Google has turned 25, which is wow, and they made a cute video about it:
Of course I tried to visit the original howtocutapineapple.com site, and unfortunately saw a database error connection. From Archive.org it looks like whoever had that domain made a nice WordPress site.
I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict.
Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services.
Simplify: WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, djbdns, SQLite.
Not enough engineers have studied under the code of Daniel J. Bernstein.
Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t actually planning to speak or even do a Q & A; I was just going to attend this WordCamp. But since the organizers have given me a bit of your time, I will try to make the best of it.
I love Canada. I first came here for the Northern Voice conference in 2006. Was anyone at that one? I think Dave Winer was actually there. It was a pretty awesome one. What’s that?
[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a different conference, but can’t remember.]
Well, that’s why we blog. My memory is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right?
Dave Winer: It was actually a couple of weeks ago—31 years.
MM: Oh, wow. Thirty-one years. Round of applause! I think why I thought it was your anniversary is that on my blog’s related posts, it showed a post from 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think The Register or someone did a nice article.
So yeah, I’ve since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal, at the jazz festival there—they also do Le Festival Haïti en Folie, and Just For Laughs—and a few times here in Ottawa, where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming.
Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing, my main work is WordPress, the core software available to everyone. We host it on WordPress.com and Pressable, and allow others to host it with WP Cloud—a cool product—and we use Jetpack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress, wherever it is running. And, of course, running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, WordCamps, WordPress.net, which probably some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cetera, et cetera.
On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it.
I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products: Day One and WordPress.com Studio and WordPress Playground. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it in the WC admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something; that could also be made smoother in the future.
So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser. Who’s tried Playground or Studio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to set up servers and databases and everything like that, and so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There’s so much you can do with it. It’s the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now, and we’ve just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague Ella builds an iOS app called Blocknotes. It’s a lot like Simplenote, but it uses a Gutenberg editor, and it’s entirely a WordPress playground instance—the entire iOS app.
Part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday, and now that you can build entire mobile apps—which, by the way, can run on every platform, cross-platform, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a promise from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Native. It’s now very possible with this WordPress WASM stuff. WASM stands for web assembly.
The main distractions and things holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake—I can’t comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon.
I forgot to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the commerce side, there’s, of course, WooCommerce, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like an open-source Shopify, our enablers here in Ottawa. It now processes over $30 billion of GMV (gross merchant volume) per year, and you can customize it to do pretty much anything: subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it’s fully open source and built on WordPress. It’s actually a WordPress plugin, so pretty exciting. WooCommerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world—WordPress is 40, so it’s running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It’s been a big part of the growth of WordPress, actually, the past few years.
In messaging, we have this product called Beeper. Anyone tried out Beeper yet? We got a Beeper super-user here, actually, in Robert. So Beeper basically takes all the different messaging apps—WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one interface, kind of like a Superhuman for messaging, and gives you cool features across all of them. Now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge, because we have to reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. But check it out, it’s a pretty fun little app. It’s, free for up to a couple accounts, and paid after that.
There’s also an open source component of that as well. We’re going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks, because there’s a lot that we don’t support yet that we get demand for, like KakaoTalk in Asia. People also want to do dating apps, which I guess have messaging platforms. So it’d be pretty fun to have everything all in one.
I’ve been in the public a lot, doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this! So I’ve been blogging a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with. Actually been going every day since WordCamp US, with one missed day in there. I got very, very inspired at WordCamp US. It was a fantastic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of sessions, and it inspired me to blog a lot more. If you run Jetpack, there’s actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So whenever I post, I get this nice little notification, like 28 days. And it has little easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So I’m gonna have to add some of this to the post later—I riffed a little bit. We’ll get the recording. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish button together.
This is a cool device called a Daylight computer. So cool. It’s from a startup I’m invested in through Audrey Capital and Automattic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s great for kids. You can order it on DaylightComputer.com. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce on it. Very, very neat device. I actually have WP Admin loaded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device.
Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recording enclosed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spoke here, who invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclosures from 2004 and 2005, some very funny early podcasts. Also, whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Merci beaucoup! If you want to follow more. Please check out my blog at ma.tt. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Bluesky and Mastodon and on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter/X at @photomatt.
