Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money!

Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. This is partially our fault, as the article notes, because the UI for some of these settings is quite poor. We’re working on it! If you can tolerate a bit of UI clunkiness, there’s significant value to be gained from Jetpack right now. For everyone else, we’ll make it much more intuitive soon.

Creed Update

Asides

This week, the Automattic Creed received its first-ever update, which I’ll describe as a minor point upgrade. This is the sentence before and after.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day.

Is now.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint; no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other every day.

As I wrote earlier in our internal P2s, “Always great to bury a gerund.” And now we have a semicolon! It’s all quite exciting. For the backstory, please read Why Your Company Should Have a Creed. I said in 2011 “I’m sure that it will evolve in the future” but I didn’t expect it to be 14 years before the first revision.

Internally at Automattic we’ve debated updating the Creed in dozens of conversations and blog posts, usually in the context of adding a sentence, which I still hope will happen in a future version. But this is a minor update. We’ll see when Creed 2.0 happens.

The private Automattic intranet is one of the most delightful things about working there, which you may consider as well.

Wayback Machine Joint

Asides

Automattic has been working with the Internet Archive to develop a plugin to combat link rot, and it’s a plugin I’d encourage you to install. As the plugin says:

When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version. It also works proactively by archiving your own posts every time they’re updated, creating a consistent backup of your content’s history.

I’ve been doing this manually on my old archives, fixing broken links and tending the garden. But we can make it all automatic. 🙂

Grokipedia

Review

It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its dozens of teams?) But at least everything on Wikipedia is true! On Grokipedia:

WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform integrated with WordPress, enables online stores and has facilitated over $1 trillion in annual commerce as of 2023.

While I actually believe someday, probably around 2037, Woo will facilitate a trillion in commerce annually, that number is off by a couple orders of magnitude right now. 🙂

As with all software, we shouldn’t come to conclusions based on the 1.0 but rather look to its vector and speed of iteration, so I’ll reserve judgment on Grokipedia for now.

I love Wikipedia. I’ve been a contributor since it started, and I think it embodies Open Source ideals in a really beautiful way. For a little love letter to Wikipedia check out this article by Jason Koebler, Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human. My take: If you think there’s something wrong with the Wikipedia, the way to fix it is to get involved and contribute. They have a robust community.

As a bonus, I learned today that the Wikimedia Foundation runs on WordPress! What an honor.

On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!

Time Zones

Akismet, Software

If you like rabbit holes, a wonderful way to spend your Sunday is in the writing of Zach Holman, an early engineer at Github and Gitlab.

All are good, but a particular favorite of mine is UTC is enough for everyone …right? You don’t need to code to appreciate that time is a construct, that has evolved over time. “At noon in DC, it was 12:08 in Philly.” Time zones introduce particular complexity because, besides obvious things like Daylight Saving Time starting and stopping at different times at different places in history and geography. If you do write code, you’ve probably come across things like Epoch Time.

The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking, the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1/1/1970), but ‘epoch’ is often used as a synonym for Unix time. Some systems store epoch dates as a signed 32-bit integer, which might cause problems on January 19, 2038 (known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038).

I’ve spent far too many hours on the PHP date manual page and the related comments (now gone! I used to have a few, they probably retired because they were on earlier versions of the language).

As a bit of lore for Zach he might appreciate, I’ll share that when writing some of the first logging and data processing systems for Akismet, I divided the files using Swatch Internet Time to give me a consistent balance of dividing a day, but still doing things as real-time as possible. The anti-spam learning system would update about every 86 seconds.

The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:

So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for me right now.

Automattic 20 & Counter-claims

Automattic, WordPress

It’s a bit of Automattic lore, but although I founded the company in June 2005, CNET asked me to stay on for a few more months to finish out some projects, which I did. Our HR systems have me as the second employee, after Donncha O Caoimh (still at the company!) So today is my 20th anniversary at Automattic! It’s 20 years since I started hacking on Akismet, our first product, and on WordPress.com.

The team gave me a sweet surprise! I’ve been fighting for the open web for 20 years, and hope to do it for at least 20 more. There’s a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes stuff happening inside Automattic that also made this day special, but one significant thing is public.

Automattic has finally had its first chance to file its counterclaims that spell out the bad actions of WP Engine and Silver Lake, as reported here by TechCrunch. You may recall that last month, the court dismissed several of their most serious claims, and they responded by filing an amended complaint. In our dogged defense of the free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem, Automattic responded today with a comprehensive counter-filing, which you can read in a 162-page PDF here about all the things WP Engine/Heather Brunner and Silver Lake did wrong.

We’ve got receipts!

I don’t think WP Engine employees or investors were aware of the gaslighting they did, hopefully some of this is enlightening. And there’s a lot more discovery to go!

I don’t get sick very often, but when it catches up to me it hits like a freight train. Just trying to keep all the plates spinning while operating at 10% capacity, been sleeping a ton. Today was in some ways better, some ways worse than yesterday. I try to avoid hospitals and emergency care, as you wind up in their system, so I’m trying to ride this one out at home. Had to cancel a bunch of travel and conferences and meetings I was looking forward to this week. Really makes you appreciate and be grateful for good health — it’s a baseline for everything else and I’m blessed with it 99% of the time.

WooCommerce 10.3 is out, just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with some nice improvements to the checkout experience, tracking cost of goods sold, and a new beta MCP server, “This new feature enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible client to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through a standardized protocol, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted store management and development workflows.” You can also help out in testing WordPress 6.9, which comes out on December 2nd.

If I’m slow on anything right now, I apologize. I’ve got some flu/Covid thing, so I’m operating at reduced capacity.

