Tumblr Support in WordPress

WordPress.com

Earlier today WordPress.com turned on the ability to push new blog posts to Tumblr, alongside the existing capability to do so for Twitter, Facebook, et al. This is interesting for a few reasons.

While the tech press often likes to paint companies in a similar market as competing in a zero sum game, the reality is that all are growing rapidly and services feed each other and cross-pollinate more than anyone gives them credit for. Tumblr built a dashboard reader product that has tons of pageviews and lots of followers, which can provide distribution for blogs much in the same way Facebook and Twitter do. (Its 85%-on-dashboard-centric usage looks more like a social network than a blogging network, actually.) WordPress has fantastic content that people on Tumblr love, and Tumblr has a rich and diverse content and curation community that can drive new visitors to WordPress — it’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

It’s true that we’re becoming simpler and more streamlined and it’s a process driven by our design vision and our community, not what any particular competitor is doing. WordPress has always flourished because it’s a hassle-free digital hub — a home on the web you can control, customize, and truly own due to the fact that it’s Open Source software. WordPress is the antidote to walled gardens.

Thirty-Five

Birthday

What a year.

First, it feels amazing to write this inside of the new Gutenberg block editor in WordPress 5.0. It was a labor of love for so many and the next chapters are going to be even more exciting.

The best part of the last year was growing closer to my friends and loved ones — I don’t know if it’s externally perceptible but my heart feels a lot more open.

I’ve found a good balance with meditation, work, sleep, fasting, eating, and reading that gives me a lot of joy, energy, and feels like a combination I could sustain the rest of my life.

Reading in particular was a highlight as I finished 38 books, which is the most in a year since I started tracking, and so many of them were truly excellent I’m going to do another post just on books. I will give a special call out to The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. Leaving my Kindle Oasis at an airport ended up being a blessing in disguise as I started using the Kindle app on my iPhone a lot more and that’s become my new favorite habit. (And the physical Kindle was returned!)

It was a strong travel year, covering 126 cities, 20 countries, and 377k miles. I especially enjoyed visits to Tulum, Iceland, Bodrum, Tonga, Kauai, Lanai, and Courchevel. I finally checked off my bucket list item to become scuba certified and had an amazing opportunity to swim with humpback whales.

I was a few feet from Adam Gazzaley when he took this photo.

I also had lots of opportunities to practice patience, weathered a torrent of personally-directed criticism across every medium, and had a few months that were the hardest I’ve worked in my career. With the benefit of a little distance, though, those things don’t loom as large. I learned a ton — often the hard way but often that’s what it takes — and discovered I had some additional gears that can kick in when needed.

As I pass solidly into my mid-thirties, I don’t have any drastic shifts on the horizon but I am looking forward to continuing to strengthen the habits I’ve been able to develop this past year.

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.

Celebrate Seventeen

WordPress

May 27th, 17 years ago, the first release of WordPress was put into the world by Mike Little and myself. It did not have an installer, upgrades, WYSIWYG editor (or hardly any Javascript), comment spam protection, clean permalinks, caching, widgets, themes, plugins, business model, or any funding.

The main feedback we got at the time was that the blogging software market was saturated and there wasn’t room or need for anything new.

WordPress did have a philosophy, an active blog, a license that protected the freedom of its users and developers, a love of typography, a belief that code is poetry, fantastic support forums and mailing lists and IRC, and firm sense that building software is more fun when you do it together as a community.

We have relentlessly iterated across 38 major releases since then, and here we are.

If you’d like to celebrate with me, put on some jazz, eat some BBQ, light a candle for the contributors who have passed on, help a friend or stranger less technical than you build a home online, and remember that technology is at its best when it brings people together.

PHP5 Issues

Asides

Dreamhost upgrades their servers to PHP 5.2 (newer is better, right?) and most of their PHP5 customers break. WP 2.1 had a lot of workarounds in it just to run under 5.2. That’s stupid. I’m sure there is a perfectly rational reason why PHP core was “forced” to break existing scripts, but constantly shooting your users in the foot isn’t a good way for PHP to stay relevant. (I write this as someone whose entire company and livelihood is based on PHP.)

Windows Tip

Uncategorized,

Something was listening on Port 80 and preventing my local webserver from working on my Windows XP laptop. Here’s how I tracked it down: Hit Windows Key + R, which brings up the Run dialog, then type “cmd” and press enter. You’ll be on a command line.