And now we’re going to push the button together. Y’all ready? Murphy willing, are you ready to publish? think I need to add a category and stuff, but I’ll do that later.
Continue reading WordCamp Canada TalkThere are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, he mentioned WordPress! In the context of his quote on this great X thread about how the Polymarket insider predicted the Nobel peace prize winner.
This trader apparently didn’t have inside information, in the traditional bad sense of like bribing a Nobel committee staffer. Instead, web scraping:
“The Nobel site runs on WordPress. Like many WordPress setups, it has an XML sitemap that lists every indexable page, even ones not yet public. If someone were monitoring this sitemap, they could easily notice a new page appear, something like “http://nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/”
If you run a WordPress site and want the best advice in the world for how to avoid this sort of thing, I highly recommend our enterprise WordPress VIP service! They help run some of the largest and most secure WordPress sites in the world, and could easily help navigate avoiding something like this from happening. WordPress is easy and cheap to run everywhere, even on a Raspberry Pi, but you get what you pay for, and any serious organization or mission-critical website should be on VIP.
Some days, like this morning when I almost missed my flight to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa, I’m so overwhelmed with the maelstrom of ideas and sparks of creation that it feels like waves crashing against a dam. There are so many ways I can imagine new software, new products, new ways for the world to be.
This is a beautiful process, but it’s also painful! The anguish and agony arise as you attempt to distill the ideas and sparks; the creativity dims, and the beauty and perfection of the original inspiration fade, as I try to translate it into something that can become real and be legible to others. That’s why I have to drop everything when inspiration strikes, because if I try to return to it later, I find the muse has left and I can’t bottle that energy anymore. (There’s a reason Eric, Tantek, and I put “muse” into the XFN standard!)
To the extent I’ve been successful at all in my life, it is because I’m able to contain this tornado and break it down into plans, business models, people, and teams. I’ve never done anything useful on my own; it’s always been in conversation and partnership with others.
I’m grateful to everyone I work with across Automattic, WordPress, Audrey, TinkerTendo, Keys, The Institute, Illuminate, EcoAmerica, Field Effect (in Ottawa!), as well as all my friends and professional connections. They are the ones that help me shape this energy into things that actually have an impact in the world and aren’t just fever dreams.
This essay itself had hundreds more words, but I have to edit, delete delete delete, trim things down.
I’ve been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting WordPressers all over the world. The stars aligned, and I’ll be swinging by WordCamp Canada next week. They’ve put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Winer, so I’m looking forward to checking out the sessions. I wish I could go to every WordCamp, like I used to! I’ve been recording videos and messages for those I can’t physically attend. Ottawa is also great as the only other commercial board I’m on is Field Effect.
Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control. Update: Thank you to the fine teams at X/Twitter and Nikita Bier, my account has been recovered. Just for future reference, I will never promote cryptocurrencies or similar investments. If you see anything from me or WordPress claiming that, be highly skeptical. Invest in open source, public stocks, and great companies like Automattic. 🙂
Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Raman Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book Let My People Go Surfing which I read back in 2018. It was the first time hosting such a large 60-person dinner in the TinkerTendo warehouse, and thanks to this Copper battery-operated induction stovetop and an amazing local chef, Hanif Sadr, the food turned out amazing.
I’ve only started the new book, but I’m interested to see what’s happened in the 20 years between Yvon’s book and David’s, especially the story of how Yvon gave away all his equity and control in the company to ensure a focus on his lifelong goal of environmentalism and conservation. Patagonia is one of the better corporate entities fighting for good, but it reminded me of how companies can put on a jacket of doing good while actually being evil underneath.
Like I talked about the economic concept of Externalties a few weeks ago, I think it’s imperative that the WordPress community understands the history of Greenwashing, which the United Nations defines as follows:
In WordPress and open source our environmental crisis comes from companies that frack the open source software and brands, which shows up as lack of investment in the code which falls fallow especially in the security sense, or by attaching themselves to a brand or trademark and tricking people into thinking they’re associated with the Good Open thing, when they’re really a parasitic cancer on it.
This is happening right now in WordPress, so when you see a company hire a good person or sponsor an event that seems on its own a good thing, and probably represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, weigh that against the tens of millions they’re spending with their other hand to destroy the source of everything they’ve benefited from, and if they were to win, endanger every open source project. It’s an open source form of greenwashing, perhaps call it openwashing.