I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict.

Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services.

Simplify: WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, djbdns, SQLite.

Not enough engineers have studied under the code of Daniel J. Bernstein.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

— Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect (1864–1912) (Hat tip: Erin, and the Summit folks.) (It’s an old quote but update in your head to include the ladies too.)

Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, you know, needing to be a vampire or having a blood boy. So with the awesome folks at Extension Health I had my blood filtered and put back in, which took a few hours. My plasma was not as clear as Bryan Johnson’s, with 41 years of microplastics and mold and who knows what else in there. The process took a few hours, and afterward I got some chicken on rice from a Halal cart on Broadway so maybe it all evens out.

WordCamp Canada Talk

WordPress

Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t actually planning to speak or even do a Q & A; I was just going to attend this WordCamp. But since the organizers have given me a bit of your time, I will try to make the best of it. 

I love Canada. I first came here for the Northern Voice conference in 2006. Was anyone at that one? I think Dave Winer was actually there. It was a pretty awesome one. What’s that?

[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a different conference, but can’t remember.]

Well, that’s why we blog. My memory is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right? 

Dave Winer: It was actually a couple of weeks ago—31 years.

MM: Oh, wow. Thirty-one years. Round of applause! I think why I thought it was your anniversary is that on my blog’s related posts, it showed a post from 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think The Register or someone did a nice article. 

So yeah, I’ve since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal, at the jazz festival there—they also do Le Festival Haïti en Folie, and Just For Laughs—and a few times here in Ottawa, where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming. 

Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing, my main work is WordPress, the core software available to everyone. We host it on WordPress.com and Pressable, and allow others to host it with WP Cloud—a cool product—and we use Jetpack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress, wherever it is running. And, of course, running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, WordCamps, WordPress.net, which probably some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cetera, et cetera. 

On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it. 

I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products: Day One and WordPress.com Studio and WordPress Playground. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it in the WC admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something; that could also be made smoother in the future. 

So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser. Who’s tried Playground or Studio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to set up servers and databases and everything like that, and so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There’s so much you can do with it. It’s the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now, and we’ve just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague Ella builds an iOS app called Blocknotes. It’s a lot like Simplenote, but it uses a Gutenberg editor, and it’s entirely a WordPress playground instance—the entire iOS app. 

Part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday, and now that you can build entire mobile apps—which, by the way, can run on every platform, cross-platform, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a promise from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Native. It’s now very possible with this WordPress WASM stuff. WASM stands for web assembly. 

The main distractions and things holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake—I  can’t comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon. 

I forgot to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the commerce side, there’s, of course, WooCommerce, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like an open-source Shopify, our enablers here in Ottawa. It now processes over $30 billion of GMV (gross merchant volume) per year, and you can customize it to do pretty much anything: subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it’s fully open source and built on WordPress. It’s actually a WordPress plugin, so pretty exciting. WooCommerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world—WordPress is 40, so it’s running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It’s been a big part of the growth of WordPress, actually, the past few years. 

In messaging, we have this product called Beeper. Anyone tried out Beeper yet? We got a Beeper super-user here, actually, in Robert. So Beeper basically takes all the different messaging apps—WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one interface, kind of like a Superhuman for messaging, and gives you cool features across all of them. Now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge, because we have to reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. But check it out, it’s a pretty fun little app. It’s, free for up to a couple accounts, and paid after that. 

There’s also an open source component of that as well. We’re going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks, because there’s a lot that we don’t support yet that we get demand for, like KakaoTalk in Asia. People also want to do dating apps, which I guess have messaging platforms. So it’d be pretty fun to have everything all in one. 

I’ve been in the public a lot, doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this! So I’ve been blogging a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with. Actually been going every day since WordCamp US, with one missed day in there. I got very, very inspired at WordCamp US. It was a fantastic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of sessions, and it inspired me to blog a lot more. If you run Jetpack, there’s actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So whenever I post, I get this nice little notification, like 28 days. And it has little easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So I’m gonna have to add some of this to the post later—I riffed a little bit. We’ll get the recording. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish button together. 

This is a cool device called a Daylight computer. So cool. It’s from a startup I’m invested in through Audrey Capital and Automattic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s great for kids. You can order it on DaylightComputer.com. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce on it. Very, very neat device. I actually have WP Admin loaded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device. 

Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recording enclosed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spoke here, who invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclosures from 2004 and 2005, some very funny early podcasts. Also, whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Merci beaucoup! If you want to follow more. Please check out my blog at ma.tt. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Bluesky and Mastodon and on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter/X at @photomatt. 

And now we’re going to push the button together. Y’all ready? Murphy willing, are you ready to publish? think I need to add a category and stuff, but I’ll do that later.

Continue reading WordCamp Canada Talk →

There are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, he mentioned WordPress! In the context of his quote on this great X thread about how the Polymarket insider predicted the Nobel peace prize winner.

This trader apparently didn’t have inside information, in the traditional bad sense of like bribing a Nobel committee staffer. Instead, web scraping:

“The Nobel site runs on WordPress. Like many WordPress setups, it has an XML sitemap that lists every indexable page, even ones not yet public. If someone were monitoring this sitemap, they could easily notice a new page appear, something like “http://nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/”

If you run a WordPress site and want the best advice in the world for how to avoid this sort of thing, I highly recommend our enterprise WordPress VIP service! They help run some of the largest and most secure WordPress sites in the world, and could easily help navigate avoiding something like this from happening. WordPress is easy and cheap to run everywhere, even on a Raspberry Pi, but you get what you pay for, and any serious organization or mission-critical website should be on VIP.