Category Archives: WordPress

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

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Books, Google, WordPress

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

Events, WordPress

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. 🙂

Usable Security

WordPress

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.

SxSW Blogging Begins

Events, WordPress

Time to break out the old SxSW (South by Southwest) category again, as I depart in just a few short hours on my journey back to my home state of Texas and to Austin, a town which I love. This year is going to be very different for me than the last two because where before I was a naïve young boy sitting in the audience starstruck at all the amazing people there, and now I’m a naïve young boy sitting on a panel starstruck at all the amazing people there. So the seating arrangement has changed a little bit, but not much else. The only other difference is last year WordPress had maybe 2,000 users (tops) and now we have about 40x that.

I just got a new memory card for my camera and I’m all charged up to photoblog the entire event as I have years past, but I don’t know if this year if I can do 0-day photos as I did before, but I’ll try to catch up when I can. Even though all the cool kids will be using Flickr this year I’m going to put mine on my photolog because I don’t want to duplicate effort and use up my limited Flickr bandwidth. The tags should be fun to watch though.

Quick public service announcement: tunnel your traffic or use SSL, far too many people sniff the networks at these things.

I’m going to be on three panels this year, I’ve linked each from the sidebar and I’ll post more about each as they approach.

If you’re a Photo Matt reader or a Ping-O-Matic or WordPress evangelist and you see my please introduce yourself or say hi, I’d love to meet everyone there.