Are you a WordPresser?

Asides

You might be a WordPresser if…

  • You like to have freedom and control over all your software.
  • You don’t mind taking a bit more time to invest in tools that give you agency.
  • You like inserting little opportunities for joy in everyday interfaces.
  • You want future generations to grow up with a free and open web.
  • You like to tinker, hack, mod, customize, and share what you learn.
  • You are impeccable with your word.
  • You think software should have a little soul in it.
  • You love giving other people superpowers, teaching them not to need you anymore.
  • You appreciate a good plan but want to be able to color outside the lines, or completely reimagine the canvas altogether.
  • You think technology is best when it brings people together.
  • You get excited by updates.
  • You want your corner of the web to truly be yours, not generic or commoditized slop.
  • Your friends come to you to learn about new stuff.
  • You leave things better than you find them.
  • You fix things as you find them, it’s never someone else’s problem.
  • You know a single comment can light up someone’s day.
  • You’ve gotten out of the house to meet other people into WordPress.
  • There’s a Wapuu item or sticker somewhere in your life.
  • You “view source.”
  • You know the difference between owning your content and being a digital sharecropper.
  • You’ve drunkenly registered a domain, and have more domains than websites.
  • You’ve snuck an easter egg in a slug.
  • You have a Gravatar, and it’s also a museum of all your email identities over the years.
  • You think code can be poetry.

If you identified with two or more of these statements, I am afraid to inform you might be classified as a WordPresser. What did I miss?

Celebrate by Writing

WordPress

My birthday is coming up soon so it’s that time of the year when friends start reaching out and asking where they should fly to and how we’re going to celebrate.

After a good run in the post-vaccinated-and-boosted part of 2020 that felt relatively “normal”, including traveling almost 200k miles, I’m going back into a pretty locked-down state of things. Omicron has just been catching too many friends and loved ones, even with fairly careful measures and testing. So what’s happening on January 11th?

What I’m asking for my birthday is for people to blog!

Whether professionally on WP.com, socially on Tumblr, or privately journaling with Day One, there’s never been a better time to stop being a passive consumer of the internet and join the class of creators.

Write for a single person. Share something cool you found. Summarize your year. Set a blogging goal with reminders. Get a Gutenberg-native theme and play around with building richer posts. Start a nom de plume. Answer daily prompts on Day One. Forget the metaverse, let’s hang out in the blogosphere. Get your own domain!

If you’re a close friend that feels intimidated by the software at all or that you don’t know where to start, I’m happy to hop on a Zoom to go through everything on a screen share. That will also be a great learning for me for places we can improve things, which is also a fantastic gift!

Berlin WordPress / Web 2.0 Expo Drinkup

Events,

I’m in Germany for the first time and I’d love to meet some of the WordPress community here. With the help of Yamile Yemoonyah we have a venue and such for a get-together this Thursday. Since there’s an upcoming Web 2.0 Expo right here in Berlin we’re co-hosting with those folks to make the event extra-fun. Here are the deets:

Thursday, Oct 9th at 7 p.m.
“Dachkammer”
Simon-Dach-Str. 39
10245 Berlin
030 2961673

If you have a German blog or Twitter please help spread the word! Hope to see you there.

Update: Got a discount code from the conference, if you register here and enter the code webeu08gr99 you’ll get a 35% discount.

Should We Have Hidden Options?

WordPress, ,

Alex King has recently suggested that we have an about:config for WordPress. When I first thought this I thought “great!” because we’ve had this for several versions now: if you browse to options.php directly you can edit any option in the database, even those that have no UI because they’re from plugins or just something we don’t expose.

However after several comments pointed this out Alex began clarifying his request, some of it isn’t entirely clear to me (I would never want to go back to storing configuration in files, that was a nightmare we eliminated in 1.0), but the main gist is not merely exposing an interface to the options we have, but rather adding many more options to the code to allow for more than one way for some core parts of WordPress to work.

With that clarification, I think it’s pretty safe to say that something like that will probably never be incorporated.
Options have several costs, which is why we avoid them fairly religiously in WordPress. The most obvious cost is UI clutter — everyone wants their 15 pixels of fame and configuration screens quickly devolve into pages of utterly confusing junk no one understands or cares about.

