expression of a very contemporary idea.

Anyway, the thing is this. While poking around Articles.js in Leopard’s PubSub.framework (you’ll need to be running Leopard for the Articles.js link), I noted a call to a couple functions having to do with FOAF, in particular function loadFOAF( ) and function receivedFOAF( html ). I talked to Tantek about this and apparently it had to do with some misbegotten effort to bring FOAF support to Safari but that it was effectively stillborn for reasons I can’t recall, but what was interesting was that, tucked away, I discovered a seemingly orphaned file called Friends.html (again, Leopard only).

This got me curious.

I started poking around the PubSub.framework for other clues… (And so you know, the Leopard PubSub.framework is effectively a system-level toolkit for subscribing to RSS and ATOM feeds and maintaining read/unread status universally — something that Windows Vista also apparently has. In any case it’s pretty cool, and it’s also new with Leopard).

So, after poking about, I eventually ended up here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/PubSub.framework/Versions/A/Headers

Within this directory is a file called PSAuthor.h and its contents are quite intriguing. The file describes a class of object called ABPerson (short for “Address Book person”). The various properties of an “ABPerson” are summarily listed, primarily pulled from the ATOM spec: things such as name, email and URL. There is also a conspicuous method at the end of the file called person, which is not listed in the docs, and which is apparently used to associate an author of a web feed with a person from the Apple Address Book. This is huge. Let me pull the method in its entirety:


/*
    @method     person
    @abstract   Returns the Address Book record associated with the receiver.
    @result     The associated record.
    @discussion Currently, associations to Address Book records must be made manually, by calling
                the setPerson: method. In the future, this method may attempt to locate a default ABPerson
                by looking up the email address or URL in the Address Book.
*/
@property (retain) ABPerson * person;

@end

Note the discussion: In the future, this method may attempt to locate a default ABPerson by looking up the email address or URL in the Address Book.

This means that Apple intends (or at least as far as I can make out from reading the tea leaves) to use the Address Book as a store for feed authors… and that — who knows — you may end up using your Address Book to read feeds from so-called “ABPersons” or, moreover, their interest in FOAF might have been a means to automagically grab your list of friends (say, from LiveJournal) to populate your Address Book — then, using ATOM discovery and the PubSub.framework, could have pulled in feed updates from all your friends, giving you effectively a local social network that could power — who knows what kinds of applications!

In any case, I could be totally off here, but there’s something in this… could it be somehow related to the Mail.app feedreader functionality? I’ll offer one more hint that seems to suggest that my Coverflow for People idea isn’t too far off… If you take a look deep in the QuickLook.framework directory you’ll find a couple of very curious images: Vcard16.png, Vcard32Base.png, Vcard32Border.png, Vcard128Base.png, Vcard128Border.png, Vcard512Base.png and Vcard512Border.png. There aren’t any other filetype-specific graphics in this directory, and yet QuickLook is useful for all kinds of files across the OS. Is it significant then, when I browse the Address Book Metadata that I get cards like this?

Privacy, publicity and open data

This one should be a quickie.

A fascinating article came out of CNN today: “Intelligence deputy to America: Rethink privacy“.

This is a topic I’ve had opinions about for some time. My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!).

Still, the more reading I’ve been doing lately about international issues and conflict, the more I agree with Danny Weitzner that there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep. He sums up the conversation space thus:

Privacy is not lost simply because people find these services useful and start sharing location. Privacy could be lost if we don’t start to figure what the rules are for how this sort of location data can be used. We’ve got to make progress in two areas:

technical: how can users sharing and usage preferences be easily communicated to and acted upon by others? Suppose I share my location with a friend by don’t want my employer to know it. What happens when my friend, intentionally or accidentally shares a social location map with my employer or with the public at large? How would my friend know that this is contrary to the way I want my location data used? What sorts of technologies and standards are needed to allow location data to be freely shared while respective users usage limitation requirements?

legal: what sort of limits ought there to be on the use of location data?

can employers require employees to disclose real time location data?

is there any difference between real-time and historical location data traces? (I doubt it)

under what conditions can the government get location data?

There’s clearly a lot to think about with these new services. I hope that we can approach this from the perspective that lots of location data will being flowing around and realize the the big challenge is to develop social, technical and legal tools to be sure that it is not misused.

I want to bring some attention to his first point about the technical issues surrounding New Privacy. This is the realm where we play, and this is the realm where we have the most to offer. This is also an area that’s the most contentious and in need of aggressive policies and leadership, because the old investment model that treats silos of data as gold mines has to end.

