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I got a free T-shirt in the mail recently. It is a very nice, forest green, American Apparel shirt, with the line “Code is Poetry” on the front – and the WordPress logo on the back.

The shirt arrived because I responded to a Twitter message from Matt Mullenweg about a month ago, which said simply, “For people who want t-shirts: email me address, t-shirt size, and gender.” I love WordPress, use it exclusively to develop websites, and as such, have great respect for its founder (Matt Mullenweg). I had no idea what his Twitter message was about – but I wanted a WordPress shirt, so I went for it!

The shirt also came with two pencils, several stickers, and an official-looking certificate, proclaiming that I, Karl Fundenberger, am one of the Three Most Important People in WordPress, and that I am entitled to a lifetime of free WordPress, to be used at my discretion for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the four freedoms of the GPL.

I had no idea what this was about! Surely I couldn’t be one of the most important people in WordPress. I have been using WP for about five years now and have set up dozens of blogs – but I have never written an official theme or plugin. I haven’t saved WordPress from demise or promoted it to millions of people. There must be something more to this, I thought.

Naturally, I went online. I first found this photo of a very similar assortment; green shirt, stickers, pencils, and certificate. Fortunately, the photographer linked to an interview with Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson.

First, a note on the GPL. WordPress is software released under the GPL (the GNU General Public License), which guarantees that it can be distributed and modified for free. It also requires that any theme or plugin developed for WordPress must carry the GPL. You can sell themes or plugins, or give them away – but you must guarantee your users the freedom to modify and distribute your themes and plugins.

Chris Pearson has a theme called Thesis, which is not a GPL theme. It violates the license of the software it is built upon.

Mullenweg called him out on this. He asked him to change the theme. Pearson refused.

Bad call, Chris Pearson. WordPress is wildly successful, largely due to the fact that it is GPL software. There is a huge community of people working to make WordPress better, all the time!

In the interview, Pearson says he could change the theme to GPL, and it might not even affect his business. But he just doesn’t like the GPL. At one point, he claims he is “one of the three most important people in WordPress,” despite the fact that Thesis accounts for only a tiny fraction of global WordPress downloads and traffic.

The certificate I received in the mail is a very clever jab at Chris Pearson. It’s not true, per se, but it’s still pretty empowering to see my name on a document with Matt Mullenweg’s signature on it. I may not be one of the most important developers or users of WordPress, but the community at large, respecting and taking advantage of its license, is what makes WordPress possible.

Mullenweg is letting users know that Thesis violates the GPL, and asking them to try out other premium themes; offering them suggestions, and even offering to buy them a copy of a theme if they promise to switch away from Thesis. For a free software that practically “sells” itself on features and usability, this is a fantastic marketing campaign. For one, I’m even prouder to be a die-hard WordPress user. I am proud to know that Matt Mullenweg will stand up for his software and for the GPL. And I am so glad I have never even considered using the Thesis theme.

Chris Pearson, you’re looking pretty foolish right now.

For more, read Mullenweg’s blog.

I like getting frequent e-mails from sites I love. It keeps me in tune with what’s going on – be it industry news, current events, or music I like. But, having had a serious case of inbox overflow lately, I’ve switched over to using an RSS reader to keep track of blogs and sites that interest me.

The problem is that not all of my e-mail subscriptions have corresponding RSS feeds.

I’ve been thinking about how to get around that, and I’ve figured out a basic tactic. Here is my [as yet untested] outline.

1. Set up a blog (using a current e-mail address) that will allow you to post via e-mail message.
2. Set up a new e-mail account that allows forwarding.
3. Use that email account to sign up for your preferred e-mail subscriptions.
4. Once you’ve signed up for the e-mail subscriptions you like, set up automatic e-mail forwarding. The forwarding address should be the one your blog service provides.
5. Find the RSS feed address for the blog you’ve just created, and drop that into your reader. Boom. Done.

Possible issues:

1. Copyright. This is re-publishing other people’s content without permission. Do your best to set your blog to private. Even though it’s for personal use, blogs are inherently public.If you’re using a WordPress installation on your own hosting, for example, you could set it so that the posts are hard to find. Set a static home page, and don’t specify a posts page. Remove all links to posts, archives, tags, and search. Find your RSS URL, but don’t leave a link out there.

   WordPress has great SEO – so you could also dig into your theme and remove some of that optimization so that it won’t start popping up in search engines.

2. Why set up an e-mail account with forwarding (steps 2 and 4)? It’s a catch-all to keep an eye on spam and control the flow of content on the blog. You could use the e-mail address your blog service provides to sign up for e-mail subscriptions, but this isn’t an address you can use to change settings. You won’t be able to log in and cancel subscriptions.
3. Keeping the blog private is important, because you’ll occasionally get sensitive e-mail messages with passwords or other account information. If you’re publishing every e-mail message you receive, you may inadvertently post a password reset link on your blog. If you do publish one of these, be sure to delete it!
4. Don’t use that e-mail address for anything else – especially the registration on your blog. See #3.

All right, that’s all I can think of now – let me know if you try this – and I’ll do the same!

The first farms were subsistence farms. Families grew enough to sustain themselves, and made planting decisions based on their projected needs for the coming year. They used draft animals, compost, manure, and manual tools to cultivate their plots, and rotated crops to preserve the soil’s nutrients.

Only in the last hundred years have grocery stores existed.  They arose from general stores and trading posts — a natural place of exchange along trade routes.

