Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Syn-thesis 3: Switchers

Personal, WordPress

The biggest after-effect of the Thesis license violation episode seems to be raising people’s awareness of alternatives that are both fully GPL and have better functionally too. One theme that seems to be picking up a ton of new users is Genesis. We helped Laughing Squid and Paul Stamatiou make the switch, but Chris Brogan joined the party completely independently. (All formerly in the Thesis showcase. Scobleizer switched a while back.) I’m excited about this because I think Genesis is a better theme, particularly for its advanced support of WordPress functionality like child themes. (Child themes are the only way you should build your site on top of a framework.)

Even though Thesis has done the bare minimum not to be sued for its license violation and the code it copy/pasted from WordPress, lots of folks including myself still have a bad taste in their mouths from the episode, since there was no apology or contrition shown (like a donation to the WordPress Foundation, which would be a drop in the bucket compared to the millions Thesis made while breaking the GPL). But I think it’s best to focus on the positive.

There is a linkbait from a Thesis affiliate going around asking if I favor certain commercial themes — absolutely yes! Is that a controversial question? Themes WordPress lists on its commercial page go above and beyond bare compliance with the GPL and are full members of the community, sometimes even becoming active in core development like WooThemes has done. As a business, I would feel a lot more comfortable building my online presence on a real enterprise like Woo, StudioPress, iThemes, and many more rather than a one-man-against-the-world operation, regardless of how good its marketing is, or how many affiliates it has.

For Automattic’s part, our theme team has been taking the opportunity to update our blogs stuck on Cutline and Pressrow, which were abandoned by Chris years ago and don’t support any of WordPress’s new features. The first iteration of this is Coraline which is aesthetically is similar to Cutline but under the hood is way better, with multiple layout and sidebar options, color schemes, custom background, per-post custom headers, gallery and asides support, and a few other bonuses. (Unfortunately, the switch had a bug that broke widgets for some sites, but that’s being fixed. We’ll avoid that when switching Pressrow.) A lot of this was kicked off before DIYThemes dodged litigation, but it’s important to continue because we’re building better themes for users who honestly shouldn’t worry about this stuff, they should just have theme that’s current, flexible, functional, and beautiful.

Ask Matt: Tips On Public Speaking

Ask Matt, WordPress

I get asked a lot about tips on public speaking because I do it so frequently. Positive response when I give a talk is generally proportional to how relaxed I was when giving the presentation and on good days I’ll get comments like people were able to relate to what I was saying or that watching me calmed them down. I don’t mention this in the video, but besides breathing and remembering the audience is there to see you do well, the best way to relax is to know your material down cold. I’ve lived and breathed WordPress for almost 7 years now, so I can talk about it for hours without thinking twice. I think practicing and knowing your material well comes across most in your body language which probably affects how people perceive your presentation more than what you say.

https://videopress.com/v/VSvor57H

We recorded this before Scott Berkun’s new book Speaker Confessions was out, which I recommend now.

Micro-blogging vs Mega-blogging

WordPress

I don’t think “mega-blogging” is actually a thing, I just made it up to make the title sound more dramatic. But if mega-blogging were a thing, you would do it with WordPress. Micro-blogging is a thing, and a lot of people do it with Twitter.

TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.

New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another.

As for the accuracy of underlying comScore data I would say they probably are precise but not accurate, meaning that whatever flaws they have in collection now, for example for WP.com they don’t count the custom domains or RSS readers and for Twitter they don’t count API usage or desktop clients, they’re at least self-consistent in how they do things over time. Some months they show us flat our internal stats showed growth, and vice versa. Ultimately it’s not worth anyone outside of comScore arguing how they collect their data, it’s better just to use it as one reference point alongside Quantcast (my fav), Alexa, Google Trends, Nielsen…

How tweets get imported into a blog is still an open question for me. I’ve seen lots of ways people have attempted it but when a blog becomes an activity stream it becomes a weak version of all the things it aggregates, less than the sum of its parts, because of the loss of context.

Published on CNN

Automattic, Meta, WordPress

Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published. I’m pretty excited about this and I also hope it drives a new audience to the blogs I mentioned, though to be fair if you’re not fascinated by how technology is changing society my picks might not be interesting. It’s a short piece in a “top ten” format, but I put a lot of thought into curating the picks.

I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)

I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.

As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)

10 Blogs to Make You Think

Essays, WordPress

This article also ran on CNN.

There are a hundred million blogs in the world, and it’s part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help as many people start blogging as possible. I think we’re doing pretty well on that front, but it does mean that sometimes it feels overwhelming to wade through them all and find the blogs that will be informative, entertaining, or whatever it is you’re looking for.  Sometimes you might feel it’s like TV — you have a thousand channels but nothing good is on. If you want to take a dip into the blogosphere, here are ten eclectic blog picks that, if nothing else, will make you think (or at least, they make me think):

1. Scripting News is the blog of Dave Winer, the father of many technologies that are crucial to the web. Dave writes every day and you’re as likely to read about something intensely personal he’s going through, like the passing of his father, as you are to read about the real-time web.

2. Open… by Glyn Moody covers the application of Open Source thinking to fields as wide-ranging as politics, genomics, content, and of course, software.

3. Scott Berkun is a former Microsoftie who has graduated to being one of most erudite authors on innovation, creativity, management, and now public speaking. He’s like a modern-day Peter Drucker.

4. Raw Thought from Aaron Swartz is a diverse blog from a deep thinker and troublemaker. The former is evidenced by his New Yorker-length treatise on John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory, while the latter is shown in his posted FBI file (you can request yours).

5. Philip Greenspun posts “every day; an interesting idea every three months.” See how a successful startup founder and engineer thinks about his post-startup life, taxes, helicopters, and photography.

6. Tim Ferriss is best known for his best-seller The Four Hour Workweek, but I’m most impressed by his blog on “lifestyle design,” or basically taking an analytical approach to your health and happiness.

7. Paul Graham, also a successful startup founder, has transformed into a philosophical leader of entrepreneurs. He espouses his view through thoughtful essays (linked) and invests in aspiring entrepeneurs through Y Combinator.

8. The Official Dreamhost Weblog is probably the most interesting blog from a company, ever. Each entry floats and wanders through vaguely inappropriate language and visual non-sequiturs before finally bringing you back home in a way you couldn’t have predicted; it’s more crazy than corporate.

9. Signals vs. Noise is another company blog, this one from 37 Signals, but at its core is an ongoing argument for simplicity in all things: design, code, and culture.

10. XKCD is daily comic that you’ll never find in a newspaper — it’s too smart, too honest, too web. For an extra bonus, hover your mouse over the image and see a hidden caption.

11. And though it’s not a blog, check out Werner Vogel’s Twitter to get insight into the mind of the CTO of one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Amazon.

Automattic Aquires AtD

Automattic, WordPress,

Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.

Open City Data

Events, WordPress

Yesterday I was part of a press conference by Mayor Gavin Newsom promoting DataSF.org, which is one of San Francisco’s first steps at opening up. Tim O’Reilly also spoke and made the point to me afterward that as he dives deep into every part of the intersection of technology and government he’s most excited about the prospect for change at the city level. Here are some pictures from the event. I think we’ll see more along these lines, and more WordPress, for San Francisco in the future.