I am very thankful and grateful to have made it through the past year, which was a really special one personally and professionally. I learned to open myself up more to relationships, continued aspiring to be clear and direct with yellow arrows, and worked alongside some incredible people to tackle the biggest and hardest problems, whether it was getting plugin and theme support on WP.com or the start and growth of Gutenberg.
I read a lot more books, traveled 337k miles between 91 cities, spent more time in Texas, kept my health in a good balance with weight training, running, and a better diet including several months of 16/8 intermittent fasting, while still getting in some excellent meals with friends and loved ones (up to 58% of top 50 list). As I’m solidly in my mid-thirties now, and I want to continue to live by: all things in moderation. I consider what I do with WordPress and Automattic my life’s work, and hope to continue it as long as I’m useful. Some days I pinch myself.
Thank you to all of you on this journey with me. I am imperfect but trying my darndest, and I’m lucky to have friends and colleagues doing the same.
JJJ at BuddyPress has some Helpful Resources for Ning Users. I’ve seen smaller startups rush to fill the space left by Ning’s announcement they’re getting out of their free tier, but honestly if a company with $120,000,000 in funding can’t figure that business out, I wouldn’t hitch my horse to a company with $5-6M. It’s better to get a $10/mo hosting account you know will be around forever and install BuddyPress and have complete and total control over your network, from the domain to the source code.
“As my blog has grown in popularity, we realized we were ready to switch to a platform offering more programming options. After careful research, that new platform will be WordPress, which we hope to launch tomorrow with an exciting photo gallery from my most recent trip to Mexico.” — Martha Stewart. Ms. Stewart was previously on Typepad. Hat tip: Joe Clark.
Sometimes it goes up and down through the course of a month, but it’s still a pretty fun milestone that we can now say about one in four websites are now powered by the scrappy open source underdog with its roots stretching all the way back to a single person in Corsica, France. We should be comfortably past 25% by the end of the year.
The big opportunity is still the 57% of websites that don’t use any identifiable CMS yet, and that’s where I think there is still a ton of growth for us (and I’m also rooting for all the other open source CMSes).
Has Microsoft stolen WordPress’ tagline? (Note: I’m sure someone in 1970 probably said “Code is Poetry” at DEC or something. 😉 But it has been the WordPress tagline since day 1.)
I’ve always been into personal analytics. From Wakemate to the Nike Fuelband I’ve tried pretty much every device that’s come on the market to help you become more self-aware of your activities, and hopefully improve them as well.
Lately I’ve settled on two that I think are really high quality: the Jawbone UP and the Basis watch. I would recommend either above the Nike Fuelband or Fitbit, but let me share some brief thoughts about my experiences with each:
The UP is beautiful — it’s easy to wear with pretty much any outfit, even with formal wear I find I can move it up my arm a little bit inside my sleeve above my shirt cuff thanks to the flexible nature of the band. The social app they have for it is cool, though it can be a little weird to see your teammate’s minute-by-minute sleeping habits (“Hey! I noticed you were up between 3:32 and 3:50 AM last night. How ’bout them Giants?”).
I’m very proud of my sleep.
The battery life is over a week so you never have to think about it, but you do have to carry around a proprietary connector for it which I keep losing leaving me (like right now) with an uncharged and useless device. To sync you plug the band into your phone’s headphone port and the sync takes a few seconds, it’s a fun process I do usually first thing in the morning to see how I slept the night before and it’s also fun to demo to friends. The first one I had was in their “mint green” color and I ended up wearing it out — it started to look dirty and I broke it where the headphone jack comes out making it difficult to charge and sync. That said, I was pretty rough on it. My new one is blue and I like it much better. My only big complaint about how the whole thing works is it doesn’t detect when you go to sleep, you have to press and hold the button on the end to put it from wake to sleep mode, which I would frequently forget to do. I really like the idea of the smart alarm and power nap features even though I never used them.
The Basis is a bit clunky and retro looking, but functionality-wise it provides some really cool data: it tracks your heart rate, skin temperature, perspiration level, steps, and sleep. It detects automatically when you’re asleep, no buttons to push. The data is presented in a really cool web app that lets you compare some of the data points and that I learned cool things from, like my heart rate jumps about 20 beats per minute when I wake up, and I’m most warm about two thirds into my sleep cycle. There don’t appear any social features that I’ve seen in the software, though its habit formation tracking seems pretty slick. The way the “buttons” work on the device is pretty cool, the silver dots in the corners are touch-sensitive. There’s a button on the side that I haven’t figured out what it does yet. Syncing and charging is much worse than the UP — it’s got an even clunkier proprietary USB thing that both syncs to your computer and charges, but because the display can show you how you’re doing as you go throughout the day I don’t feel the need to synchronize it as often. The heart rate tracking is by far my favorite feature. It’s comfortable to wear, but doesn’t disappear like the UP. Finally, as an added bonus, it tells the time. (Surprising useful.) If it somehow merged with the Pebble I’d be in geek heaven.
If I had to pick between the two I’d just use the Basis. The awkwardness of the device is outweighed by the richness of the data it provides. For right now I’m not choosing: I wear one on each wrist and compare the data. (It’s always within a few % of each other for things they both do.) If I were hiking in the woods for a week I’d probably just take the UP as its battery would last the entire time. It’s really illustrated for me what a silo each of these systems are, they don’t talk to each other at all and it appears unlikely they ever will.