Type netstat -a -o -n and it’ll bring up a network list, I looked for one with 0.0.0.0:80 as the local address and noted down the PID of 2600. To find out what PID 2600 was (hopefully not a trojan) I typed tasklist /FI "PID eq 2600" which means show me a tasklist, and filter (/FI) where the PID (process ID) is equal to 2600. This told me that it was Skype.exe that was running something on port 80 locally.

Finally I killed it using taskkill /PID 2600 and Skype was gone and I was able to start up my web server locally and do a little bit of offline coding. Windows actually has a pretty handy command line once you learn your way around it, it’s just the syntax is so inelegant to me after spending all day on Linux terminals. A final tip, you can type /? after most Windows commands to get the equivilent of a man page for that command.

Now for why Skype was listening or port 80 on localhost and serving blank pages… Ihave no idea.

Optimism Tax

Quote

Around 1:00 am on Halloween, I hailed a cab with a friend. “Drive around to the front of this building. Can ya leave the meter running while I go inside to tell our friends that we’ve left? Thanks, man… I appreciate it.”

A few minutes later, the cabbie told my friend to run inside and get me because he was in a hurry and had someone waiting.

— John “Halcyon” Styn beginning a story on the Optimism Tax, which I paid today in the form of a GPS, some sunglasses, and an original PalmPilot. “[A] small price to pay to be able to continue trusting people.”

Five for the Future

Essays, WordPress

On Sunday at WordCamp Europe I got a question about how companies contribute back to WordPress, how they’re doing, and what companies should do more of.

First on the state of things: there are more companies genuinely and altruistically contributing to growing WordPress than ever before. In our ecosystem web hosts definitely make the most revenue and profits, and it’s been great to see them stepping up their game, but also the consultancies and agencies around WordPress have been pretty amazing about their people contributions, as demonstrated most recently by the fact the 4.0 and 4.1 release leads both hail from WP agencies (10up and Code for the People, respectively).

I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.

Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up quickly. As of today Automattic is 277 people, which means we should have about 14 people contributing full-time. That’s a lot of people to not have on things that are more direct or obvious drivers of the business, and we’re not quite there today, but I’m working on it and hope Automattic can set a good example for this in the community. I think it’s just as hard for a 20-person organization to peel 1 person off.

It’s a big commitment, but I can’t think of a better long-term investment in the health of WordPress overall. I think it will look incredibly modest in hindsight. This ratio is probably the bare minimum for a sustainable ecosystem, avoiding the tragedy of the commons. I think the 5% rule is one that all open source projects and companies should follow, at least if they want to be vibrant a decade from now.

Further reading: There’s been a number of nice blog follow-ups. Post Status has a nice post on Contribution Culture. Ben Metcalf responded but I disagree with pretty much everything even though I’m glad he wrote it. Tony Perez wrote The Vision of Five and What it Means. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, pointed out his essay Scaling Open Source Communities which I think is really good.

Selling Links

Uncategorized,

“Let’s face it, we’re selling links here. Call it ‘buzz’ all you want, but it boils down to selling links. That skews Google’s index and they’ve come out against that quite publicly. If we’re all given the freedom to disclose in our own manner, we’re a moving target. If we’ve all got disclosure badges everywhere, it’s easy for them to penalize/ban us all.”

The comments on this PayPerPost blog encouraging disclosure are interesting, it seems even their own users recognize that they’re doing something Google should/will penalize.

Perhaps rather than trying to find better ways to hide from Google, they should just stop the questionable behaviour in the first place. This is one of the reasons we took an early stance by banning PPP on WordPress.com, and other blog hosts should do the same.

Trying out Nexus One

Asides, ,

This week I’ve taken the SIM card out of my iPhone and put it in the Nexus One, which I’m going to try to stick with for the next week. I love my 3GS, but I’m just hungry for something else as the iPhone has felt a little stagnant lately, and the Nexus has the most beautiful hardware — it’s a pleasure to hold and look at. So far I’m really happy with the screen, the grass live background, the Google and Facebook contact syncing, news/weather widget, Google Voice (!), and I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to the UI. (Only other Android device I’ve tried was the G1, and that lasted 10 minutes.) I’m not impressed with the email application IMAP support, the app store seems a bit anemic, and the camera application crashed once when I was trying to take a picture. I’ve found equivalent apps for the most-used stuff on my iPhone.

MySpace Spam

Asides, Spam

This is an example of a MySpace spam profile, it’s very convincing—see if you can spot the ad. I think this phenomenon is under-reported. They are using data from your profile—location, age, romantic preferences—to highly target messages and “adds.” Seventeen hundred friends. It would be interesting to know the growth of spam on social networks like MySpace is as high as email or comments. The incentives are there.