Category Archives: WordPress

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

Selling Links

Google, WordPress, WordPress.com,

“Let’s face it, we’re selling links here. Call it ‘buzz’ all you want, but it boils down to selling links. That skews Google’s index and they’ve come out against that quite publicly. If we’re all given the freedom to disclose in our own manner, we’re a moving target. If we’ve all got disclosure badges everywhere, it’s easy for them to penalize/ban us all.”

The comments on this PayPerPost blog encouraging disclosure are interesting, it seems even their own users recognize that they’re doing something Google should/will penalize.

Perhaps rather than trying to find better ways to hide from Google, they should just stop the questionable behaviour in the first place. This is one of the reasons we took an early stance by banning PPP on WordPress.com, and other blog hosts should do the same.

Blank Slate

WordPress

Daring Fireball: Blank Slate talks about basing your work off a template vs. starting from scratch. I think both can be valid, there are enough (over 1000) WP templates out there that finding one that’s close enough to what you want and customizing from there can be a great way to bootstrap and get started quickly. But longer term, invest in design. (This reminded me I have a long todo list for this site to catch up with.)

71Miles on WP Framework

Google, WordPress

71Miles is a cool new travel site with a twist PM readers will find interesting — it’s built with WordPress. How? Adam Rugel writes “The nuts and bolts of our site is WordPress, it’s our foundation and content management system. We extended it to manage our content feeds: Google Calendar XML for the events calendar, map, and mobile product and Kayak’s brand new hotel API for the hotel deals. We tricked out the custom fields in WP to do a lot the work for us, and we’ve got the categories set up so that we can scale to roll out dozens of editions (NYC, LA, Chicago…). At any rate we’re loving the platform…” Definitely one of the coolest uses of the WordPress framework I’ve seen in a while.

USPS and Speaker.gov

WordPress

Jim Amos just wrote in that Campbell-Ewald launched a new WordPress-powered site for the US Postal Service, called Deliver Magazine. Congrats to Jim and Naoko McCracken! Ryan noticed the other day that Nancy Pelosi has a WordPress blog at Speaker.gov called The Gavel. Cool domain name, and good to see WP being used in the political realm, especially since none of the Presidential candidates for 2008 are using WP (yet). If you come across or instigate WordPress being used someplace cool, be sure to write in.

PHP5 Issues

WordPress

Dreamhost upgrades their servers to PHP 5.2 (newer is better, right?) and most of their PHP5 customers break. WP 2.1 had a lot of workarounds in it just to run under 5.2. That’s stupid. I’m sure there is a perfectly rational reason why PHP core was “forced” to break existing scripts, but constantly shooting your users in the foot isn’t a good way for PHP to stay relevant. (I write this as someone whose entire company and livelihood is based on PHP.)

2007 Resolutions

Books, Food, Personal, WordPress
  1. Not be so late with things like resolutions.
  2. Make my writing shorter. Because… nevermind.
  3. Read 2 offline books a month.
  4. File taxes on time.
  5. Do 3 major releases of WordPress.
  6. Get Wii tennis score to 4000.
  7. Eat more regular meals.
  8. Release 3 new Open Source projects.
  9. Normalize sleep schedule.
  10. Throw out clothes I don’t wear, junk I don’t need.
  11. Keep inbox in the single or double digits.
  12. Stop trying to do everything myself.
  13. Take it to thirteen.