Mike Little points out that WordPress is three years old today. 🙂 Who woulda thunk it? Mike and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago, here’s a picture Khaled took of the event.
BlogTalk Reloaded
I’ll be keynoting at BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna, Austria on October 2-3rd. Hopefully I’ll meet a few WordPress users while I’m over there.
Google Irony
John Battelle – The real irony…. Alex Bosworth – Google’s Doublespeak. (Isn’t Alex their CTO’s brother? That’ll make for an interesting Thanksgiving dinner discussion.) I loved Google not just because of their great technology, but because they sold me a dream. Something bigger and better than just another company. Something inspiring and with soul.
XFS vs ZFS
Kevin Burton looks at XFS vs ZFS, and feels XFS is a better choice.
In Sacramento
I’m heading to Sacramento tomorrow for the SacStarts dinner and also to meet Joseph Scott, who’s been contributing some neat code to WP.
Free Sun Server
I put in an application for a free Sun server to try out for either WordPress.com or Ping-o-Matic, depending on when/if it arrives. Everything we’ve done on WP.com has been Dell thus far, and honestly they’ve been pretty good with the exception of one box that they’re going to replace soon. Our biggest DB server (a Dell 6850) does north of 300 queries per second, but it weighs as much as me and uses a crazy amount of power, which is expensive. Of course as more and more of our infrastructure becomes distributed, high performance boxes don’t matter as much.
Features Don’t Matter
Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore. I think similar things when I hear “But CMS X has hundreds more features than Y! Why don’t we have more users?”
Front Row
WOW. The new Front Row remote control feature is amazing. I can’t believe this hasn’t gotten more coverage. If I had a TV, this would make a fantastic digital hub. Actually it looks pretty darn good on a regular monitor.
Dell vs. Sun
The Sun Doesn’t Shine for Me, or why Dell is kicking Sun’s butt. I can attest to a similar experience, except that I gave up long before Jason did.
In Baring Train Crash Facts, Blogs Erode China Censorship in the NY Times.
Akismet for Movable Type
We’ve released a Akismet for Movable Type plugin and the response from testers thus far has been very good. John Battelle blogs about it here: Akismet for MT: Death to Spam. Also check out this post by Jeff Nolan. “I was spending up to 45 minutes a day cleaning it up.”
Thomas Dolby, Hot Air, and Southwest
Tons of people have been writing in about some new WordPress blogs, so to roll them into one post: Thomas Dolby the noted musician has a new WP blog, a new conservative video blog from Michelle Malkin called Hot Air, and finally closest to my heart is Southwest Airlines new one.
Conventional RSS
Alex from Textpattern has started putting thoughts down on what we’re calling “conventional RSS.” It’s not a spec, profile, or anything like that. It’s just a documentation of the things we do in our RSS 2.0 feeds. There are some minor differences with what WP currently does, but at least in the beginning WordPress and Textpattern will have a shared set of conventions and assumptions.
Now, more and more of the computing power we use comes from a CPU across the Internet. We no longer own our digital homes. Instead, we live rent-free with our parents.
The Clouds My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem by Alexis Madrigal.
At Webvisions in Portland
About a month from now I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” The talk will be part tech, part social. It’s a very reasonably priced conference with a lot of great speakers, I think they’re going to sell out soon so if you’re interested in going book soon. It’ll also be my first time in Portland, so I’m looking forward to exploring the area a bit and meeting WP users.
Marco Arment has a great take on how the decentralized nature of podcasting is a feature, not a bug, and Apple being more proactive there would be harmful to the ecosystem. As an aside, since I’ve been in Houston more recently, which means driving a lot, I’ve been really loving his app Overcast and I opted in to the optional paid subscription for it. I just need to get in more of a habit of listening to podcasts outside of Houston.
Darwin on Web 2.0
Darwin on Web 2.0: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
I [heart] WordPress
Some folks on the WordPress.com forums have come up with some really wacky I [heart] WordPress logos.
Packt CMS Nomination
If you have a favorite open source CMS, consider nominating it for the Packt Open Souce CMS award.
Our Tail
Someone had asked me about traffic patterns on WordPress.com the other day and whether or not they followed a "long tail." I knew the answer was yes, and I guestimated the numbers from memory at around 80% outside the top 10 blogs. It's actually a little more acute: 92.63% of the traffic to WordPress.com is for blogs outside of the top 25. (About 8.4 million pageviews in the past week.) This is from Google Analytics, so doesn't include RSS or anything like that.