I think Tim O’Reilly is really talking about this when he lambasts Google’s OpenSocial, proclaiming, “It’s the data, stupid!” The problem of course is what open data actually means in the context of user control and ownership, in terms of “licensing” and in terms of proliferation. These are not new problems for technologists as permissioning dates back to the earliest operating systems, but the problem becomes infinitely complex now that it’s been unbounded and non-technologists are starting to realize a) how many groups have been collecting data about them and b) how much collusion is going on to analyze said data. (Yeah, those discounts that that Safeway card gets you make a lot more money for Safeway than they save you, you better believe it!)

With Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, taking an equally pessimistic (or Apocalyptic) attitude about privacy, I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly. In another post, I talked about the value of this data — calling it “Data Capital“. People need to realize the massive amount of value that their data adds to the bottom line of so many major corporations (not to mention Web 2.0 startups!) and demand ongoing and persistent access to it. Hell, it might even result in better or more accurate data being stored in these mega-databases!

Regardless, when representatives from the government start to say things like:

Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all, said Kerr, 68. Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that.

Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety, Kerr said. I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.

…you know that it’s time we started framing the debate on our own terms… thinking about what this means to the Citizen Centric Web and about how we want to become the gatekeepers for the data that is both rightfully ours and that should willfully be put into the service of our own needs and priorities.

Vulnerability in WP Super Cache v0.1

Sometime yesterday morning I logged into my TextDrive account to make some more changes to my blog template and noticed two odd folders in my blog root directory called rh4m4.t35.com and www.kolortavil.org. I believe that the folders were empty, but nevertheless, it was clear that someone had broken into my site.

I deleted the suspicious folders and quickly reviewed the changes I’d made the day before and realized that the culprit was probably wp-super-cache, a new WordPress plugin that I’d installed the night before. I went ahead and disabled and then deleted the plugin (taking care to delete the supercache folder in /wp-content/cache/) and notified Joyent customer support (transcript and notes here) and Donncha Caoimh, the developer. I also twittered about the incident.

Sometime later I saw that Stephanie Sullivan had replied to me letting me know that Tiffany Brown was having a similar experience (though with greater consequence) and a report in the WordPress forums. Both Kristie Wells from Joyent and Donncha got back to me, the former confirming my suspicion that it was some kind of PHP Injection vulnerability and the latter asking for additional information.

This morning I found Chris Heilmann’s post on the subject confirming my concerns:

…Checking the folders created I found the same two injection attempts Tiffany mentioned. The caching allowed code injected as txt urls via “i” or “s” parameters to be executed.

In my case I found that half my server was mirrored into the supercache folder in the plugin’s cache folder. Not good.

I was happy to see that my etc folder and other more interesting bits were not reached yet before I deactivated the plugin. Right now I am playing grepmaster to see if there are some injections left. My action: deactived and deleted all caching plugins and their cache folders (best via SSH as FTP is a PITA with so many files).

I’ve now been in touch with Barry from Automattic and have followed up with Donncha, who have both been very patient and helpful in parsing through my logs trying to replicate the vulnerability.

The most likely culprit is an unquoted ABSPATH in v0.1 of the plugin. According to Donncha, “The ABSPATH part of the WPCACHEHOME definition could possibly have expanded when it was being written to the file. Unfortunately it wasn’t quoted so that may have done strange things to other variables like $cache_path. Barry says that the problem, though annoying, is just a bug and was likely just a misdirected attack on potentially vulnerably Drupal sites and that it won’t do more than create some benign directories in a WordPress install. Fortunately v0.3 of the plugin seems to have resolved the problem; meanwhile you can download or checkout the latest development version that corrects the ABSPATH issue.

I’ve written up my experience so far and let others know to watch out for irregularities if they choose to install the wp-super-cache plugin. I’m actually going to give the latest version another go and will report any problems here should I experience any.

While I’m at it, I’d like to point out the important role that Twitter and personal blogs played in tracking this down; and that Joyent support, Barry from Automattic and Donncha himself all played supportive roles in resolving this issue.

Coverflow for People

Ever since Apple bought Coverflow, I thought that it would make an awesome interface for browsing people. In fact, I had previously designed “people in the browser” for Flock to look something like this in the early days:

Of course, at the time, the design required a few things that we still lack, namely: 1) bigger default personal photos or avatars, 2) ubiquitous universal identifiers for people (this was before OpenID) 3) and free access to public data about people, typically found at the end of those identifiers.

Anyway, CoverFlow for people is something that I think could be a very powerful way of revealing “the ghosts in the machine” — across Leopard — or in interfaces generally. Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense. The new integrated Gtalk features in Gmail seem to be prioritizing your “Top 250”, so this is also something that could be added to the People Coverflow API without much trouble in order for the interface to scale accordingly. Anyone able to hack up a demo of this idea?

