Category Archives: WordPress

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

Markup Survey

Google, Press, WordPress

Ian Hixie at Google just published a really awesome web authoring survey of a billion documents. What I found most interesting about reading it was places that things I’ve worked on, notably WordPress and GMPG, popped up.

HTTP Headers — “A pretty significant number of pages include an X-Pingback header (more than the number of pages with the Set-Cookie2 header). In fact, X-Pingback was the 30th most-seen header in our data sample.”

WordPress is one of the few platforms that supports pingback, an alternative to Trackback with a real spec. Apparently there are enough WP pages in the world for this to make a blip on the radar.

Page Headers — “It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profileattribute, though. The three most-often used values are http://gmpg.org/xfn/1, http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/, and http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. This makes XFN the most popular HTML metadata profile!”

Too cool for words. 🙂 Both of these profiles are included by default in some WordPress templates.

rel="pingback" and rel="bookmark" both skirt the charts in the link relationship page. No XFN values made the cut there.

The <a> element — “external seems to be mainly propagated by WordPress, but people have long been asking for a way to label their links as being external vs internal.”

Nice to get a direct mention there, and we’ve supported bookmark and tag from the beginning. All in all the report is a very interesting read, and kudos to Google for doing this type of research and sharing it with the web. I hope to see more of these in the future, it delights my inner markup geek.

Automattic Toni

Automattic, Press, WordPress, Yahoo

Another nice birthday present! I have no idea (really) how he got this, but Om has the scoop on Yahoo VP Toni Schneider leaving to join Automattic. We were originally going to announce this at the end of the month when Toni actually left but I guess now is as good a time as any. 🙂 Toni was the CEO of Oddpost and after joining Yahoo led, amoung other things, their really cool developer network.

I first met Toni shortly after I moved to San Francisco and I’ve wanted him to be a part of Automattic pretty much since the idea first entered my mind. We’ve spent many long meals over the past year discussing the Automattic idea before it even had a name. I’ve been on cloud nine since (somehow) I convinced him to leave the incredibly cushy corporate job and rough it out in startup world again. I’m very very excited about some of the things coming down the line.

Update: Toni has blogged about it here. He also has a WordPress.com blog that used to have a bunch of cool cars on it, hopefully that’ll come back somewhere. 🙂

Update 2: It’s on Digg, and I’m curious what linking to the Digg story will do. Digg it if you think it’s interesting.

Home Sweet Home

Press, Travel, WordPress

I’m back in San Francisco. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except I left at the beginning of December. It has been an exciting month, and I had the pleasure of meeting WordPress users from all over the world in person. I also learned a ton about efficient traveling and getting work done on the road. All great fun, but I am so happy to be back in my own place.

WP2 Thoughts

Press, WordPress

WordPress 2.0 “Duke” is available! Like 1.5 when it first came out I expect it will take a few months before the full implications of this release are realized. There are some surface changes (see 5 little things I like about WP 2.0) that still need some polish in places, but I think the underlying architectual changes are really rock solid. Interface changes are easy to iterate on in future versions. WordPress.org also has a rocking new design from Matt Thomas, and there will be some more action there in the coming months.

No Guinness

Press, WordPress

Been in Ireland since Saturday, and it couldn’t be better. What a lovely country with lovely people. One thing I’ve noticed, at least here in the “real capital” Cork, that “Guinness is for tourists.” Everyone here drinks Murphy’s. Anyway, back to work with Donncha on some WordPress.com goodies.

About.com switching to WordPress

Press, WordPress

Sheila Coggins just published an interview with me on About.com Weblogs, which came out fairly well and talks a little bit about new efforts like WordPress.com.

The timing for the interview couldn’t be better. As people watching closely may have already started to notice, About.com has begun switching their sites over to WordPress from Movable Type. They’ve been doing it quietly and one-by-one for at least month now, you can see WP in action on Weblogs, Baby Parenting, entrepreneur, US politics, and many more. They’ve integrated it so tightly with their system most of the usual signs of a WP blog aren’t there, but the dead giveaway is the comments. In fact none of their older blogs seem to have comments enabled, just the upgraded WP ones.

About.com isn’t very “2.0” hip but they are still get some of the highest traffic on the web, easily within the top 50 sites in the world. From what I understand they haven’t made any changes to the core code, all of their customizations have been through plugins. They’re also looking at bringing a WP “powered by” link to the pages. (Which, as noted in the previous entry, is completely optional.) I’m very glad About has found a platform that will grow with them. 🙂

The good news keeps coming in.