Category Archives: WordPress

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

IE7 on New Sonys

Press, WordPress

I was in the Sony store at the Metreon the other day because Vista has been driving me nuts, I can't find my restore disks, and in a moment of weakness I was contemplating a new laptop. Anyway they had some pretty nice models, but what struck me most when playing around with the different computers was that IE7 was installed as the default browser on each of these computers. Consider IE7 wrecks havoc on sites like WordPress.org, I better start testing with it.

Our Tail

Press, WordPress, WordPress.com

Someone had asked me about traffic patterns on WordPress.com the other day and whether or not they followed a "long tail." I knew the answer was yes, and I guestimated the numbers from memory at around 80% outside the top 10 blogs. It's actually a little more acute: 92.63% of the traffic to WordPress.com is for blogs outside of the top 25. (About 8.4 million pageviews in the past week.) This is from Google Analytics, so doesn't include RSS or anything like that.

WordCamp – WordPress Conference

Events, Press, WordCamp, WordPress

The idea for an event for WordPress users has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, as there is a really interesting group of people around WP but we don't do nearly as many face-to-face interactions as some similar projects. A set of circumstances are coming together at the beginning of August, and I think we're going to give it a go.

August 5th, 2006 is the date, here in the lovely town of San Francisco, California. The idea is a one day BarCamp-style free conference with a party that night. There will be free BBQ for lunch, WordPress t-shirts, and a full day of both user and developer discussion. ("BarCamp-style" is a code phrase for "last minute.")

There are still a few things to figure out, such as a venue, schedule, and other little things like that. (By the way, if you can help with any of these or have event experience, please drop me a note.) But mostly I wanted to get the date out there so people could start planning for it, buy tickets if they're travelling, and let us know if there are any huge conflicts that day. (Like a national holiday or something.)

In the meantime, I've put up a quick site where you can leave your email to signup for more information or let us know you're coming. If you think you can make it, please say so as soon as possible so we can prepare for the right number of people. If you'd like to help in any way, drop me a note via email or in the comments.

Don't know if this will work or not, but it should be fun regardless. Podz is coming in all the way from England, and Donncha from Ireland. 🙂

Paid Support

Akismet, Automattic, WordPress

We just launched the Automattic Support Network which is a place for companies to purchase paid support for WordPress and MU. Originally I didn't think we'd need to do this, simply because the WordPress.org support forums are so amazing and there is such a good community around it. That hasn't changed, but some big companies and enterprise folks are uncomfortable with volunteer support, and want (and insist) on paying someone before deploying a product. Based on that feedback and a lot of input from Podz, we put together this new product, which is basically VIP support with a guaranteed response time. Toni has some more thoughts here. We also rolled out new pricing for commercial Akismet use a few days ago, and the response has been great so far.