If you listed the habits of successful people, tracking and measuring would be near the top of that list. I see it with people, companies, and teams that I work with. I see it in my own behavior.
Fred Wilson writes on Tracking and Measuring. Lack of measurement — picking stats and watching them before and after a launch — is one of the most common mistakes I see product teams make, certainly inside of Automattic.
People are abuzz because it looks like the W3Techs survey of the web now has WordPress at 25% market share.
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).
If you want to celebrate with us come to the first-ever WordCamp US event next month in Philadelphia (tickets still available) — it’s shaping up to be an amazing event. We just published the schedule and there are some amazing speakers and sessions.
I was wondering the other day how many miles of road were in every state, and guessed that Texas must be the highest. It turns out it is, according to this list of the road mileage of every state. It’s about 70% more than the runner-up, California. After TX and CA, it’s Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.
Tech blog idea: A site that covers the top headlines on Techmeme 6, 12, or 18 months after they happened, and explores the delta between what people said was going to happen when they raised funding, or did an acquisition, and what actually happens after time has run its course. We keep covering announcements like they matter. Can also compare analyst and commentator predictions for claim chowder.
In this video Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss World 1-1, or the very first level in the very first Super Mario Bros. It’s fascinating how every element on the level is designed to introduce you to a mechanic of the game, or how Mario moves and jumps. This is interesting if you like Mario, but also important for any developer in any medium who is thinking about the NUX (new user experience) of their product. I sometimes joke that in WordPress we put people on the boss monster level the first time they enter the dashboard. There have been improvements but still so much to do to naturally introduce people to our interface.
When I was last in Tokyo I sat down with Lifehacker Japan and they have a long interview in Japanese and some photos from the trip. I don’t remember what I said, but the Google Translate version is pretty hilarious.
Priceonomics on The Rise and Fall of .Ly. Some of my favorite domains I own are .ly.
One benefit of working from home that doesn’t get discussed much is the ease of small, but frequent exercise activities through the day. I’m sure it’s not outlawed in an office to get out of your chair and do 20 jumping jacks, or plank for a minute, I definitely would feel awkward doing so. This is something on my mind as I’m working this week around ~400 colleagues for our once-a-year Grand Meetup.
When I’m home and have a ton of work to get through, my favorite approach is the Pomodoro Technique with 25 minutes on followed by a 5 minute break. (I use this app but any timer will do.) The 5 minute break is a fantastic time to do something small, like a few push-ups, squats, a plank, or even meditate. (The new Pause app is cool, and of course I love Calm.) You don’t have to do a ton, but over the course of a day or a week these 5 minute break exercises add up to be quite a bit and can kickstart a Tiny Habit. And don’t even get me started on the benefits of naps.
Again, not something that’s impossible in an shared office, just feels a lot more natural and less embarrassing in your private home office.
Great talk on analytical HR at Google. Hat tip: Sara.
This custom Mario Maker level, and the skill required to beat it, is one of the craziest feats of Mario virtuoso I’ve seen.
The app that changed my life is Simplenote, linked to Notational Velocity. I have Simplenote on my phone and Notational Velocity on my computer, and I’m obsessed with to-do lists and lists about my to-do lists. It allows me to have my lists on my phone and my lists on my computer, and they sync… if you are a list freak, with lists of lists, it will change your life.
— Lena Dunham
From a talk with Kara Swisher on Re/code. Listen to the whole podcast, Simplenote comes up at the 48-minute mark. Hat tip: Toni Schneider.
As was just announced on the VIP blog and Google, there’s a new open standard that competes with (or complements) Facebook’s Instant Articles. It’s easy for WordPress sites to support both, you can check out this Github project to see the plugin code so far.
Whether you’re curious for yourself or looking for a great gift for a scotch-loving friend, The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All from my friends Richard Betts, Crystal English Sacca, and Wendy MacNaughton is a must-buy. I have read this book myself and it smelled great.
Si vous parlez français, vous pourriez profiter de cette interview avec moi sur Journal Du Net.
One of the original WordPress developers, Alex King, has passed from cancer at far too young an age. Alex actually got involved with b2 in 2002 and was active in the forums and the “hacks” community there.
Alex had a background as a designer before he learned development, and I think that really came through as he was one of those rare people who thought about the design and usability of his code, the opposite of most development that drifts toward entropy and complexity. One of my favorite things about Alex was how darn tasteful he was. He would think about every aspect of something he built, every place someone could click, every path they could go down, and gave a thoughtfulness to these paths that I still admire and envy today.
