Oct
19
74

As some folks have noticed already, Automattic is now a “real” domain registrar (ID #1531). This has been a goal of mine for several years now, chiefly because I am a bit of a domain collector myself and I’ve never been completely satisfied with the domain buying or management experience on any of the usual players. Second, custom domains are a popular feature on WordPress.com and should become even more popular with some changes we’re introducing this month and it’ll be good to be able to provide a fully integrated experience for our users there. It’ll be a few months while we build all the tools necessary to begin taking advantage of our registrar status so in the meantime we’ll continue to use Godaddy, who has been an excellent partner.

Feb
1
4

After the Deadline, the enhanced spelling and grammar checker, has just released a new extension for Firefox that enables AtD functionality on any textarea on the web, which is really killer. This is one of the possibilities I was most excited about when we acquired AtD. For more check out the coverage on Download Squad and Lifehacker.

Jan
12
11

There have been a few requests for the plugin that drives the custom CSS feature on WordPress.com. We wanted to clean it up before releasing, and ended up adding a feature that stores the CSS better (in the posts table) and also adds revisions so you can revert to an old version of your custom CSS. The plugin is now available on the WordPress.org directory, free for everybody. Enjoy!

Sep
8
26

Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.

Oct
10
20

It’s now been one year since Automattic acquired Gravatar. “Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers. 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server.  That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day.  That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily!” Wowza!

Aug
15
2

Pre-WordCamp Dinner

A dinner for speakers and Automatticians at Jack Falstaff preceding WordCamp SF 2008.

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