But the food trade in this country has become gluttonous:

Americans spend a smaller share of their disposable income on food than citizens of any other country and choose from an average of 50,000 different food products on a typical outing to the supermarket. In 1994, the food supply provided an estimated 3,800 calories per person per day, enough to supply every American with more than one and a half times their average daily energy needs. (USDA)

Our system has become so efficient that industry now provides a gross excess of food. We throw away almost 1/4th of the food we buy, despite eating more than we need to and exercising less than we ought to.

Perhaps Ayn Rand was right, when in Atlas Shrugged, she suggested that the ideal society operated on pure capitalism, where producers of value bartered for goods and services they needed. Fiscal wealth was so insignificant that in her novel, a solid gold sculpture was the central fixture in her utopia.

What if the supermarket were more like the romanticized Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter films? Or even the true markets of London hundreds of years ago, complete with mixed-use development? Producers of value — craft — produced and sold goods locally in their shops (above which they dwelled), while farmers brought the excess produce of their toil into the city for exchange.

A system like this is limiting. It suggests a diet devoid of bananas, oranges, halibut, and saffron. But can we not grow spices in our windowsills? Can we not catch fish in our own state lakes and ponds? Do not fruit trees flower in Kansas?

It is radical to suggest that we should all survive on subsistence farming, or local agriculture, or barter systems. But more radical is my belief that maybe we could.

Stopped working at Peterson Publications.
Went to Friedrichshafen, Munich, Bonn, and Cologne, Germany.
Graduated from Washburn University with a BA in French and Mass Media (Advertising).
Moved out of a house with two roommates, moved into a house with no roommates.
Put five custom bicycles together.
Worked for a U.S. House congressional campaign.
Became a partner in a new media consulting firm.
Started a band.
Became involved with an artists collective.
Started commuting by bicycle as often as possible.
Improved my diet.
Painted a mural.

And I feel pretty good about all that!

I love work.  I love working.  Lately, work has been challenging, exciting, and has involved lots of creativity.  And the more I work, the happier I am.  The more I create, the more creative I feel.  The more challenged I feel, the harder I work to meet the challenge.  And the harder I work, the harder I play.  And that has its own benefits and drawbacks… but ultimately, it just serves to keep me focused.

I’m working as a designer and social media consultant for a recently founded new media consulting firm in Topeka. 

Our theory was like this: If you can’t find a job you like, why not create one?

It has been a long time since I’ve been so captivated by a documentary – but I watched Helvetica with a few friends last night, and I think I could probably quote parts of it now. I loved it.

Rarely, as a designer, do I get to be immersed in content created by someone else that is relevant to what I thoroughly love and do everyday, but this was exactly that.  A movie about type and design, and a broader discussion of design as an important part of life.

One of my favorite parts of the film (other than the “For Crystal Meth, call Christine” sign) was the clash between modernists like Wim Crouwel and Massimo Vignelli, postmodernists like David Carson, and then younger, more contemporary designers like Lars Müller.  I feel a lot like Müller when I design – I know the “rules” that the modernists set and the postmodernists broke - and I know the reasons for each – but I design by my own set of rules and motives.

A friend of mine made a great comment on twitter recently:

Sifting through my old journal entries has caused me to realize that I was basically intolerable until I had the age 15 years and 5 months.

And it reminded me to check out some of my old web sites and poetry that I host on GeoCities.  I’ve had http://www.geocities.com/kfgd since probably 1999 (when I was 13).  I made some really creative web sites, and it’s interesting to see what conventions I used.

I loved image rollovers. And I’m still pretty proud of this design.

And I stacked images all the time.  I don’t even remember how this works any more.

I figured out that huge graphics on the page look awesome, even if the mouseovers aren’t great or perfect.  And I may again use radioactivewriting as a brand – so let this be the copyright.

I made a nice opening page for the local neighborhood organization, but the internal pages are set in Courier and nearly impossible to read due to a heavy background. Blech!

I was also really weird.  I had an e-mail penpal in Iowa with whom I wrote a story about marshmallows that lived under a Wal-Mart and revolted against humans.  But my flame graphics are sweet – and a little ironic, considering one of the terrible crimes agains marshmallows is turning them into s’mores.  I don’t think the flames were on purpose, though.  Be sure to check out the ‘book’ page, where you can find the actual text of the story, and see the accompanying photo illustrations.  Pretty sure my dad helped me dye those marshmallows brown. Gross.

I also wrote lots of poetry from that time until I was about 18 or so, when I started writing songs for guitar.  I found some great excerpts:

You can’t expect me to bring home the bacon
If I’m always doing the cooking
Because I buy the drinks, the dinner, the tickets
And I don’t give a damn who’s looking

(Part of a poem I wrote when my girlfriend at the time refused to ever pay for dinner we went out to eat in public!)

“L is for the big word Love,
You’re the Big Bird I’m dreaming of”
Belted Oscar from the depths of his can

“And nine is for the times I cry
Each night that I can’t hold you tight”
Sang Big Bird, from far stage left

The two continued, harmonizing
Cameras rolling, just too surprising
100,000 eyes unblinking

“We’ll be together, no matter the norms,
Our eyes are open, now open yours,
Love should never be concealed”

They walked together, embraced each other
And turning away from facing each other,
They held hands and addressed the TV audience

“We’ve loved each other since Episode One,
And until last month, it was always fun,
But sharing’s best for everyone

“That’s why we’ve come to you today
We must do this, we have to say
We love each other and it’s staying that way”

(And this one is about a romance between Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird. But it has a nice message! I think I wrote this one three years ago.)

It’s nice to look back once in a while.  And hey, I guess that’s what blogs are for, too.