Long-term I think we really need an open source package you can run on your own servers that can ingest the data from all of these services, say from back when I used to use a Wakemate sleep tracking to today’s Fitbit Aria scale, the meals I track in the UP app with my Basis heart rate data and Runkeeper and Hundred Pushup logs, and provide you with a single data store for all the personal analytics you generate across various services. I think there’s going to be a lot of competition in this space in the next few years.
There’s an interesting post at GigaOM: Web 2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet. It’s a good read, though could be shorter, but a few things struck me after reading it. I don’t disagree with him per se, I just think the emphasis is on the wrong thing. (Probably for effect.)
Infrastructure can be a competitive advantage today — the speed and reliability of WordPress.com has certainly put us in a favorable light with users, especially large customers — but that’s going to disappear over time. We’re very much at version 0.1 of things like Amazon’s web services and App Engine, but it’s not hard to read the writing on the wall and understand that level of abstraction is going to be the future foundation of web applications. I’m not counting on infrastructure to be a long-term competitive advantage for Automattic.
If you have a few minutes it’s worth reading On Grids, the Ambitions of Amazon and Joyent which has the real definition of a grid and Sunshine, which is worth it for the extended analogies to Greek mythology. (Both end in ads for Joyent.) Also check out Early notes on GoogleApps, Dave Winer groks where this has to go.
Second, Allan describes a case of a DDOS attack hurting a friend’s startup who had very little information about how to stop it:
Unfortunately, the poor site performance was not missed by the blogosphere. The application has suffered from a stream of bad publicity; it’s also missed a major window of opportunity for user adoption, which has sloped significantly downward since the DDOS attack and shows no sign of recovering.
We can all name startups or sites that aren’t particularly known for their performance, but that flourished in spite of it. Twitter and MySpace comes to mind. If we dug a little deeper we could also find thousands of startups who were prepared for the world to show up to their door, and it never did. Building something people want is much harder than scaling it. (In most cases.) If you solve the what-people-want problem, they’ll use you no matter how bad your interface is, how slow your site is, just give them somewhere worth waiting for. I would suspect the friend here isn’t seeing their usage decline because on their Techcrunch day the site wasn’t responsive, it’s that they’re probably still in the before market fit stage.
Third, I am a huge believer in the importance of performance, but most people forget that on the web 80-95% of performance is on the front end not the page generation time. (I realize I’m saying this on a site with a 140kb header graphic. :)) Yahoo has fantastic resources on this. When a website “pops” it probably has very little to do with their underlying server infrastructure and a lot to do with the perceived performance largely driven by how it’s coded at the HTML, CSS, and Javascript level. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons Google Gears is going to change the web as we know it today – LocalServer will obsolete CDNs as we know them. (Look for this in WordPress soonish.)
Finally, for the next few years before we have true utility computing, there are some great “hardware as a service” providers like Layered Tech and Server Beach that essentially handle everything from the power to the network to hardware, and let you take over from the operating system up. This is what we use for WordPress.com, Akismet, WordPress.org, and it’s great. It’s allowed us to focus on what matters — our software and service. You still need a pro like Allan describes to handle things at the OS level (most performance problems I see are badly configured servers, not hardware limitations) but leave networking and hardware to people with economies of scale. This comment nails it.
Stephen Steele (is that a real name?) just wrote in that the new Yahoo Mail updates blog is on WordPress. As far as I know this is the first official Yahoo blog on WP I’ve seen. What makes it really interesting is it’s the first time I’ve seen third-party software (like WordPress) on the yahoo.com domain. You’ll notice every time they’ve done blogs before it’s been on a different domain like yahoo.net or ysearchblog.com, I imagine because of the incredibly strict security requirements anything with access to Yahoo.com cookies must meet. This is very exciting news. 🙂
The past few days I’ve been in Athens and now I’m on Ios island for the Greek Blogger Camp. Having a conference like this in one of the prettiest places in the world is a great idea (go Stefanos) and there is a lot of energy in the Greek blogosphere. Things are very early here, I’ve heard estimates that there are fewer than ten thousand Greek blogs, but it’s obvious that there is a lot of growth coming, they have all the right ingredients.
After a security update my 12″ Powerbook asked me to reboot, after which it decided that it will only boot to a command line. I have no idea how to even start to fix this, I can navigate around it like it’s Linux but there is no indication of what went wrong or how to fix it. I’m going to take it to the Genius bar in hopes they can do something, but all-in-all this is pretty disappointing.
The new version of Movable Type sounds very nice, and they’re doing a good job telling its story through a series of entries. I recommend people read what they’re adding and if anything particularly strikes your fancy let us know so we can consider it for WordPress. Inspiration for WordPress has always come from many places, from 37signals or Adaptive Path to other weblogging platforms or content management systems.
First off, Merry Christmas everybody! I’ve been doing some tweaking here around ma.tt. The biggest thing you’ll notice is that I’ve imported about 12,000 photos from my old Gallery-powered gallery, which was broken since I upgraded to PHP5, into core WordPress, and you can see them under this category. I even managed to bring over people tags and comments from the proprietary system I had written. I feel so much safer now that all this data is in WordPress, I know it’ll still work in 10 years. I might have to change how “random” works, though, to exclude the really old photos, because they can be fairly embarrassing. 🙂
I’ve always been into personal analytics. From Wakemate to the Nike Fuelband I’ve tried pretty much every device that’s come on the market to help you become more self-aware of your activities, and hopefully improve them as well.
The Basis is a bit clunky and retro looking, but functionality-wise it provides