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.

• March 18th, 2011

  YouTube Comment Snob is now Comment Snob

  In which I write a Brita filter for the Web.

• April 26th, 2008

  YouTube Comment Snob updated

  YouTube Comment Snob is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that allows you to filter YouTube comments based on spelling, capitalization, and punctuation usage. I’ve updated YouTube Comment Snob to work with YouTube’s latest redesign, as well as to add compatibility for Firefox 3. It’s available for download from the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox until [...]

• August 28th, 2007

  Filter YouTube comments by spelling mistakes

  I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has noticed that the discussion threads at YouTube typically contain a low percentage of quality comments. Earlier this week, I remarked to a co-worker that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be able to filter the comments based on the number of spelling mistakes made [...]

• August 22nd, 2007

  TubeStop also stops YouTube ads

  The TubeStop Firefox extension that I wrote in order to stop YouTube videos from auto-playing also has the serendipitous side-effect of removing ads from YouTube videos. Since YouTube is only serving ads through the player on their main site, and not on the embeddable/syndicated player, and TubeStop works by replacing YouTube’s native player with the [...]

• July 8th, 2007

  TubeStop updated

  I’ve updated the TubeStop Firefox extension to work with YouTube videos that have embedding disabled (like this one of Ben Folds covering Elton John). Since TubeStop replaces the auto-playing video with the non-auto-playing embeddable version, these videos were not being properly replaced. You can install TubeStop from the TubeStop homepage. What is TubeStop? It’s an [...]

• June 26th, 2007

  Time well spent

  Check out my brother Jacob’s home-brewed Simpsons Movie trailer. If YouTube (and home computers capable of producing video) had been around when I was 13, I think this is very similar to something I would have done. Instead, my sister Gina and I made fake radio shows using the WAV recorder that comes with Windows [...]

• May 28th, 2007

  TubeStop extended to non-YouTube sites

  TubeStop was mentioned today on the the Global Geek Podcast, and the main drawback discussed was that it doesn’t disable the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on other sites. I’ve added this feature and subsequently released TubeStop 1.1. You can install TubeStop 1.1 from the TubeStop homepage. TubeStop is a browser extension that stops YouTube [...]

• May 19th, 2007

  TubeStop

  My latest browser extension, TubeStop, is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube.com videos. This means that you can open YouTube videos in multiple tabs without them all starting to play at once. Currently, this extension only works on videos at YouTube.com, not on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com websites [...]