Nick Bradbury: If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support. Hat tip: 37signals.
GPL FUD
Michelle Atagana from Memeburn posted an interview we did when I was in South Africa: Matt Mullenweg on how open source is democratising the web.
November NYC Events
I’ll be chatting with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York when I’m there in November. I’ll be speaking in NYC three times that week: WordCamp New York, SVA, and at Web 2.0 Expo. Would love to see my Yankee peeps while out there. 🙂
Bruce Schneier on The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. Packed with good links as well.
Plugin Mistakes
Bruce Schneier has a remarkably clear essay on Our Newfound Fear of Risk which could as easily be about corporations, finance, or relationships as it is about its chosen topic. It reminded me a lot of one of the better books I read this year, Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.
Dave Pell on building the NextDraft platform. Spoiler: It’s WordPress, but a really cool implementation of it across a blog, iOS app, and newsletter. I wish more publishers worked the same way.
Twitter API Support
You can now Post and Read WordPress.com via Twitter API, which was a pretty fun project. Everything doesn’t work yet because in some ways we’re overloading the Twitter API but it’s 90% of the way there to something really cool, and some relatively minor adjustments to the clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck can make this a really nice experience.
WordCamp Delhi, India
Attending the WordCamp in Delhi, India with Om.
KRNFX Get Lucky
Very cool looped version.
As written about by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt, Automattic is fighting back against two cases where we feel the DMCA has been used abusively for censorship and bullying. Read more about it here.
Why Hanukkah and Thanksgiving Will Never Again Coincide, with lots of fun calendar geek information. Colbert has a funny take too.
Have you seen the famous Automattic / WordPress shuffleboard? That and more in this excellent profile and interview by Debra Winter in SOMA Magazine.
There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend.
The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged about with some technical detail here.
Second, my dear friend Om Malik published a great conversation with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in his new newsletter Crazy Stupid Tech. Matthew and Om are influential thinkers to listen to, and their discussion contains a lot of interesting nuance about networks, censorship, and sovereignty.
Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writes for the Observer, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg Is ‘More Energized’ Than Ever Amid WP Engine Battle.
DrupalCon Singapore
This week, DrupalCon Singapore is bringing together an incredible community of Drupal platform creators, developers, and supporters.
Last year, I had the chance to share the stage with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and the conversation stuck with me. It highlighted the profound impact we can have when communities like ours come together to push the boundaries of Open Source and shape the future of the web.
At Automattic, we believe that Open Source is more than a license—it’s a philosophy that drives innovation and makes publishing accessible to all, and we want to support fellow open source communities. Our team is at DrupalCon to share some of the tools we’ve built, including Akismet (check out the Drupal extension here), The Atavist Magazine, Beeper, Day One, Longreads, and Pocket Casts. These products, much like the web itself, thrive on connection and collaboration. (Basically all our non-WP stuff.)
I’ve loved hearing about how people are engaging with our booth—whether exploring our tools, grabbing a local snack, or taking a moment to recharge. For those of you at the event, I encourage you to swing by the Automattic booth, meet our team, and share your thoughts. Together, we can continue to create an open web that’s full of possibilities.
Socket.IO 1.0 is available with a number of new features, including binary support. Socket.IO is one of the most useful tools in the Node.js world.
Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 1 is now up, and it’s a great reminder of the huge diversity and incredible quality of what people are publishing on WP across the web, on both .com and .org WordPresses. Great for picking up a few meatier reads for this holiday weekend.
On Logan Bartlett Show
You may not have heard of Logan Bartlett, but he’s one of the most hilarious people on Twitter and does a really interesting podcast. (He had a cool episode with Marc Benioff recently.) We sat down for a discussion on managing through crisis, open source and AI, employee liquidity, future of WordPress, and more. You can watch on YouTube below or listen on Pocket Casts.