Category Archives: WordPress

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

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.

Shuttle

Press, WordPress, WordPress.com

Khaled has drawn back the curtain on Shuttle. It’s a fantastic set of work by an exceptional group of people (Khaled, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar, Bryan Veloso). There are some pretty significant shifts in there so it’ll be integrated incrementally rather than overnight, and I also plan to test out things on WordPress.com first and watch usage to make sure none of our assumptions are too far off, but I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty significant milestone for WordPress and we have some exciting months ahead of us. Everyone should thank the Shuttle team. (Note: There will be some ongoing design work as well, especially as new features are added to WordPress. If you’re a kick-ass designer who can juggle code as well as Photoshop, drop me a line.)

Trying Shangri-La

Books, Press, WordPress

So I’m going to take a whack at this “Shangra-Li Diet” thing I’ve read about on several blogs, most notably here. I’m not having a weight crisis, but I think 5-10 pounds would put me in a healthier class for my height. I bought the book and read it this morning, it basically just repeats itself a lot and seems to have a lot of filler, but it may be useful to some folks as a motivator. You can get all the important details from various blogs. Mostly I’m interested in it to see if the mind hacking really works, and I’m willing to endure Glenda making fun of me about trying something out of a diet book for the sake of you guys ;). Apparently I don’t own any sugar, extra light olive oil, or a scale, but I’ll post updates as I get going. Update: The author has a WordPress blog.

Share Your OPML

Google, Press, WordPress

Share Your OPML has relaunched and appears to be built on WordPress. This was one of my favorite services a few years back and was far ahead of its time. I still think moving OPML around is too hard, it would be nice to have some sort of OPML normalization service that could log into different accounts at places like WordPress, Bloglines, and Google reader, grab your file, auto-discover any feeds for entries that don’t have a xmlUrl, and merge everything together using the updated attribute. Hat tip: Niall and Johan.

CNET Buzz Out Loud

Akismet, Press, WordPress

Thanks to Michael Pate and Josh Jarmin who wrote in about Akismet and WordPress being mentioned on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast on 4/26, I got in contact with the Buzz folks and they invited me in to the studio today for a brief chat. (I still live a block away from CNET.) Molly Wood and Veronica Belmont were fantastic hosts and hopefully Molly can get her firewall sorted out. It should be up on their site later today. Update: I snapped two photos to Flickr during the podcast.

Typepad Switches Atom

Press, WordPress, WordPress.com

I think that Typepad may have just switched it’s Atom feeds from .3 to 1.0. How do I know? Because two blogs I read just popped up with 10 new entries (none were new) and each one was broken in Bloglines. (Which is the single largest aggregator in the world, at least according to WordPress.com feed stats.) Here is Seth Godin’s as viewed by the feed validator. This is a bold move, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be their support department tomorrow. This could also just be my misunderstanding, as some feeds like this one from Marginal Revolutions (one of my favorite blogs) seems to be on Atom 0.2.