It’s becoming more and more painfully obvious that Meetup has jumped the shark, we might as well start a group working on an open source alternative for WordPress users. Anyone interested in working on this?
Category Archives: WordPress
Pulse of Freedom
“The Pulse of Freedom is a site published by the protesters at Martyrs’ Square, Beirut, from a tent city.” This is an inspiring story: “A group of Web masters, graphic design artists, writers, and photographers stayed up all night for several nights in a row putting the Web site together.” They chose WordPress. “As far as I’m aware this is the first Web site of its kind anywhere in the world. The leaders of a democratic revolution are openly blogging about their experience from the center of the action.” Echoditto writes about their part in Blogging from Beirut. “I am writing this post from a tent city in the Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, a place which is filled with the energy and excitement of a burgeoning democratic movement.” Hat tip: Mike Carvalho via email.
Adam Trachtenberg
Stewart Ugelow writes in that “Adam Trachtenberg, eBay’s technical evangelist and author of O’Reilly’s
“Upgrading to PHP 5”, has switched to WordPress.”
Firefox Counter
Get a Firefox download counter for your blog, I wrote a quickie plugin for WordPress that’ll grab and cache the number.
Hosting
Announcing the new WordPress hosting page. Update: I forgot to thank Chris Messina for helping out with the design of the page.
150k
WordPress 1.5.0 broke 150,000 downloads earlier today.
Default Spam Handling
Dougal takes a look at built-in spam measures in WP and SpamLookup, I think we could integrate more in the next release.
Blogging Autosave
This Blogger autosave feature is something I’ve been wanting to do for WordPress for a while, but I had envisioned it as an asynchronous javascript updating the draft every minute or so if the post was over 50 words long. Perhaps this cookie approach is better. Anyone want to try it for WP?
UK Liberal Democrats
Peter Westwood wrote in that the UK Liberal Democrats election blog is on WordPress and looks pretty professional. I have no idea about UK politics, but it’s nice to see WordPress being used in more and more high-profile sites.
USF using WordPress
Mark Jaquith wrote in to say “The University of South Florida in Tampa is using WordPress to run student blogs. http://blog.usf.edu/ The blogs are available to each of the school’s 42,000 students! The blogs have some pretty slick features like an included Gallery photo album, a unified login system, del.icio.us integration, Flickr integration, and pre-installed CSS varieties. They even provide unified RSS/Atom feeds for all of the blogs.” I don’t know what to add to that, except that this is fantastic. I wonder how long before other universities start to follow in their footsteps?
WordPress Lessons
WordPress Lessons on the Codex are looking good, in fact the entire Codex is becoming a fantastic documentation resource. Kudos to Lorelle for kicking these off.
Amazon on WordPress
Joe Clark wrote in that the Amazon Development Center, India has a WordPress blog. I’ve never seen india.amazon.com and the whole thing feels very different from Amazon’s other sites. What’s the story?
Caption Machine
Caption Machine is a site where people upload funny photos and submit captions, and they just moved to WordPress 1.5. Here’s a good example. Tim writes in they have 21,000 captions and counting…
WordPress in Higher Education « WordPress Support
WordPress in Higher Education — “Penn State is also telling all of the participants (about 200 leaders in higher education) about how they use WordPress for courses, portfolios, content mangement and about everything else.”
Fitlog
Matt Haughey’s Fitlog is a
great use of custom fields for what has been called “datablogging” lately. We will be expanding our XML-RPC APIs with WordPress extensions to allow more remote programatic access to advanced WP features such as custom fields in the future.
WP in cPanel
I just got a note from Billy at cPanel that WordPress is now a cPanel Addon Script, which means you will be able to install and keep WordPress updated automatically using cPanel which is installed on millions of hosts worldwide.
Mark Jen on WordPress
Remember Mark Jen who got fired from Google for blogging? He’s back, working at Plaxo, and on WordPress. Here’s the story of his switch. He has a style switcher that turns capital letters off and on. Hat tip: David via email.
Theme Winners
The theme contest winners have been announced, of course to be perfectly cheesy the real winner is the WordPress community. I’m going to need a day or two to get all the themes set up that accumulated while I was out, and when they’re all in I’ll do the drawing for the prize I’m sponsoring.
A Summary
I guess the problem with a long piece is many just skim it, and the more words there are the more chance there is for the meaning to be lost. I’ve given a lot of thought to putting things as succintly as possible: Knowing what I knew then, I would probably make the same decision; knowing what I know now I wouldn’t even consider it. Not thinking through all the ramifications was a big mistake. So was not having more community dialog from the beginning, which would have caught this earlier. I am extremely sorry for both, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. Amazingly, WordPress has gotten more donations in the last 4 days then it has in the past year — what an incredible community.
A Response
Let me do my best to respond to the inquiries have been coming in, only some of these are direct quotes.
There is a shorter version of this available too.
Is this an April Fool’s joke?
Unfortunately not. If I was more clever perhaps I could make it a killer intro for one, but that’ll have to wait for next year.
What was your thinking behind accepting the advertising?