A very closely related problem is user frustration. With WordPress we’re trying to make publishing to the web as effortless as humanly possible, and one part of this is taking care of a thousand little details that really shouldn’t ever cross your mind — if we’re doing our job right. One common reason for the proliferation of options in open source software is that (news flash) people often disagree about how things should be done, often violently and vocally in threads that can drag on for weeks on development mailing lists. (It is frustrating for many people that these option flame wars draw more discussion than useful topics or questions.) Few like fighting about things, and project leaders pull the proverbial car to the side of the road and declare “Screw it! We’ll do both!” To satisfy a handful of developers a burden is put on countless users.

I try to build everything imagining I have a million users. (Someday!) Small things add up — if there is an option in the interface that people have to think about for only 2 seconds (which is probably low) across a million users that’s 23 days (555 hours) of time lost to the world! (Call centers track efficiency per second because of similar constraints. Small things add up.)

Alex’s hidden options don’t trigger either of these by definition. However there is a third hidden cost: as the number of options increases it becomes difficult (or even impossible) to test for all possible combinations of how the options may interact in different enviroments. This also makes support a real bear. Costs go up, bugs increase.

This is why we say no by default to pretty much every suggested option, and we do our best to remove the ones that have built up over the years. (I just axed a whole panel earlier tonight.)

All that said, hard-core developers often need flexibility in the system to expand WordPress to things we’ve never even imagined, and that’s where our plugin system comes in. While we often say no to new options, we rarely ever shoot down a suggested extension to our plugin API. The beauty of this is it allows for near-infinite flexibility in how you interact with the program (there are some amazing plugins out there) while still keeping the core light, clean, stable, and fast. It also makes support relatively painless: “Does it work when you deactivate the plugin?” When someone says they want to do X and it should be core because it can’t be a plugin, 9 times out of 10 I see that as a plugin API bug, not a core bug.

In summation: Don’t waste your users’ time like I just wasted yours with this essay and be mindful of hidden costs. If I had a few extra hours I would edit and cut most of it out. (Good thing I don’t have a million readers.)

Tumblr the Day After

Asides

It is not surprising that the news about Automattic buying Tumblr has picked up a lot of coverage. I especially appreciated the notes of support from Tumblr founder David Karp, former CTO Marco Arment, and investor Bijan Sabet. I am beyond excited to see what the Tumblr team creates next, and I will definitely be connecting with alumni to hear their perspective.

There has also been a lot of speculation on the purchase price, which I think is missing the real story. I would like to take this opportunity to express my respect for Verizon and how they approached this entire process. They inherited Tumblr through an acquisition of a merger, a few steps removed from its initial sale; it’s probably not a company they would have bought on its own, but they nonetheless recognized that there is a very special community and team behind the product. It’s also worth noting at this point that Verizon is a company that will do over $130B in revenue this year and has over 139,000 employees.

First, they chose to find a new home for Tumblr instead of shutting it down. Second, they considered not just how much cash they would get on day one, but also — and especially — what would happen to the team afterward, and how the product and the team would be invested in going forward. Third, they thought about the sort of steward of the community the new owner would be. They didn’t have to do any of that, and I commend them for making all three points a priority.

Automattic is still a startup — I’m sure there are deep-pocketed private equity firms that could have outbid us, but the most likely outcome then would have been an “asset” getting chopped up and sold for parts. (This is a caricature and there are PE firms I like, but it’s not a terrible stretch of the imagination.) Instead, Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond. Its community is joining with WordPress’ 16-year commitment to open source and the open web.

Reflecting

Personal, WordPress

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from.

The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.

My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.

But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.

The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.

So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.

Spammers Hack Blogs

Spam

Blog spammers have sunk to new lows.

Nivi Spam SourceNivi, a blog I’m subscribed to, was showing dozens and dozens of entries being updated even though there was no discernible difference. However as I started looking closer, I noticed if you view the source, for example on this post, there is are ton of spam links there. You can click the screenshot to the left.

