Why Give to Wikimedia? is a new fundraiser blog for the Wikimedia Foundation that is actually quite good. (And powered by WordPress.)
Category Archives: Asides
Random Bits Podcast
Bloggers’ Union Strike
WordPress for Dummies Book Review
WordPress for Dummies Book Review. Happy Thanksgiving! I’m stuffed.
Road Trip
Yesterday started a road trip from San Francisco to Houston. Barry has the details on his blog. Today is the long day — Pismo Beach, CA to Flagstaff, AZ. Wish us luck!
Fruit Bowl
WordPress founder to use million-dollar trumpet as fruit bowl. Ah, the internet. If you thought this was real, don’t feel too bad, I got a call from my mother about it. 🙂
SF Weekly Article
WordPress Stands for Open Source, Morals, Democracy… and apple pie. Tyler Callister had an interesting take on some of the recent press we’ve gotten and our conversation.
Comment Moderation Notifier
The WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier puts a little thing in your Windows mini-icon tray that let’s you know when you have a new comment, much like Outlook or Thunderbird do with email. Cool! Now we just need a Mac version, maybe using Growl? Update: There is now a Mac version.
WebProNews Video Interview
Citizen Wausau
Citizen Wausau is a Site About Life in Wausau Wisconsin, and a nice-looking citizen journalism site built on WordPress.
Blogworld Expo Meetup
I’m in Las Vegas for the Blogworld Expo. As I announced from the stage this morning, there will be a WordPress Meetup before the official Blog Expo party. We’ll be meeting at “Lucky’s” in the Hard Rock Casino at 6:30, and I’ll have a limited supply of 20 or so t-shirts for the people who get there first. The guys from Mindtouch will also be there and are rumored to be buying a round. There was some confusion about the venue earlier, so please spread the word.
Marketplace Followup
Alex Jones has some good thoughts on the marketplace. As some stats, our themes page on .com got 2.4 million pageviews last month and someone previews a theme about once every 1.74 seconds. I can’t say how many people have purchased upgrades on .com, but even with our limited selection of products it’s a meaningful percentage, and that’s one of the reasons we think this idea has legs. It’s still impossible to know for certain, though, and I appreciate that our launch partners are taking a risk that they might create a theme and not sell a single one, and the whole thing might tank. If it goes well, though, I fully expect there to be thousands of themes in the system by this time next year, and the people in early will have a significant advantage, much like app developers did on Facebook.
Best WP Newspaper Site
The Express and Star is “Britain’s biggest and best regional newspaper online” and was founded in the 1880s. If you look closely, you’ll notice that their entire site including every article and feature is powered by WordPress. They now take the crown from NY Times for having the best URLs of a news site. (Though the Times now has clean URLs on their blogs.)
In Argentina
WordCamp Argentina finished up today and was a fantastic event, great turnout too. Congrats to the many people who contributed to its success. I haven’t seen any coverage in English yet, but I expect that and photos soon. I’m in Buenos Aires until Sunday night so looking forward to exploring the city much more.
Best Open Source Social Networking CMS
WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS. “Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.” Yay!
Google Penalizing Paid Links
Now that Google is officially penalizing paid links, I’m glad the WordPress community took such a strong stand against them in themes. Countless blogs could have been penalized just for the theme they were using, not related to anything they did or did not do on their blog. It was a tough decision at the time, it probably drew more criticism and personal attacks against me than anything we’ve done before, but time has proved us right.
WordPress For Dummies
Gravatar-enabled
The comments on this blog are now Gravatar-enabled. I didn’t use a plugin, just 2 lines of PHP. It’s pretty fascinating going through old posts and comments and seeing who has a Gravatar already. Do you have an account yet?
Microsoft Open Source
Microsoft will Open Source Windows before 2017.
WordCamp Argentina
I’ll be at WordCamp Argentina on October 31st. Do they celebrate Halloween there?