As an example look at his project page (essentially a category archive) for the Post Formats Admin UI, isn’t that clever and intuitive how the posts connect together, and when more time passes in the thread it’s shown as a break. It’s classic Alex: something simple and thoughtful that in hindsight is so gobsmackingly obvious you wonder why everything doesn’t work that way, but you never would have imagined it beforehand. And Alex wouldn’t just imagine it and do it for himself, he released his best work as open source, as a gift to the community and the world, over and over and over again.
Back when WordPress was getting started Alex was a celebrity of the b2 world, his hacks (plugins before plugins) were some of the coolest ones around. We had a ton of overlapping interests in web standards, photography, development, and gadgets so we frequently read and commented on each other’s blogs. I would never miss a post on his site, and that’s back when we were both doing one or more posts a day. To get a sense of Alex it’s worth exploring his blog — he was a clear thinker and therefore a clear writer. The straightforward nature Alex wrote with was something I always admired about him.
We discussed WordPress early on, Alex signed up to help with what later became the plugin directory, and his CSS competition (look at those prizes! and notice it’s all GPL) was hugely influential on the path to themes, and he officially became a contributing developer in August of 2003.
The list of what Alex was one of the first to do in the WordPress community is long, and in hindsight seems gobsmackingly obvious, which is the sign of innovation. I smile when I think of how he moved from the Bay area to Denver before it was cool, or his love of scare quotes. Once there was something going on in WordPress and he called me to talk about it, I was so surprised, he said the number was right on my contact page (and it was) but even though it had been there for years no one had ever called it before, but that was just the type of person Alex was, always reaching out and connecting.
Adam Tow, myself, Barry Abrahamson, Alex King; Photo from Adam Tow’s post.
I’m not sure how to include this next part: I couldn’t write last night — I was too tired. After falling asleep I had one of those super vivid dreams that you can’t tell are dreams. There had been some sort of mix-up on Twitter and Alex was still alive, I visited Colorado with my sister and saw him surrounded by family at a picnic table, all the rooms were taken so they put me on a floor mattress where I slept. Tons of his friends were around and we took pictures together, he was excited about the better front camera on the 6s+. (Alex understood mobile all the way back to the Treo days.) It was all very ordinary and in a group setting, until we decided to walk alongside a small highway, past some grain silos, to meet the group at a bar. The walk was just the two of us and we talked and laughed about the big mix-up and he asked about this post, what was going to be in it. He got most excited and emphatic with the part about him being a developer with great taste, and a clear writer William Zinsser would be proud of, so I like to think that those were two things he was proud of. The overwhelming emotion I remember was joy. Waking up was disconcerting, part of me wants to believe part of Alex’s spirit was there, where another more logical part thinks my mind was just going through the denial stage of grief. Regardless I know that Alex will stay in the minds of people who knew him for many years to come.
Code that Alex wrote still runs billions of times a day across millions of websites, and long after that code evolves or gets refactored the ideas and philosophy he embedded in WordPress will continue to be part of who we are. Alex believed so deeply in open source, and was one of the few people from a design background who did. (Every time you see the share icon on the web or in Android you should think of him.) I like the idea that part of his work will continue in software for decades to come, but I’d rather have him here, thinking outside the box and challenging us to do better, to be more obvious, and work harder for our users. He never gave up.
“The reality is that more and more decisions, including decisions about life and death, are being made by software,” Thomas Dullien, a well-known security researcher and reverse engineer who goes by the Twitter handle Halvar Flake, said in an email. “But for the vast majority of software you interact with, you are not allowed to examine how it functions,” he said.
The Times has a great look at hacker and car manufacturer mishaps and makes the case over and over again for Open Source. It’s great to see more of the world waking up to the importance of open source.
In about half an hour I’m doing an AMA (ask me anything) on Product Hunt, please join and ask some questions on any topic that tickles your fancy.
I had a conversation with Tony Conrad at the StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week, following a dizzyingly talented line-up of Chamath Palihapitiya and Steve Jurvetson.
Techcrunch has a good write-up with a number of the relevant quotes from the event. The only thing I’d like to respond to, because it wasn’t a direct quote, is the headline “Move Over Slack? Automattic Mulls Commercializing Its Own Internal Messaging Product.”
The first problem is the headline missed the obvious alliteration of “Mullenweg Mulls,” 😀but more importantly… Slack has become a really key tool for both Automattic and WordPress.org and anything we do with the evolution of P2 (some of which we already have running internally) will be complementary to Slack, not competitive with it.