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.”
Category Archives: WordPress
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?
Back Online
I called my sister last night to tell her about a present I found for her in the market and she interrupted me to say she saw my name show up in Google News a few times and started reading some of the articles. Before the phone card ran out she read me some headlines and my stomach sank. This is my first vacation and I almost didn’t even bring my laptop. (Luckily I talked myself into bringing it to do pictures.) I haven’t been on the internet since Monday and I obviously have a lot to catch up on. It was almost midnight when I found out and there was no access anywhere, so I woke up at 4:30 AM this morning to catch the first water bus to the airport and found some overpriced wifi, and here I am.
I have close to a thousand emails and countless blog posts and comments to go through, but I’ll try to synthesize everything and respond ASAP, I think it’s important because some people seem to be spinning things quite maliciously. If you have a specific question please send me an email and I’ll do my best to respond personally or on the blog, even if you’ve already decided I’m the scum of the earth.
WordPress World Tour
So I’m doing a little vacation this week and I’m going to be Florence, Italy until Tuesday the 29th, Venice until Friday the 1st, and then Copenhagen, Denmark through Sunday the 3rd. If anyone wants to do a WordPress/Photo Matt meetup while I’m in town, drop me a note. Also if you have any suggestions of things to do in any of these places please leave a comment. Blogging will be light this week, but I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures. 🙂
Technorati Bump
Technorati: The Technorati cosmos for wordpress.org now shows 96,194 incoming sources, another jump.
Corporate Headquarters
Scott has a picture of the new WordPress Corporate Headquarters on Flickr.
OK/Cancel SxSW
OK/Cancel comic on SxSW 2005, in which my name makes an appearance. OK/Cancel appears to be running on a well-hacked WordPress install, though there’s no link.
Party
Party was great, thanks to everyone for coming out. The tag for the night is wordpress100k.
PyMusique
PyMusique lets you purchase music from iTunes on Linux and apparently when the music comes from the server it has no DRM. I just read a News.com story on them and noticed their blog was also on WordPress.
100k and Counting
WordPress 100,000 Party, and here’s the Evite. This is going to be a lot of fun. 🙂
Amazon Search and WordPress
Hacking a9’s Open Search into WordPress, so you can have your blog as a sidebar on a9.com.
Usable Security
Usable Security is a new blog about—you guessed it—the intersection of usability and security. This comes up every few weeks since I improved the error messages on the WordPress login (and bbPress) to specify which part of the login was mistaken, the username or the password. Security folks see this as a problem because you’re revealing more information but I see making the error message more generic as premature security optimization. Plenty of systems where login names are public or easily discoverable, such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, most email systems, and so forth, seem to be doing just fine.
Tim Kaine on WordPress
At SxSW Mike let me know that Tim Kaine, Virginia governor candidate, has a WordPress blog.
Spammer Compliments WordPress
A spammer, or a former one, compliments WordPress in this interview about 5 minutes in. It’s an interesting listen regardless. Hat tip: Praneet Kandula via email.
NewsForge Review
A great review of WordPress at Newsforge is up, very thorough and covers a lot of the resources at the Codex.