The implications of this are disturbing. His blog was hacked (which isn’t unusual and could have been for a thousand reasons like another account on his server being hacked, and old version of phpBB or other software) but instead of doing anything obvious to disturb the content of the site they invisibly modified his posts using CSS-hidden text. He has probably had hundreds of posts modified. I can’t imagine cleaning it up will be pleasant.

On PayPerPost

Uncategorized

So I signed up for PayPerPost is Toni’s foray into the seedy side of paid blogging. Includes some interesting comments, including an ultra-defensive thread from one of their investors. I also came across a ton of creepy videos on Youtube, a lovefest for PayPerPost and apparently those are $10 a pop. There is a firm that does something similar in real life, Buzz agents or something, but they’re actually fairly respectable simply because they require one thing: the agents to say that they’re being paid. End of story. I have no problem with bloggers making money, but that info out there and let people make up their own mind.

Another way to think about it: If PayPerPost was PayPerComment instead, and they paid people to leave comments shilling various products or services, what would you call it? What if they paid people to email their friends about something without disclosure? Would someone start an anti-PayPerPost Akismet, or a Firefox extension to detect and highlight people using them?

Rails Bashing

Asides, ,

Since 7 reasons I switched back to PHP there seems to be a trend of Rails-bashing articles, epitomized by this one which is a fine example of the form until it advocates ASP.NET. Through it all, I still haven’t heard of a startup or web service that failed or succeeded due solely to its web framework or language. These articles are like the celebrity gossip stories of Web 2.0, complete with ad hominem attacks, and just as useless. Hacker News tends to be a fairly high signal source of discussions actually relevant to startups.

Weblogs.com Sold, Ping Outlook Bleak

Uncategorized

Verisign, which does not have a particularly good history in the blogosphere, has purchased Weblogs.com. This leaves Ping-O-Matic as the only large-scale and independent ping relay service left. (Blo.gs was sold to Yahoo earlier in the year.) I can definitely see why Dave did this, he has probably found as I have that keeping up with the spammers exploiting the service requires a fair amount of daily effort, and I’m sure he has more interesting things to work on. People have been talking about this for months now, and while I was skeptical before I suppose it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise.

I’ve been trying to pin down in my mind why this deal just feels sketchy, like when you find out that nice girl you went to school with is engaged to the class bully. It just doesn’t feel like a healthy, long-term relationship. When blo.gs was sold to Yahoo it was an open-source and technically robust service being supported by a growing company full of smart people who really get the Web. The transition of blo.gs has had some bumps along the way, but it’s obvious that Yahoo is operating it for its intrinsic value to their other services, not trying to move their bottom line or impress investors with the buzzword “blog” in their next quarterly report. (Look at how all the press is saying things about RSS, even though it is only tangentially connected with RSS. Not an accident.) Weblogs.com is an older service that has stagnated for a while being lost to a company with a history of evil and a declining business with plans to embrace, extend, and monetize what should be a public service.

We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they were working for. (Shady.) The “real time web” group also took me to dinner at one point and outlined their view for a “value-added” ping ecosystem (with Verisign in the middle, of course). Every major content producer and every company relying on the ping stream should be very worried about this move.

Other people have gotten so frustrated with the ping mess they’ve abandoned the existing ping community and standards and decided to produce their own feeds in a corner and let everybody come to them. In a format different from the over-hyped Feedmesh, no less, and with no discussion on that group. (As an aside, if the Livejournal stats match what their front page says, which looks like it would be 5-15 pings per second, that would be well within the means of Ping-O-Matic to handle in addition to its current load.) The state of the ping community is fairly bleak

What do we need to keep a BigCo from exploiting this space? A free, open, non-profit, and stable alternative supported by a consortium of organizations who understand that value should be built on top of pings, not in front of them. Ping-O-Matic is not this today, though the seeds of it are there in the servers and services Textdrive and Technorati to make the service 1000% more reliable than it was. Getting competing services to work together is never easy, but I fear if we don’t Verisign is going to successfully exploit the situation.