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My friend Jesse left me a voicemail on my Google voice number. Here’s a demo of the fantastic transcription feature.

Voicemail from Jesse from mitcho on Vimeo.

Every website has a purpose. Maybe you want people to buy a product, donate to your cause, download your app, or subscribe to your mailing list. How can you confidently modify your site to make it more effective with respect to this goal?

A/B testing is a process by which multiple variants of a website are presented to different users randomly and statistical tools are used to see whether any variant is more effective, according to an overall goal metric such as conversions or revenue.

While various A/B testing products—many free—exist, none are made from the ground up to work within the WordPress ecosystem. I believe a solution made particularly for WordPress could make A/B testing so much easier and more straightforward, and that such a solution could be greatly beneficial to the platform as a whole.

I’m happy to announce my new project, code-named ShrimpTest,¹ which is directly aimed at filling this void. I’ll be working on this project this summer together with the fantastic folks at Automattic.

The best way to keep up with development is on the project’s development blog, the ShrimpTest P2. Most updates will most likely be much shorter than this initial post. You can get less frequent, milestone-like updates by following ShrimpTest on twitter. Development will be open so feel free to check it out (haha) and submit patches as well. As I go along, I’ll also look forward to your feedback.

Everyone I know in linguistics uses the LINGUIST List website to a greater or lesser degree. Linguist List began as a mailing list in the 90’s, with book, job, and dissertation announcements, call-for-papers, and general academic discussions.

Nowadays many people follow the various announcements on Linguist List using an RSS feed reader such as Google Reader or my personal favorite NetNewsWire.

Unfortunately, the Linguist List RSS feeds (at least recently) don’t include the full text of the articles and have a few other quirks as well. It’s often hard to judge based on the title whether it’s really something I’m interested or not, so I’ve spent a lot of time frustratedly opening any possibly interesting-looking entry in a separate NetNewsWire tab. Today I decided enough was enough: I just wrote a script which parses each of the Linguist List RSS feeds, finds the actual descriptions and interleaves them.¹ It’s working remarkably well so far:

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This article is a translation of a recent article in Japanese by fellow Jetpack Ambassador Gomita which was published on the Mozilla Labs Jetpack blog. I’m cross-posting it here for posterity.

Mozilla Labs recently released version 0.2 of the Jetpack SDK, which fixes some issues of the 0.1 release such as a glitch regarding development with Windows. SDK 0.2 doesn’t include the planned APIs for rapid development of new browser functionality, but you can still play with SDK 0.2 to get a flavor for development with the Jetpack SDK.

In this article we begin by setting up an SDK 0.2 development environment and explain the steps required to develop a simple, practical add-on using SDK 0.2. The instructions here are for Windows, but the basic steps are the same in every platform.

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I recently confirmed three different very exciting speaking gigs which I’ll be doing this spring:

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A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at the Boston Javascript meetup introducing Jetpack and filling people in in the latest developments in the project, including the Reboot. Between 20 to 30 people came to the talk which was at Microsoft Cambridge. Here are the slides from the talk:¹

Extend the Browser with Jetpack

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A couple weeks ago I went out to Mozilla HQ in Mountain View for a Jetpack Ambassador meetup. Jetpack is a project at Mozilla labs intended to make writing Firefox add-ons easier, and shares some ancestry with the Ubiquity project dear to my heart. The Jetpack Ambassadors are a team of Mozilla community members who will be involved with Jetpack marketing, evangelizing Jetpack and writing about our own experiences working with the exciting new Jetpack architecture.

We spent a good chunk of time with a team from Invisible Elephant who came in to give us some training on making technical presentations, and then dug into the code on Day 2. It was great to have the geniuses at Mozilla Labs like Atul and Myk show us the latest Jetpack code as well as get the latest project direction from Daniel, Aza, and Nick, from which we could see the amount of careful consideration and effort that’s gone into the Jetpack reboot.

The best part of the whole experience, though, has to be the fellowship with the other Jetpack Ambassadors. The Ambassadors came from all over the world, encompassing Europe, Asia, S. America, and of course N. America. Each are involved with some really exciting projects and have each made a name for themselves in their respective communities. I’ve put together a twitter list of all the Jetpack Ambassadors and the core team members and invite you to follow them.

We also had the greatest number of Ubiquity core developers to have ever been in the same place at the same time, which of course had to be documented.

(More photos can be seen in my gallery.)

