Monthly Archives: August 2007

Browser Stats

Uncategorized

I’m at An Event Apart in Chicago and Eric Meyer just said that browser statistics were “worse than useless.” More specifically, the only browser share numbers that matter are the one for sites you run, not what the web at large uses. Here’s our browser breakdown from 115 million visits to WordPress.com:

  1. 62.46% – Internet Explorer, sub-breakdown by popular request
    1. 64.10% – Version 6.0
    2. 35.17% – Version 7.0
    3. 0.28% – Version 5.5
  2. 30.74% – Firefox
  3. 3.83% – Safari
  4. 1.78% – Opera
  5. 0.52% – Mozilla

Just for fun, the operating system breakdown:

  1. 90.36% – Windows
  2. 6.73% – Macintosh
  3. 2.19% – Linux
  4. 0.03% – PlayStation Portable

Grey Followup

Uncategorized

On the bright side, last week’s hatchet job in Techcrunch generated some great blog posts. For whatever reason they don’t show up as links on Techcrunch’s page, but here’s some of the better ones:

To summarize some of my responses:

  • I have no problem with people making money from Open Source, in fact I think some of the most successful OS projects have profit motives aligned with user motives.
  • Related: I have no problem with Pligg being sold. I think it’s better than them selling links in the software.
  • It is possible to make money while giving your users something they want and provides value rather than something they never asked for. (Think of selling a hosted version vs. selling paid links meant to spam search engines.)
  • The fact that I made a similar mistake in the past gives me unique perspective into both sides of the issue.
  • The developer blogroll links in WordPress are nothing like the links being bought and sold for the intention of spamming search engines, but regardless they have been replaced with links to WordPress resources instead of individual contributors.
  • Duncan said “Money is money, no matter how you make it.” I could not disagree more.
  • While anyone can do almost anything with WordPress under its license, that doesn’t mean we have an obligation to promote folks who we feel are doing so in a way which is not ethical or in the best long-term interests of the community.

Turkey Update

Censorship,

The folks responsible for blocking WordPress.com in Turkey have issued a press release, here’s some snippets.

As it is known by public, the entry of the publications to Turkey of the blog service named “woldpress.com” that gives the opportunity of opening free site to internet users is interrupted with the judgement. This judgement is applied on 17.8.2007 and thus the entery of worldpress.com service and the publications of all sub-sites which takes service from this service to Turkey is interrupted.

aI wish they had blocked worldpress.com instead. They seem proud that they blocked all the sites instead of just the ones that they consider illegal under Turkish law.

The reason of this suspention, is that the limitlessly enable to illegal publications of the mentioned blog service, not taking to notice about the suspention of the applications and ignoring the judgements that are given by the Turkish courts related to the suspention of known sub-sites. The free and uncontrolled opportunities provided by the mentioned service are directed baleful people to this service and in a short time wordpress.com is returned to the voice and publication center of separatist-disastrous ideologies, private hostilities, illegal targets.

As far as I know, we never received any notice from Turkish courts about anything, only barely coherent threats and bully-attempts written much like the above.

Thus before ABOUT 17 TÄ°MES we have appealed to the mentioned site administration for the suspention of the unlawful publications , but the site administration did not take any caution about these publications.(one of our applications is published in their sites) Thereon about our applications RELATED WITH THE SUB SITES THAT ABUSE OUR CLIENT’S PERSONAL RIGHTS the Turkish courts have given numerous judgements for the closing of the illegal sub-sites which are broadcasting under WordPress. These judgements are delivered to the center of the mentioned firm in USA and to the agency in Turkey, this time the suspention of the illegal publications according to the judgements of the Turkish courts is asked. BUT, IN SPITE OF THE ALL WRITTEN AND ORAL APPLICATIONS, THE MENTIONED FIRM AND ITS AGENCIES ARE NOT AFFILIATE OUR REQUIREMENTS AND THE JUDGEMENTS OF THE TURKISH COURTS AND THEY INSISTED ON APPLYING.