Apple Tablet Concept: the iPad Touch

I don’t really do much industrial design (there’s probably a good reason for that) but I couldn’t get over a niggling (though probably baseless) inkling that Apple will be coming out with a tablet this spring. I mean, if anyone can ship a tablet that’s not lame, it’ll be Apple. Besides that, there’s just too much evidence out there that suggests rather convincingly that Apple intends to put one out sooner or later (not that they haven’t tried before), so rather than sit around and wait, I thought I’d mockup what one of these devices might look like:

Here it is with the touch keyboard:

With a wireless keyboard:

And with CoverFlow™:

So, there were some other ideas I had about this too that venture into the realm of pure conjecture. I mean, I could have just blogged these ideas without pictures, but I think it’s certainly more compelling with them. Anyway:

The OS will actually use the same OS as the iPhone. I mean why else would they invest so much in a paired down OS if they’re only going to use it on one platform? Ludicrous! Instead, this device will basically be a glorified iPhone, just 2.5x the size. Here’s the kicker <wild conjecture>: the iPhone SDK was delayed in order for 1) Leopard to come out (so you wouldn’t write Tiger-apps for the iPhone) and 2) because this device will launch at MacWorld, and the iPhone SDK will work for the Apple iPad Touch as well.</wild conjecture> Pretty clever eh?
Just like the name implies, and just like its cousin the iPod Touch, this device is all about tactile user interface. There’s no solid state keyboard on this bad boy. Instead, it’s a pure software keyboard, able to be gloriously adapted and regiggered to fit the task at hand, or able to have key identifiers in any language imaginable. Heck, you could even have a Halo-specific keyboard with specific buttons for each type of grenade.
To add an additional Minority Report-quality to this device, Apple will probably introduce their own software-driven version of the clickwheel, and it’ll probably look something like the QuickSilver constellation menus or the new Sapiens app. This interface will be necessarily for navigating around without a Dock and without having to return to the home screen. And, don’t forget how good CoverFlow looks at larger sizes.
Although this device wouldn’t have a CD or DVD slot, it would still be an excellent device for movie playback (for all the movies you buy from the iTunes store, of course!). Imagine being cramped in an airplane seat — no more dinky iPod Video… and no more awkward 15″ laptop. You get a perfectly mobile, conveniently flat device for even the seats with the least legroom.
Speaking of the lack of optical drive (well, the bottom-loader theory is interesting)… this device is all about wireless, just like the iPod Touch. Fortunately it has all the same ports as the MacBook Pro, but is only as thick as the lower part of that system, given that the screen is just a thin layer above the inner workings.
There’s no mouse or touch pad on this device (though you can add a mouse via Bluetooth or USB). As with the Touch series, you interact with everything directly, rather than having the traditional out-of-body pointer experience.
Dashboard Widgets really get their due here with a souped up WebKit rendering engine — supporting CSS animation and transforms, downloadable fonts, offline storage (for those airplane rides, again) and SVG, not to mention a lot of Core Animation goodness. And yes, with the SDK, native apps will of course be possible.
Losing the optical drive helped another area that rocks with this device: battery life. It’d say 12 hours without too much trouble, thanks too to converting to flash drives.

So that’s about it. Part of this exercise was just to come up with a bunch of random ideas and see what other people think or what they want from an Apple tablet. If you ask me, less is more here; I don’t want just another Windows-style tablet with all the bells and whistles. I actually like my iPhone better without third-party apps. If Apple’s going to build the Apple iPad Touch (or whatever better name they come up with), I expect nothing less than a slick, streamlined experience that feels less like a computer and more like a lifestyle object.

Oh, and one more thing. 😉

This baby will retail at $699 for 32GB and $899 for 64GB (remember, flash drives are still pricey) available immediately (well, if I were speaking at MacWorld 2008 it would be…).

hCard for OpenID Simple Registration and Attribute Exchange

One of the many promises of OpenID is the ability to more easily federate profile information from an identity provider to secondary consumer applications. A simple example of this is when you fill out a basic personal profile on a new social network: if you’ve ever typed your name, birthday, address and your dog’s name into a form, why on earth would you ever have to type it again? Isn’t that what computers are for? Yeah, I thought so too, and that’s why OpenID — your friendly neighborhood identity protocol — has two competing solutions for this problem.

Unfortunately, both Simple Registration (SREG for short) and its potential successor Attribute Exchange (AX) go to strange lengths to reinvent the profile data wheel with their own exclusive formats. I’d like to propose a vast simplification of this problem by adopting attributes from the vCard standard (also known as RFC2426). As you probably know, it’s this standard that defines the attributes of the hCard microformat and therefore is exceptionally appropriate for the case of OpenID (given its reliance on URLs for identifiers!).

