MacManX.com » General

2011 in review

James — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:22:17 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Filed under: General, Technology, WordPress

A Slight Design Tweak

James — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:42:05 +0000

After spending several months with Twenty Eleven’s awesome out-of-the-box looks, I finally decided to drop in a few tweaks. What you see before you now is almost entirely the result of Twenty Eleven’s built-in theme options, with absolutely no CSS work, and a few custom fonts.

With the built-in options, I set the background and link color to the shade of blue that my previous themes used and “borrowed” the background image from Fruit Shake for some extra texture. I didn’t tweak any of the CSS this time, but I did add a Custom Design upgrade to utilize Snicker for the headers and Ubuntu for the body text.

Filed under: General

San Francisco Road Trip

James — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:55:30 +0000

After having so much fun at WordCamp San Francisco, my wife and I decided to head out on a road trip back up to San Francisco, California. Along the way to San Francisco, we stopped for hiking in Aptos, our main hotel in Burlingame (right across the bay from SFO for some great airplane shots), Golden Gate Park (and the Conservatory of Flowers for some great close-up shots), the Automattic office, the Palace of Fine Arts, Coit Tower, and finally Solvang to see just how easy it is to turn a historic Danish community into an outdoor shopping mall.

For some reason, the auto-focus on my old camera decided that it was done with this world after the WordCamp trip, so I made this trip with my shiny new Nikon P500 and wound up with a ton of great photos to share. Feel free to also check out my roadtrip2011 tag for some more photos via my iPhone and the WordPress app’s awesome Quick Photo feature.

Filed under: General, Nostalgia

Disappointed by the Non-Rapture?

James — Sat, 28 May 2011 20:38:31 +0000

If you were disappointed by non-Rapture b/c you think heaven would be better than this Earth, get off your ass & do something to improve it!—
Jane Wells (@janeforshort) May 23, 2011

‘Nuff Said

Filed under: General

Austrian Kangaroo

James — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:25:06 +0000

As promised, here’s the only Kangaroo that I have seen in Austria so far.

Filed under: General

I Saw a Kangaroo

James — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:25:07 +0000

Despite all of my joking, I did actually see a kangaroo in Austria.—
James Huff (@MacManXcom) February 22, 2011

Unfortunately, pictures will have to wait until I get back, unless I can find a place nearby that sells SD card readers.

Filed under: General

Off to Vienna

James — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 19:35:00 +0000

I’m off to spend a week with the rest of the Happiness Engineers in Vienna, as we work together to improve your WordPress.com experience.

If you’re curious about why we travel to work together, check out this great article about what goes on behind the scenes.

Filed under: General

Clean Desk

James — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 06:40:09 +0000

Today marks the first day that my desk has been clean since the day we moved, so I figured I’d share a photo of this monumental occasion.

To the left is the Automattic holiday card that serves as inspiration through the work day, my iMac obviously dominates the center of the desk, and my trusty sonic screwdriver is to the right should I find myself in any impossible situations.

Filed under: General

New Car

James — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:11:25 +0000

After six years of loyal service, my 2005 Toyota Prius began to show signs of transmission failure. Considering the car was over six years old and had about 75,000 miles with a failing transmission, I figured that it was time to take Toyota up on their 0.9% promotional APR on a new 2010 Prius.

The new Prius has tons of cool features, and the most advanced hybrid system yet. I’ve already improved my fuel economy over the old Prius by at least 5 MPG, which is great for the environment and my wallet. Of course, the coolest thing about the new car is that it’s “almost-WordPress” blue!

Filed under: General

Welcome to WordPress.com

James — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:59:59 +0000

Those of you who are kind enough to have subscribed to this humble blog may have noticed a few new posts suddenly appear. That’s because I have officially merged MacManX.com with my very short-lived MacManX on Music blog. After all, there really was no reason to divide my efforts like that. But, the merger wasn’t the big change.

MacManX.com is no longer a self-hosted WordPress blog under A Small Orange. It is now officially a WordPress.com blog. Don’t get me wrong, A Small Orange has been a terrific host, and I still have quite a few sites hosted with them. The decision to move was made for a few reasons:

Having my blog on WordPress.com shows that I have entrusted my own blog to the very system that I support.
Blogging on WordPress.com allows me to get a better feel for what I’m supporting every day.
I was growing tired of updating plugins and finding replacements for abandoned plugins. WordPress.com has all the features that I need, and they are maintained on a constant basis.
A Small Orange was a wonderful host, and the server that I was on was no exception, but it pales in comparison to WordPress.com’s multiple datacenters, could-powered system, multi-layer caching, and the fact that I know everyone here by name.

The only notable loss was my custom theme, courtesy of fellow Automattician Joen, but I’ll be leveraging our available themes and Custom CSS to make something truly unique over the next few months. If you’re curious, feel free to browse the gallery of past MacManX.com themes.

Thanks to the wonders of domain mapping, everything should be exactly as it was, which means you won’t need to resubscribe, but I do have a handy email subscription button in the sidebar now if that’s your thing.

So, how did I move? Well, it was a lot easier than I thought. The hardest part was editing all of my video posts to use our quick embed technique for YouTube and Vimeo, rather than their native embed codes, before exporting. After that, I simply exported MacManX.com, imported it to the former MacManX on Music, changed the name, deleted a few obsolete pages, and mapped my domain. Domain changes can take up to 72 hours (though usually much less) to propagate to your ISP, but thanks to OpenDNS, I was up in a matter of minutes.

I’ve been through big moves like this before, so I’m sure there may be a few broken links hiding in the corners. If you find any, please let me know!

P.S. With this blog post, I have now officially entered the Post a Day challenge. Let’s see how long that lasts.

Filed under: General, Technology, WordPress