Just to clarify when they said they contacted us 17 times, that means that they would blast the same email to multiple address and when they didn’t get the reply they wanted they sent the same message over and over again.

In addition to some blogs they complained about, their main request was that we block the name of their client being used by any blog hosted by our site, much like you can’t write “democracy” on blogs hosted by MSN Spaces in China. I’m going to skip some bits to the threat at the end:

There is a lesson which all blog services and internet service providers should take from this judgement. Blog services, especially the ones that give free service, should be careful about the sites that are illegally active through their firms. These services should not remain insensitive to the complints that they receive and especially to the judgements. It is certain that the services which behave opppositely will meet with the same enforcement that WordPress met.

So if you don’t disallow certain words being used on your blogs, you’ll be punitively punished through our state-controlled ISP. Today those words are “Adnan Oktar.” Who knows what they’ll be tomorrow.

Vanilla Sponsored Links

Asides

Vanilla, the popular open source forum software, is now embedding sponsored links in every download so when you install it they’re on your site. This strikes me as a bad idea the same way sponsored themes are, except worse because it’s in the core code. This and things like the sale of Pligg say to me that many open source web products are having a hard time transitioning to businesses. It also bothers me when people cite “hosting costs” as the reason for doing something like this. Hosting has never been cheaper, there are plenty of free resoures like Sourceforge and Google Code, and plenty of people would donate hosting if it was asked for, including myself.

WordPress.com Growth

wordpress.com,

Even though we post a wrap-up post each month, I don’t think the story of the growth of WordPress.com is very well-known. As Narendra Rocherolle said to me a few weeks ago, “Pound for pound you guys get less press per pageview.” Webware just publish some Nielson numbers that show WordPress.com as the #4 blog site in July, after Blogger, TMZ, and Typepad. Number four isn’t that hot,but the year over year growth was 398% which is 7-10x more than those above us. Of course Nielson/Netratings doesn’t match anyone’s internal numbers, though people generally assume they’re precise relative to each other.

But what about something more accurate? I’ve been a supporter of Quantcast since they launched and we run their code on all our blogs. It provides some interesting stats like demographics that we wouldn’t have on our own. (I also like that it’s fast and has never caused us problems, better than even Google Analytics.) Their numbers place us fairly well, #29 in the US with 16 million uniques. However there’s more…

Apparently the Quantcast numbers are just for blogs on a wordpress.com subdomain, none of our custom domain traffic is counted. They’re experimenting with a new feature called “networks” that aggregates the traffic for WordPress.com-hosted blog even with their own domains. Those numbers place us at 25 million US uniques and 70 million global a month, with a bit over 300 million monthly pageviews. We don’t track uniques, but their pageviews mirror our own closely so I feel this data is pretty accurate. 25 million US uniques would put us at #19 right next to Facebook.

The growth and reach isn’t a credit to us, it’s to our bloggers, but I am happy we’ve created a platform where some of the most creative bloggers can express themselves and attract a meaningful audience. Imagine what those numbers would look like if they included WordPress.org blogs.

This is a long way of saying happy 2nd birthday, WordPress.com. Thanks for the incredible ride over the last year.

iPhone IMAP Tip

Uncategorized, , , , ,

Hopefully this will help some future searchers. After the last iPhone update all the folders in my cPanel / Courier IMAP account started showing up in the Mail app, but I could not select them or move mail to them. I’d get an error like “mailbox does not exist” even though some part of the iPhone knew it did because it could see them. I Googled around and found that if you go to Settings > Mail > you@example.com > Advanced you could set an IMAP prefix to get everything working.

So I did, but nothing changed. However I deleted the account, reset it (hold down the top button), added the account back, set the prefix, reset again, and then all the folders started working. The advice I found worked, but there was some setting stuck somewhere that needed to be flushed out. Being able to file messages and read other folders from my iPhone is amazing. I was on the fence about the utility of the iPhone before, now I’m completely sold. It’s actually more fun than doing it in Thunderbird.