Very quickly, I’ll compare the attributes in each format so you get a sense for what data I’m talking about and how each format specifies the data:

Attribute	SREG	AX	vCard
Nickname	`openid.sreg.nickname`	`namePerson/friendly`	`nickname`
Full Name	`openid.sreg.fullname`	`namePerson`	`n (family-name, given-name)` or `fn`
Birthday	`openid.sreg.dob`	`birthDate`	`bday`
Gender	`openid.sreg.gender`	`gender`	`gender`
Email	`openid.sreg.email`	`contact/email`	`email`
Postal Code	`openid.sreg.postcode`	`contact/postalCode/home`	`postal-code`
Country	`openid.sreg.country`	`contact/country/home`	`country-name`
Language	`openid.sreg.language`	`pref/language`	N/A
Timezone	`openid.sreg.timezone`	`pref/timezone`	`tz`
Photo	N/A	`media/image/default`	`photo`
Company	N/A	`company/name`	`org`
Biography	N/A	`media/biography`	`note`
URL	N/A	`contact/web/default`	`URL`

Now, there are a number of other other attributes beyond what I’ve covered here that AX and vCard cover, often overlapping in the data being described, but not in attribute names. Of course, this creates a pain for developers who want to do the right thing and import profile data rather than having folks repeat themselves yet again. Do you support SREG? AX? hCard? All of the above?

Well, regular people don’t care, and shouldn’t care, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a trivial matter.

Instead, the barriers to doing the right thing should be made as low as possible. Given all the work that we’ve done promoting microformats and the subsequent widespread adoption of them (I’d venture that there are many million hcards in the wild), it only makes sense to leverage the upward trend in the adoption of hcard and to use it as a parallel partner in the OpenID-profile-exchange dance.

While AX is well specified, hCard is well supported (as well as well-specified). While AX is extensible, hCard is too. Most importantly, however, hcard and vcard is already widely supported in existing applications like Outlook, Mail.app and just about every mobile phone on the planet and in just about any other application that exchanges profile data.

So the question is, when OpenID is clearly a player in the future and part of that promise is about making things easier, more consistent and more citizen-centric, why would we go and introduce a whole new format for representing person-detail-data when a perfectly good one already exists and is so widely supported?

I’m hoping that reason and sense will prevail and that OpenID and hCard will naturally come together as two essential building blocks for independents. If you’re interested in this issue, please blog about it or express your support to specs@openid.net. I think the folks working on this spec need to hear from folks who make, create, build or design websites and who recognize the importance and validity of betting on, and support and adopting, microformats.

OpenSocial and Address Book 2.0: Putting People into the Protocol

I wonder if Tim O’Reilly knows something that he’s not telling the rest of us. Or maybe he knows something that the rest of us know, but that we haven’t been able to articulate yet. Who knows.

In any case, he’s been going on about this “Address Book 2.0” for awhile, and if you ask me, it has a lot to do with Google’s upcoming announcement of a set of protocols, formats and technologies they’ve dubbed OpenSocial.

[Aside: I’ll just point out that I like the fact that the name has “open” in it (even if “open” will be the catchphrase that replaces the Web 2.0 meme) because it means that in order to play along, you have to be some shade of open. I mean, if Web 2.0 was all about having lots of bits and parts all over the place and throwing them together just-in-time in the context of a “social” experience, then being “open” will be what separates those who are caught up and have been playing along from those who have been asleep at the wheel for the past four years. Being “open” (or the “most” open) is the next logical stage of the game, where being anything other than open will be met with a sudden and painless death. This is a good thing™ for the web, but remember that we’re in the infancy of the roll-out here, and mistakes (or brilliant insights) will define what kind of apps we’re building (or able to build) for the next 10 years.]

Let me center the context here. A few days ago, I wrote about putting people in the protocol. I was talking about another evolution that will come alongside the rush to be open (I should note that “open” is an ongoing process, not an endpoint in and of itself). This evolution will be painful for those who resist but will bring great advantage to those who embrace it. It’s pretty simple and if you ask me, it lies at the heart of Tim’s Address Book 2.0 and Google’s OpenSocial; in a word, it’s people.

Before I get into that, let me just point out what this is not about. Fortunately, in his assessment of “What to Look for from Google’s Social Networking Platform“, David Card at Jupiter Research spelled it out in blindingly incorrect terms:

As an analyst who used to have the word “Unix” on his business card, I’ve seen a lot of “open” “consortia” fail miserably. Regular readers know my Rule of Partnership: For a deal to be important, two of the following three must occur:

– Money must change hands
– There must be exclusivity
– Product must ship

“Open” “consortia” aren’t deals. That’s one of the reasons they fail. The key here would be “Product must ship.”

