Squarespace has raised $38.5 million dollars to compete with WordPress and Six Apart. I used to chat with Anthony on AIM forever ago, and they’ve come after our VIP program before when they made a screencast showing how they could recreate Scoble’s blog in 15 minutes using their design tool. That’s quite a chunk of change, so it will be interesting to see what they apply it to.
Category Archives: Asides
VP Logo / Ads
I wrote a bit today on the VaultPress blog about its new logo and ad campaign.
Football to Themes
Drew Strojny tells his story of his journey from professional football player to small business owner to full-time WordPress theme developer, all in three years. (And GPL, natch.)
Post by Voice
The voice feature is now live on WordPress.com, using Twilio and implemented by Nick. Check it out: Phone Your Blog.
Dessa
While walking home at the jazz festival earlier we stumbled across a hip-hop show by a female artist named Dessa who has a new CD out called A Badly Broken Code. It’s not often you see hip-hop at a jazz festival, and it was an excellent show. Also, her blog is WordPress-powered!
Bezos Interview
JP Mangalindan interviews Jeff Bezos for Fortune. (WP.com-hosted article.)
Not Just for Blogs
WordPress is NOT Just for Blogs says Bronson Quick.
Plinky
Overcome Writer’s Block With Plinky Prompts — Automattic has bought Plinky and is promoting it from WordPress.com. See also: Thing Labs (makers of Plinky and Brizzly), TechCrunch, The Next Web.
Million in a Week
WordPress 3.0, released last Thursday, has already passed one million downloads. 🙂
Montreal Quake
I never expected I would leave San Francisco and experience a quake in Montreal. It was pretty slight here, but I definitely noticed something.
Web Services as Governments
Brad Burnham did a cool post on Web Services as Governments which I mostly agree with. In my talks I often refer to the GPL as software’s Bill of Rights. If you think of web services as governments, the need for a Bill of Rights fits right in.
Linux Try #12
Spent a hour or two tonight trying to get Ubuntu running on my laptop, unfortunately I ran into all the problems described here. The blank-screen experience was a little overly minimalist even for me. Tomorrow I’ll try going full-screen with VirtualBox, like some people in that thread had luck with, as a baby step to a full Linux switch.
Chronicle Interview
When I was in Houston last week I visited the Houston Chonicle for a chat with Purva Patel which ran in yesterday’s paper. Yes, I am wearing a Drupal sticker in that photo. 🙂
WikiLeaks Twist
The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks. This story gets even more interesting.
Top Referrers
The WP Dev blog got a ton of traffic today because of the 3.0 release announcement. Here are the top referrers: WordPress Dashboard, Twitter, Slashdot (huh?), Digg, news.ycombinator, Lifehacker, Google Reader, Reddit. So far today Slashdot is ahead of Twitter. Didn’t realize they were even still around! They’ve got staying power.
Son of Gutenberg
Marion Maneker at Slate’s site The Big Money chatted with Toni and I the other week, which turned into this article: The Son of Gutenberg. Not a bad overview “Mullenweg says, with the tone of an idealistic 26-year-old.” 🙂 I hope people still write that when I’m 36.
Your Brain on Computers
Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, a pretty fascinating read. I think the main subject of the article, Kord Campbell, is the same guy who used to run a photo sharing startup I thought about working at 6 or 7 years ago.
Packing for Montreal
As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to Montreal for about a month and a half, maybe two months. I posted to my moblog about packing and Hanni asked what the final manifest would look like. Here is a breakdown of everything I’m taking for the 1.5-2 month trip, which is about 4x what I normally travel with.
Twitter in Iran
The Twitter Devolution questions some of the assumptions we all had about Twitter’s role in the “green revolution” of Iran. For the record, I didn’t shade my Twitter picture green because it’s pink and they would combine to make brown.
WP-guided Missiles
So Apparently WordPress Can Guide Missiles, some WordPress Javascript makes a guest appearance on-screen in a British TV show.