Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I’ve seen.

[...]

I think we–and information workers like programmers, designers and writers especially–are capable right now of living a fantastic life that marries the wild vitality that Thoreau experienced at Walden with the better parts of civilized living. This is a life that Ted, if he were still in his cabin, could be envious of–if we could only muster the discipline to get away from the noise.

Brian Lam — Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic

Reblogged from Andrew Spittle:

Continuing in the style of last week I spent most of today reading my Instapaper backlog and listening to podcasts. Good day. Here are the highlights: Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic All aboard the Cocaine Express The Devastating Costs of the Amazon Gold Rush The New French Hacker-Artist Underground Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing Back to Work episodes #48 and #46 Seminars About Long-Term Thinking: Universal Access to All Knowledge

Instapapering these for upcoming travel.

Chiefly, though, I make sure I don’t rely on other people to find stuff for me to read. I mean, I do, of course; everything I’ve described so far is powered by other people. But I feel strongly about also hunting for material on my own, which is why RSS remains a huge part of my life. I subscribe to 881 feeds, although recently, in a moment of sanity, I decided to focus on about 200 of them that I find most valuable. (To pick those choice feeds, I mostly followed the advice of Marco Arment: “RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites.”)

[...]

RSS is frequently said to be a dead technology, which is silly on a lot of levels, but I don’t begrudge the many people who say that, for them, Twitter has replaced RSS. It’s just that I place a premium on reading stuff that others aren’t and don’t find that my Twitter stream reliably reaches into the bowels of the Web.

Zach Seward — Getting the News

Each guide could have:

• Links to example sites
• Suggested WordPress.com upgrades
• Suggested WordPress.com themes
• Steps you need to take to configure your site
• Frequently asked questions about setting up this type of site

This idea has been around the block a lot, and I recently rediscovered it in a notes folder. I think guided signups would be super useful for photo blogs, small to medium size business sites, mommy bloggers, etc.

Midweek skiing is fantastic. Nailed 17 runs in just under three hours with Jason and Amanda. Mercury off Shooting Star had some great snow, and Heather was a blast.

Currently, works of journalism (articles, videos, galleries, graphics, etc.) no matter what subject (news, sports, entertainment, business, features, investigations, etc.) are quantitatively measured the same. An investigative piece that might be nowhere near as popular in pageviews across a mass audience (yes, sometimes, they can be) is quantitatively measured the same way a celebrity death story is. Either story could make a sensational splash, truly connect emotionally with readers, or both. Each has value, but there are different kinds of values across different subjects journalists cover.

If we value impactful accountability journalism, why are we quantitatively equating it one-to-one to entertainingly impactful news? For example, when an investigation is published that saves taxpayer money or even human lives, we should instead try to measure these in a more multi-dimensional way — instead of merely the simplistic ones — and measure them differently from journalism works that have different goals. We should do this not just because the quantification would be more accurate (again, still imperfect), but because it would be a better model of the complex real-world response.

Greg Linch — Quantifying impact: A better metric for measuring journalism.

I have a site with multiple authors.
I would like to allow authors who create a post or a page to give rights to other authors.
For now, only administrator and editor can do that.
Is there a solution?

Yep, totally doable. By default, Co-Authors Plus defaults to ‘edit_others_posts’ as the required cap for changing co-authors. With the following code snippet in your theme’s functions.php file, you can make that cap ‘publish_posts’ instead (which authors and above usually have).

/**
 * Filter the Co-Authors Plus current_user_can_set_authors() function
 * so that users with 'publish_posts' can set Co-Authors
 *
 * @author danielbachhuber
 *
 * @see https://github.com/danielbachhuber/Co-Authors-Plus/issues/8
 * @see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-co-authors-plus-allow-authors-post-to-give-access-to-other-authors
 */
add_filter( 'coauthors_plus_edit_authors', 'db_filter_coauthors_edit_cap' );
function db_filter_coauthors_edit_cap( $cap_result ) {
	global $coauthors_plus;

	$post_type = $coauthors_plus->get_current_post_type();
	if( ! $post_type ) return false;
	
	$post_type_object = get_post_type_object( $post_type );
	return current_user_can( $post_type_object->cap->publish_posts );
}

In preparing this snippet, I also opened a couple of issues in Github:

• Allow authors to set co-authors by default – I’m not sure why we restricted it to editors and admins originally. Also, the existing filter could use cleanup.
• Don’t show search box if user doesn’t have capability to change co-authors – We should have a “locked” UI if the user doesn’t have the appropriate cap

“Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in.”