I had a fantastic time in MV and it was a shame I could only be there for such a short time. I feel honored to be a part of this group and am looking forward to speaking on Jetpack soon at an event near you!

After the Deadline is a powerful and intelligent proofreading tool which checks for spelling errors, misused words, some grammatical gaffes, and even some stylistic issues. For the past month, I’ve been working for Automattic, the company behind AtD and the makers of WordPress.com, to create a Firefox add-on which enables this superior technology everywhere on the web. Words can’t do justice to the magic that is AtD, so here’s a video we put together:

I invite you all to give it a spin:

Working on After the Deadline for Firefox gave me my first experience creating an add-on from the ground up and I’ve learned a lot. After working on Ubiquity and dabbling with Jetpack, it’s given me another perspective on extensibility on the web and I look forward to thinking and writing more about these experiences in the near future.

In the mean time, happy proofreading!

This past weekend I gave a couple talks at the inaugural WordCamp Boston. WordCamps are local, community-organized events for WordPress users and enthusiasts. We had about 400 people at the Microsoft Cambridge campus.

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I recently have been working with the Shadowbox JavaScript library for an upcoming revision to the MIT Edgerton Digital Collections website. Shadowbox is a nice lightbox library designed to work with various JavaScript libraries like jQuery, prototype, and mootools with a nice modular design.

Shadowbox is organized around different “players”—one for each kind of media that will be displayed. The library by default comes with players for Flash, HTML fragments, iframes, QuickTime, and Windows Media. Some of these players, like those for images and video, automatically recognize the media size and adjust the lightbox accordingly, while others such as the iframe player can use a set size or can fill the screen. For the Edgerton site, though, we had a need for displaying an iframe but in the dimensions of a set image, so that we could display the image with an overlay. Here are some notes on how to implement a custom player for Shadowbox.

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In working on a new website for the MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, I recently inherited a collection of HTML files with all of our books’ abstracts. To my dismay (but not surprise) the markup in these files were horrendous. Here are some of the cardinal sins of markup that I saw committed in these files:

1. Confusing ids and classes. ids should be unique on the page… but here’s an instance of using multiple instances of the same id in order to format them together.
   

<div id="indent"> <div id="number">4.2.1</div> <div id="page">161</div> <div id="section">Old French (Adams 1987)</div>
</div> <div id="indent"> <div id="number">4.2.2</div> <div id="page">164</div> <div id="section">The evolution of the dialects of northern Italy</div>

1. Putting a class on every instance of something. Everything paragraph should be formatted equivalently. We get the point.
   

<p class=MsoNormal><b>The English Noun Phrase in Its Sentential Aspect</b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Steven Paul Abney</p>
<p class=MsoNormal>May 1987</p>

1. Using blank space for formatting.
   

<p class=MsoNormal><o:p>&amp;nbsp;</o:p></p>

1. CSS styles that don’t exist. Browsers just ignore these anyway…
   

<p class=MsoNormal>One factor in determining which worlds a modal quantifies
over is the temporal argument of the modal’s accessibility relation.<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>It is well-known that a higher tense affects
the accessibility relation of modals.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> 
</span>What is not well-known is that there are aspectual operators high enough
to affect the accessibility relation of modals.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> 
</span&gt

The solution

My solution was to write a perl script which takes care of a number of these issues. It’s not foolproof and doesn’t involve any voodoo—for example, it can’t retypeset things which were formatted using whitespace—but it does a good job as a first pass.

You can run the script by making it executable (chmod +x cleanwordhtml.pl) then specifying a target filename as an argument. For example,

./cleanwordhtml.pl source.html > clean.html

I used this with a simple bash for loop to run over all my files:

for f in */*.html; do ./cleanwordhtml.pl $f > ${f%.html}-clean.html; done;

Hopefully someone else can benefit from my experience.

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the TechMaine annual conference in Portland, Maine.

Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup. The Boston WordPress Meetup meets monthly at the Microsoft Cambridge Research Center which is a fantastic venue right on the Charles river. Last night we got to be up on the 10th floor which has a great view of Boston right over the river. There was pretty good turnout, with about thirty or fourty people there.

My talk was a general introduction to WordPress plugin development, beginning with the concepts of actions and filters, and concluding with a description of HookPress, my new plugin which enables webhooks in WordPress. Here are the slides:

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We’re now three weeks into the semester at MIT where I just started a PhD program in linguistics. The Linguistics and Philosophy department is housed in The Ray and Maria Stata Center, also known as building 32. It’s a Frank Gehry building and thus crazy looking.¹

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