This completely misses the point. This is why the first bubble was so lame. So many people had third-world capital in their heads and missed what’s new: the development, accumulation and exchange of first-world social capital through human networks.

Now, the big thing that’s changed (or is changing) is the emphasis on the individual and her role across the system. Look at MyBlogLog. Look at Automattic’s purchase of Gravatar. Look at the sharp rise in OpenID adoption over the past two years. The future is in non-siloed living man! The future is in portable, independent identities valid, like Visa, everywhere that you want to be. It’s not just about social network fatigue and getting fed up with filling out profiles at every social network you join and re-adding all your friends. Yeah, those things are annoying but more importantly, the fact that you have to do it every time just to get basic value from each system means that each has been designed to benefit itself, rather than the individuals coming and going. The whole damn thing needs to be inverted, and like recently rejoined ant segments dumped from many an ant farm, the fractured, divided, shattered into a billion fragments-people of the web must rejoin themselves and become whole in the eyes of the services that, what else?, serve them!

Imagine this: imagine designing a web service where you don’t store the permanent records of facets of people, but instead you simply build services that serve people. In fact, it’s no longer even in your best interest to store data about people long term because, in fact, the data ages so rapidly that it’s next to useless to try to keep up with it. Instead, it’s about looking across the data that someone makes transactionally available to you (for a split second) and offering up the best service given what you’ve observed when similar fingerprint-profiles have come to your system in the past. It’s not so much about owning or storing Address Book 2.0 as much as being ready when all the people that populate the decentralized Address Book 2.0 concept come knocking at your door. Are you going to be ready to serve them immediately or asking them to fill out yet another profile form?

Maybe I’m not being entirely clear here. Admittedly, these are rough thoughts in my head right now and I’m not really self-editing. Forgive me.

But I think that it’s important to say something before the big official announcement comes down, so that we can pre-contextualize this and realize the shift that’s happening even as the hammer drops.

Look, if Google and a bunch of chummy chums are going to make available a whole slew of “social graph” material, we had better start realizing what this means. And we had better start realizing the value that our data and our social capital have in this new eco-system. Forget page views. Forget sticky eyeballs. With OpenID, with OAuth, with microformats, with, yes, with FOAF and other formats — hell with plain ‘ol scrapable HTML! — Google and co. will be amassing a social graph the likes of which has yet to be seen or twiddled upon (that’s a technical term). It means that we’re [finally] moving towards a citizen-centric web and it means great things for the web. It means that things are going to get interesting, for Facebook, for MySpace, for Microsoft, for Yahoo! (who recently closed 360, btw!) And y’know, I don’t know what Spiderman would think of OpenSocial or of what else’s coming down the pipe, but I’m sure in any case, he’d caution that, with great power comes great responsibility.

I’m certainly excited about this, but it’s not all about Google. Moreover, OpenSocial is simply an acknowledgment that things have to (and have) change(d). What comes next is anyone’s guess, but as far as I’m concerned, Tim’s been more or less in the ballpark so far, it just won’t necessarily be about owning the Address Book 2.0, but what it means when it’s taken for granted as a basic building block in the vast clockwork of the open social web.

This can all be made… awesome.

If you only read me on RSS, you may never have seen the smirk of a catch phrase I use on this blog. If you haven’t, it’s been “This can all be made better. Ready? Begin.” for some time. I don’t know how I came up with it, but since blogs have this weird tradition of having a catch phrase, I grabbed that one and it stuck.

Anyway, I dunno, “better” sounds kind of assumptively pejorative, as though achieving satisfaction is off limits. That you always have to be improving things; never enjoying.

Whatever, it’s not a big deal. So, taking a line from Threadless, my catch phrase will now be: This can all be made awesome. Ready? Begin.

Raw Materials

I thought I’d start a new category on my blog (not that they’re exposed in my current theme, but whatever) called “Raw Materials”.

I oftentimes have thought fragments or observations that seem to be part of bigger trends or ideas that I don’t tend to blog about because they’re not substantial or clear enough to warrant a full post. But then later on, I realize that it would have been helpful to be able to cite earlier pieces of my thinking that lead to the current revelation.

Rather than simply collecting Asides (as Matt does), I want to record, primarily for my own sake, where my head’s at and what’s filtering in to it. I mean, I could use Twitter for this, but sometimes, well, I have a little more to say than fits in 140 characters.