Sarah Gooding’s “Last Call” at WP Tavern

WordPress has been an important part of my life for the last decade or more. I’m not sure when exactly, but I’ve been subscribed to WP Tavern for a long time now, and it has been an excellent source of news and updates about what’s been happening in the world of WordPress — everything from plugin acquisitions and notable theme releases to security breaches and fixes and other updates. Many of my favorite or most memorable articles were written by Sarah Gooding.

Unfortunately, Sarah has posted possibly her last article on the site, titled “Last Call“. She writes,

This has been an emotional, bittersweet morning for me, reading through old posts, as I close the book on my time at this beloved publication. Today is my last day before moving on to embrace a new challenge in the world of tech.  

In 2013, the year I started writing at the Tavern, just 17.4% of the web was running on WordPress, but the momentum I felt at that last WordCamp San Francisco was intoxicating and undeniable. It marked the ascendency of the global WordPress community and the move to embrace new tools like Slack and GitHub for contributing to core.

At that time, one frustrating thing I frequently heard was “It’s just WordPress, don’t take it so seriously.” Yet there we were, standing on the edge of an amazing acceleration of WordPress’ adoption and expansion of the ecosystem that brought meaningful work to millions and gave people a voice on the web. It was never “just WordPress” to me. As the software enters its third decade, powering 43% of the world’s websites, WordPress continues to be an irrepressible force of good on the web. I’d like to think the Tavern had a small part in that.

WP Tavern has been a fantastic place to get a no-nonsense feed of excellent articles and many of them were written by Sarah herself. I’m actually feeling sad knowing that Matt doesn’t have a ready replacement for Sarah yet, and I’m definitely going to miss Sarah’s content.

November 28, 2023 ✚ Permalink

A Review of BSG Stay, Turtle Beach, Morjim Hotel in Goa

This past week, I went on a small, long-pending, post-Diwali vacation to Goa. It was splendid, and gave me a much-needed break from the routines. We spent our time in North Goa, in Morjim. Although the trip was fantastic, we had a terrible time at the hotel stay we had chosen, which was ‘BSG Stay, Turtle Beach, Morjim‘. While it’s a good-looking hotel in the pictures, the ground reality is vastly different. A whole lot of things went wrong in our experience and I wanted to post a review about it on Google. Unfortunately, Google won’t publish the review I wrote for this listing, so I’m posting it here instead. Hopefully it’ll help someone in case they are considering booking a stay at the BSG Stay Hotel at Morjim, Goa.

BSG Stay, Morjim (Goa) – A Detailed Review

Terrible place and piss poor service.

This place has decent quality rooms, but a lot of stuff is broken or not working and it goes unfixed for days due to the hotel’s bad service. Hot water system? Not working. Jet spray? Not working. Toilet seat? Broken. This is going to be a long and detailed review, so bear with me till the end as I cover some important points that you shouldn’t miss.

(more…)

November 22, 2023 ✚ Permalink

Tata to make iPhones in India

Manish Singh, writing for TechCrunch:

Tata Group will start making iPhones in India for the local and global markets, India’s Deputy IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Friday, after the Taiwanese firm Wistron entered a deal with the salt-to-tech conglomerate.

Tata Group has acquired Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Pvt for $125 million, the Taiwanese firm said in a stock exchange filing. Wistron said it finalized the deal after strategic considerations in response to the reshaping of the firm’s global manufacturing strategy.

October 27, 2023 ✚ Permalink

Adding ActivityPub Support to this WordPress Site

I just installed and enabled this fantastic ActivityPub WordPress plugin by Matthias Pfefferle & team Automattic on this blog. You should be able to follow new posts published here going forward by searching for the following user in your favorite Mastodon or Fediverse app of choice.

@[email protected]

Do let me know at https://mastodon.social/@preshit if it works!

September 27, 2023 ✚ Permalink

Twitter Auto-Sharing Feature Discontinued in Jetpack WordPress Plugin

Kristina P, writing on the official Jetpack blog, in a post titled “The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing”:

Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

This was bound to happen, and we’ll be seeing many more such announcements in the coming days.

May 2, 2023 ✚ Permalink

GoDaddy is Retiring the Media Temple Brand

I missed this news last month:

For the past 24 years, Media Temple dedicated itself to serving the needs of the digital creative community. Thus, our mantra—for creatives, by creatives.  This mantra led to our decision that now is the time to retire the Media Temple brand and fully integrate into GoDaddy.

GoDaddy acquired Media Temple back in 2013, so props to them for keeping the brand alive all these years. Media Temple was not only one of the best places to host your websites before the acquisition, but also one of the coolest brands to be a part of. Just having the (mt) branding on your website was like a stamp that you were serious about your website.

It’s a shame that they had to go with GoDaddy — I still think GoDaddy is one of the scummiest companies around.

January 18, 2023 ✚ Permalink

IFFI 2022 jury head calls The Kashmir Files ‘propaganda, vulgar movie’

All of us were disturbed and shocked by the 15th film, The Kashmir Files. That felt like a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival.

Yikes!

November 29, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Apple reports "all-time revenue record" from India

Apple reported their quarterly results for Q4’22 yesterday and the folks at Six Colors have published their transcript of the call that Tim Cook and Luca Maestri have with analysts.

During the call, Apple mentioned that the company saw double-digit grown in India and iPhone growth was “impressive”.

iPhone Revenue grew 10% year over year to a September quarter record of 42.6 billion despite significant foreign exchange headwinds. We set September quarter records in the vast majority of markets we track, and our performance was particularly impressive in several large emerging markets with India setting a new all-time revenue record and Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mexico more than doubling year over year. Thanks to our strong iPhone lineup, we set a quarterly record for upgraders and grew switchers double digits. This level of sales performance, along with unmatched customer loyalty, drove the active installed base of iPhones to a new all time high across all geographic segments.

(Emphasis mine.)

No surprises here. The iPhone continues to get more expensive in India, yet more people continue to buy it every year.

October 28, 2022 ✚ Permalink