One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, has a great new profile out in the New Yorker.)
I learned today from the Newspack newsletter that the Houston Press is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.
The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here. There’s a funny quote in there:
He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. “They have a ton of money…But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have time” to do WordPress.
That “search-engine start-up” was Google! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running Automattic.
Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/feature2.html, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine, but not needing it is even better.
It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along.
Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In Beeper we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but Apple’s default was to only give 15 megabytes — barely enough to do anything. The previous CEO of Beeper, Eric Migicovsky, started a lobbying effort with the EU’s Digital Markets Act on behalf of the team to give third-party apps the same memory limits that Apple provides for their own apps, which is 50MB instead of 15MB. (And up to 250MB on their higher end devices.)
Today we’ve gotten a notification that as part of iOS 26 update Apple has shipped to 2.3B devices around the world, our memory limits issue has been addressed globally, for every application developer, and some interoperability requests we had for SMS/RCS have been addressed for EU users. Kudos and huge thank you to Apple for giving us all new capabilities to build amazing experiences for users on par with what they seek to deliver themselves. If you want to geek out on this, check out the technical deep dive that Beeper just posted.
BTW, if you haven’t heard of it yet, Beeper is an Automattic product which aims to democratize messaging, just like WordPress democratized publishing for the world, by allowing you to get all your messages from friends across 11 different networks, like WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter/X, Signal, Discord, in one single inbox. The new version we launched in July does this in a completely secure way that’s local to your device, so the same encryption, privacy, and security each network provides is maintained.
I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others.
Om was one of the earliest users of WordPress and he was one of 8 people who came to the very first WordPress meetups at Chaat Cafe on 3rd street in San Francisco in 2005. (You can tell what an early adopter he is because he has the username “Om” on Twitter/X and Instagram and WordPress and probably more.) We had connected on the WordPress support forums when I helped him get set up around the 1.0 days. After I moved to San Francisco to take the job at CNET he connected me to people like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, and Toni Schneider who would become, respectively, an investor, board member, and CEO of Automattic. These are folks I still work with and consider close friends today. As a journalist, he had a keen nose for BS and made sure as a naïve 20-something in SF I was connecting with quality people.
Since we met we’ve both had a shared love for photography, and I’ve seen Om blossom into an amazing photographer with a really unique style and approach, in fact you can even buy some of his photography prints.
Over the years, we’ve dipped in and out of shared obsessions with cameras, watches, shoes, fashion, and design. We have a fair number of matching things in each. In photography we’ve shivered in minus thirty weather in Antarctica and Jackson Hole at odd hours to catch a special shot. We’ve traveled to Europe and Japan dozens of times, being very early (pre John Mayer and Kanye) to brands like Visvim. When I wear something like a bespoke, hand-made piece from 45R to speak at WordCamp US, he recognizes it off the cuff and even knows the one store on Crosby Street in New York where you can buy it. He is a tastemaker and an aesthetic connoisseur in every area he’s interested in, from food to coffee to pens, and everything in between. Sometimes we’ll start a journey together, for example, trying nice pens, and years later, I’ve moved on and he’s gone deep into collecting dozens of them, being in obscure forums and Reddits, or attending events like the SF Pen Show last month.
When you walk into a coffee shop with Om he doesn’t just know the barista’s name, he knows their dog’s name and the story of every person working there.
I’m 500 words in, and I still haven’t even scratched the surface of describing Om’s journey, from growing up in Delhi to becoming a journalist for a Japanese publication in New York, a book author, party promoter, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, photographer, and explorer. If you want to understand the AI bubble we’re in right now, you should read his book Broadbandits on the crazy telecom / Enron bubble. This is a long way to say, happy birthday Om!
When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of sharing your dreams to help them come true, here they are:
And one bonus: Houston Chronicle. (Gotta root for the hometown.)
There has been uneven progress toward this over the years; we’ve gotten some of the NYT and all of the New Yorker at one point, only to have them revert under new CTOs. Also, there have been some unexpected huge wins, like when Vox Media retired its proprietary CMS Chorus and brought over amazing publications like The Verge and New York Magazine. For any projects related to these publications, including trials or micro-sites, I’d be happy to provide my feedback on architecture, design, and opportunities, and contribute Automattic and VIP resources wherever they could be helpful.
