Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Naval describes the venture model while suggesting a way for firms to differentiate.

We help our customers but don’t tell them exactly how. Our core product is a commodity, yet we don’t disclose pricing. Even when we do, there are substantial hidden costs. It has to be bought in bulk, more than they want. We can take months to onboard a customer. We reject most of them but don’t actually give them a straight answer. They don’t get dedicated support. They don’t get to choose or replace their representative. We don’t commit to serve them in the future. We have hundreds of competitors with the same strategy. Now where’s my check?

Dave Winer tweeted this on Saturday:

One of the things I love and admire about him is that many, many years after he doesn’t have to anymore he’s still learning, hacking, and taking free time on a weeknd to make something new.

Almost 3 years ago we released a version of WordPress (3.0) that allowed you to pick a custom username on installation, which largely ended people using “admin” as their default username. Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).

Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).

On (Un)organized Consumption by Automattician Cheri Lucas. “I stopped using Instapaper. Early on, I relied on it as a space to store ideas and information I could draw from, but it quickly became my intellectual limbo: the unfortunate vault of forgotten stories and Twitter residue.”

TechCrunch writes WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers. I’m very proud of the 8+ years we’ve been a home for, and protected, our users blogs. Protection covers many aspects: backups, scalability, security, speed, permalinks, mobile versions, forward-compatible markup, clean exports… the list goes on. We’ve done the same with other internet-scale services, like Akismet, Gravatar, and Jetpack, and I hope to earn the same trust in the coming decade with VaultPress and Simperium.

No to NoUI by Timo Arnall is one of the better pieces I’ve read on design and interfaces, and is also chock-full of links that will keep you busy for hours.

The Redhat of Drupal

Asides

I got this email today:

Hi Matt,

I apologize for the cold email. I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. I work for the “Redhat of Drupal”, (Acquia) and we have seen an explosion of Drupal use in the Media, News, and Entertainment Industry.

Some companies using Drupal/Acquia include Warner Music, Maxim, NBC Universal, and NPR.
If you are evaluating your current system or are looking into new web projects, I would love to connect and discuss Drupal as an option.

Would it make sense to connect on this? If there is someone better at Automattic , Inc. to speak with, perhaps you could point me in the right direction?

Cheers,

—
Dillon J. ********
Enterprise Drupal Solutions
Direct: (781) 238-****

http://www.acquia.com
Acquia, 25 Corporate Drive Fourth Floor
Burlington, MA 01803

Acquia ranked #1 Software Vendor on the 2012 Inc 500

Hmmm, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all these years… Dillon, I’ll be in touch!

Rapping Truth To Power. “The study’s authors concluded that ‘the overwhelming message in hip-hop wasn’t that the rappers disliked the idea of justice, but they disliked the way it was being implemented.'” This is part of why sites like Rap Genius are so important. Hat tip: Elise.

Creative Market just announced that all of their WordPress Themes are now 100% GPL, meaning to list in their marketplace and reach their users your theme must provide users with the same freedoms that WordPress itself does. They have some great themes already. This is fantastic news and I’m very proud of their team for taking this bold step, and as promised WordPress.org homepage promotion is forthcoming. I think we’ll see more of these down the line, especially as WordPress consumers start demanding 100% GPL from anything they buy.