I put in an application for a free Sun server to try out for either WordPress.com or Ping-o-Matic, depending on when/if it arrives. Everything we’ve done on WP.com has been Dell thus far, and honestly they’ve been pretty good with the exception of one box that they’re going to replace soon. Our biggest DB server (a Dell 6850) does north of 300 queries per second, but it weighs as much as me and uses a crazy amount of power, which is expensive. Of course as more and more of our infrastructure becomes distributed, high performance boxes don’t matter as much.
Category Archives: Press
Widgets
WordPress Widgets, we just enabled editable sidebars and some bootstrap widgets on WordPress.com. Plugin for WordPress, API, and a few more widgets are on their way. Right now widgets are just for sidebars, but I see no reason the concept couldn’t be adapted for the Dashboard as well. It’s ultra-simple, if you know HTML you can make a widget.
A pro-PHP Rant
Harry Fuecks – A pro-PHP Rant. Hear hear. Sometimes I feel guilty about how easy it has been to scale WordPress.com from 1 to 110,000 blogs in just a few months.
Hack WP for NY Times
I was at the New York Times last week and one of the things that blew me away were how many WordPress blogs they’re running. I had seen 2-3, but it turns out they have almost 25 running on both sides of the paywall and they’re going to be doing even more with WordPress as time goes on. (There are also some interesting things going on with Times Select.) There’s more good news: they’re hiring. Khoi Vinh writes “A thorough knowledge of weblog publishing software, especially WordPress, is required.” Sounds like a great gig for whoever gets it. Bringing things full circle, Khoi’s site is one of my favorites and an inspriation for the new WordPress.org.
Get Random
Get random on WordPress.com, I really really really like this feature. (We’re about to hit 100k blogs.)
Theme Explodes Traffic
The effect of releasing a good WordPress theme on traffic and stats. With stories like this and all the success Micheal has had after Kubrick and K2 I really don’t understand why more professional designers aren’t falling over themselves to address the WordPress theming audience which is huge, growing by thousands every day, and very enthusiastic.
New Theme Competition
Someone is running a WordPress 2.0 theme competition with some pretty sweet prizes. Winners of previous competitions run by Alex have gotten a ton of exposure all over the blogosphere. I think there is so much new functionality possible with the new functions in 2.0 that themes like Regulus take advantage of that it should be a factor in the competition somehow.
BlogTalk Reloaded
I’ll be keynoting at BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna, Austria on October 2-3rd. Hopefully I’ll meet a few WordPress users while I’m over there.
Markup Survey
Ian Hixie at Google just published a really awesome web authoring survey of a billion documents. What I found most interesting about reading it was places that things I’ve worked on, notably WordPress and GMPG, popped up.
HTTP Headers — “A pretty significant number of pages include an X-Pingback header (more than the number of pages with the Set-Cookie2 header). In fact, X-Pingback was the 30th most-seen header in our data sample.”
WordPress is one of the few platforms that supports pingback, an alternative to Trackback with a real spec. Apparently there are enough WP pages in the world for this to make a blip on the radar.
Page Headers — “It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profileattribute, though. The three most-often used values are http://gmpg.org/xfn/1, http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/, and http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. This makes XFN the most popular HTML metadata profile!”
Too cool for words. 🙂 Both of these profiles are included by default in some WordPress templates.
rel="pingback" and rel="bookmark" both skirt the charts in the link relationship page. No XFN values made the cut there.
The <a> element — “external seems to be mainly propagated by WordPress, but people have long been asking for a way to label their links as being external vs internal.”
Nice to get a direct mention there, and we’ve supported bookmark and tag from the beginning. All in all the report is a very interesting read, and kudos to Google for doing this type of research and sharing it with the web. I hope to see more of these in the future, it delights my inner markup geek.
WordPress in its Terrible Threes
Mike Little points out that WordPress is three years old today. 🙂 Who woulda thunk it? Mike and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago, here’s a picture Khaled took of the event.
Millions of Blondes
I’m not going to particpate in it, but the “best blonde joke” (example) thing is driving thousands and thousands of hits every day to WordPress.com. It’s traffic on par with a front-page Digg, just constant and steady. Where did this thing come from??? (Continuing my tradition of being a month late to internet trends.)
Bloggies
The bloggies are now open, and for the first time ever WordPress is a nominee. However there is very good company like Blogger, Flickr, and Delicious. Flickr! My fav thing about the bloggies has always been the discovery aspect, finding blogs I had missed somehow. This year contains quite a few gems and I’d recommend going through everything and exploring a few you haven’t seen before.
WP Probloggers
Andrew says ProBloggers Use WordPress based on this poll at problogger.net which gives WordPress + WordPress.com about 40%.
Building 9rules
Building the 9rules network (using WordPress). Some very interested ways of stretching WP far beyond a CMS or blogging script. First of a series.
Automattic Toni
Another nice birthday present! I have no idea (really) how he got this, but Om has the scoop on Yahoo VP Toni Schneider leaving to join Automattic. We were originally going to announce this at the end of the month when Toni actually left but I guess now is as good a time as any. 🙂 Toni was the CEO of Oddpost and after joining Yahoo led, amoung other things, their really cool developer network.
I first met Toni shortly after I moved to San Francisco and I’ve wanted him to be a part of Automattic pretty much since the idea first entered my mind. We’ve spent many long meals over the past year discussing the Automattic idea before it even had a name. I’ve been on cloud nine since (somehow) I convinced him to leave the incredibly cushy corporate job and rough it out in startup world again. I’m very very excited about some of the things coming down the line.
Update: Toni has blogged about it here. He also has a WordPress.com blog that used to have a bunch of cool cars on it, hopefully that’ll come back somewhere. 🙂
Update 2: It’s on Digg, and I’m curious what linking to the Digg story will do. Digg it if you think it’s interesting.
SxSW Meetup
A tentative WordPress meetup for SxSW is starting to come together, the date and time may change, so sign up if you’re interested. This is also the first time I’ve used Upcoming and I must say it’s pretty slick.
Newsforge on WP
Newsforge thinks WordPress 2.0 is better than ever. Aw shucks. 🙂 There is still a lot of work to do still, nice reviews are great but we’re still working our butts off on the next version.
WSJ On WordPress
It’s a new year and new people are using WordPress. On the heels of About.com and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal has launched a new law blog powered by WordPress. Hat tip: Blog Herald.
Home Sweet Home
I’m back in San Francisco. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except I left at the beginning of December. It has been an exciting month, and I had the pleasure of meeting WordPress users from all over the world in person. I also learned a ton about efficient traveling and getting work done on the road. All great fun, but I am so happy to be back in my own place.
WP2 Thoughts
WordPress 2.0 “Duke” is available! Like 1.5 when it first came out I expect it will take a few months before the full implications of this release are realized. There are some surface changes (see 5 little things I like about WP 2.0) that still need some polish in places, but I think the underlying architectual changes are really rock solid. Interface changes are easy to iterate on in future versions. WordPress.org also has a rocking new design from Matt Thomas, and there will be some more action there in the coming months.