Automattic — Matt Mullenweg

Mar
9

Remember my resolution to “Launch secret new thing, code abbreviation JP”? There was even a WP Candy thread guessing what it was. Well it’s live, and you can click here to read all about Jetpack. Check it out, every WordPress deserves a Jetpack.

Oct
19

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.

May
6

I’ve been back on Chrome pretty much full-time, especially since I figured out some proxy stuff, so the new After the Deadline checker for Google Chrome is a lifesaver. See also: Download Squad.

Mar
8

Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic, writes 5 reasons why your company should be distributed.

Feb
1

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
18

Polldaddy just became the second Automattic web service to reach a billion pageviews a month. (I’m not counting Gravatar.) They also just updated their WordPress.org plugin to including ratings. Watch for some other major updates coming up soon. Update: ReadWriteWeb gives some context to the story.

Jan
12

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!

Oct
26

After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.

Sep
8

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.

Aug
20

Gravatar gets a light visual refresh, portent of things to come.

Jul
14

Check out the new haiku-powered Automattic design.

Apr
23

PollDaddy just finished their big switch from ASP.NET/SQL to PHP/MySQL. Go and give the guys a virtual Guinness.

Mar
6

Introducing IntenseDebate Plugins: add the features you want. Now ID has a plugin architecture (just like WordPress) that allows you to enhance the functionality of comments. First ones out the gate are polls, Youtube, Seesmic, and of course smileys. Want to supercharge your comments?

Dec
20

WordPress “Art Direction” Plugin, from Automattician Noel Jackson. Basically allows you to do what Jason Santa Maria does for his blog without all the custom code and template hacking, just a simple plugin.

Nov
13

IntenseDebate is back open to the public, and has a new WordPress plugin that does a two-way comment sync so all of your comments are always stored in your database so you can easily turn ID on and off without losing anything.

Oct
10

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

Pre-WordCamp Dinner

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

This album contains 37 items.

Oct
17

Automattic has bought Gravatar. Om sees it as a larger trend, but to us it was just a good fit.

Sep
14

Automattic has a new position we’re hiring for.

Jul
10

Read/WriteWeb has a good article about Automattic and Six Apart.