I believe the most crucial aspect to get right for these customers is real-time co-editing, which is on the Gutenberg roadmap and shipping soon. If I were writing this list today I might choose some different targets.
I love the culture of freestyle rap, it’s so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week I got to meet Harry Mack and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you’re not familiar with Harry Mack, this is a good example of him taking three words: Imported, Lurking, Automatic and freestyling with them. (BTW, if you noticed, we finally got the domain spelled correctly.)
There is a video chat site called Omegle that paired you with random people, and Harry would record these encounters, such as this cute one with girls from Sweden who gave him the words Cartoon, Titan, Death. It’s awesome to see him meet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
For some fun WordPress rap history, check out when Childish Gambino referenced me in a rap he performed on Tim Westwood back in 2012.
Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It’s really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp.
My colleague Eduardo Villuendas has been making some cool music with it.
This really gets to my vision for Gutenberg to be a builder that anyone can use to create an incredible website, like legos anyone can assemble anything they imagine on the web. This is why I said Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress.
Hat tip to the Gutenberg Times. As I said in 2022, you need to learn AI deeply, there is so much fun stuff happening. Berkan Cesur even likes it on Reddit.
Nick Diego writes how Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block developer.
The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day.
Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we got to chat about the hero’s journey of entrepreneurship, my earliest “Hot Nacho” WordPress scandal and the context of current battles, 996 work, jazz clubs in San Francisco, and more. Kleiner never invested in Automattic (I don’t think we ever pitched) but I have always had huge respect for John Doerr, Brook Byers, Bing Gordon, Mary Meeker, Ilya Fushman, and Mamoon Hamid, so many of the people at KPCB. You can watch on YouTube or listen in Pocket Casts.
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. (The joke is the S in MCP stands for security, but that’s another post.) They say to think of it like “like a USB-C port for AI applications” because it allows interoperability between AI chatbots and other tools. Here’s some of the MCP stuff happening across the Automattic solar system:
When nerds start connecting things, interesting stuff happens; that’s been my entire career, so while none of these have made it into a critical daily workflow for me, I’m curious to see what people come up with.
One of my favorite YouTubers is Charles Cornell (WordPress-powered!), who creates great videos that break down the music theory of various things you’ve heard, such as this adorable one featuring SNES soundtracks or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I first came across him reacting to Jacob Collier in 2020. Once I got super-into Severance, his breakdown of the spooky music is great. It’s also interesting to see that the YouTube community is going through its own version of fair use and copyright, trademark, etc., enforcement, which he discusses here.
Sam Altman is always interesting to follow, and it’s interesting to contrast this great interview he did with David Perell on writing with this very direct and awkward one with Tucker Carlson. I have immense respect for anyone who enters the arena and engages directly with journalists or critics, rather than hiding behind PR agents or lawyers. Given the current blood feud, it’s fun to go back eight years and see Sam Altman interview Elon Musk, long before any of the AI stuff blew up they were both terribly prescient.
Ray Dalio is always a gem and he went on Diary of a CEO. Theo Browne has a good take on what it means to vibe code. Kishan Bagaria discusses how Beeper is going to reach 100 million users. The story of how Atlassian took a non-traditional enterprise path with Jay Simons is great. Not a YouTube, but don’t miss Bret Taylor on The Verge. Check out Adam D’Angelo at South Park Commons.
And finally, I’ll say that YouTube Premium, which turns off all the ads, is probably one of the highest value subscriptions you can have. Many of these are essentially like podcasts, and from a product perspective, I think we need to figure out how to sync and allow seamless movement between watching, listening, or reading transcripts in Pocket Casts (Automattic’s open-source podcasting app). We support video podcasts, but there’s no good way yet to have a Whispersync-like experience between video, audio, and a transcript.
Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for us but for all open source maintainers and contributors. Huge thanks to the folks at Gibson and Automattic who have been working on this.
With respect to any remaining claims, we’re confident the facts will demonstrate that our actions were lawful and in the best interests of the WordPress community.
This ruling is a significant milestone, but our focus remains the same: building a free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem and supporting the millions of people who use it every day.
It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes about.
As it happens, James LePage of Automattic has spun up a WordPress plugin for it, so that was fast. Now the thing to figure out is distribution and adoption.