Less Talk, More Do

I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

• December 10th, 2010

  Using Google Chrome-style locales in Firefox extensions

  In which I simplify cross-browser extension translation.

• November 22nd, 2010

  What kind of traffic is driven by a single mention of a domain on network TV?

  In which I register BeardGuru.com.

• September 13th, 2010

  My experience with developing a freemium browser add-on

  In which I discover that selling something that used to be free is hard.

• June 1st, 2010

  Blast from the past: The Humor Archive

  There’s no point to this post; it’s just a collection of memories I have about launching one of my first websites. The first website I ever built was called “The Humor Archive:” It went online in late 1999 at the URL http://ticon.net/~finke/. The motivation behind the building of the site was that our ISP offered [...]

• February 27th, 2010

  Making Add-on/User Communication Less Annoying

  When a new user downloads TwitterBar, there are a number of things I want them to know or questions I want to ask them. So what is the best method to communicate with an add-on user? The solution I’ve been using for a while is to pop up a dialog like this: There are several [...]

• January 30th, 2010

  Uploading form data and files with JavaScript (Mozilla)

  One problem I stumble across occasionally in writing Firefox extensions is properly uploading form data that includes a file – that is, assembling the POST request in JavaScript while still maintaining the sanctity of any file or string data. You can’t just do this: var request = "--boundary\r\n some text\r\n--boundary" + fileBytes + "\r\n--boundary--"; I [...]

• May 16th, 2009

  Wolfram Alpha

  Wolfram|Alpha, the new computational knowledge engine, seems like it has a lot of potential. But for some reason, I’m not so sure about its mathematical abilities: For more information on Wolfram Alpha, here’s Mahalo’s Wolfram Alpha page: Wolfram Alpha Embed this widget See full results for Wolfram Alpha

• March 19th, 2009

  Retweeting in Python

  My friend Eliot has been running a retweet bot named @SanMo for some time that is designed to serve Twitter users in the Santa Monica, California area by allowing them to broadcast tweets to other Santa Monica-area users without explicitly friending them. He wrote up the full details of the service and the script behind [...]