Adobe Migrates to WordPress, switching 1,200 blogs from Movable Type.
Stream Like a CEO
Update: There’s an updated 2021 version of this setup.
When Bill Gates was on Trevor Noah’s show it was amazing how much better quality his video was. I had experimented with using a Sony camera and capture card for the virtual event we did in February when WordCamp Asia was canceled, but that Trevor Noah video and exchanging some tweets with Garry Tan sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, even after I was on-record with The Information saying a simpler setup is better.
The quality improved, however something was still missing: I felt like I wasn’t connecting with the person on the other side. When I reviewed recordings, especially for major broadcasts, my eyes kept looking at the person on the screen rather than looking at the camera.
Then I came across this article about the Interrotron, a teleprompter-like device Errol Morris would use to make his Oscar-winning documentaries. Now we’re onto something!

For normal video conferencing a setup this nice is a distraction, but if you’re running for political office during a quarantine, a public company CEO talking to colleagues and the press, here’s a cost-is-no-object CEO livestreaming kit you can set up pretty easily at home.
GEAR GUIDE
Basically what you do is put the A7r camera, shotgun mic, and the lens together and switch it to video mode, go to Setup 3, choose HDMI settings, and turn HDMI Info Display off — this gives you a “clean” video output from the camera. You can run off the built-in battery for a few hours, but the Gonine virtual battery above lets you power the camera indefinitely. Plug the HDMI from the camera to the USB Camlink, then plug that into your computer. Now you have the most beautiful webcam you’ve ever seen, and you can use the Camlink as both a video source and an audio source using the shotgun mic. Put the Key Light wherever it looks best. You’re fine to record something now.
If you’d like to have a more two-way conversation Interrotron style, set up the teleprompter on the tripod, put the camera behind it, connect the portable monitor to your computer (I did HMDI to a Mac Mini) and “mirror” your display to it. (You can also use an iPad and Sidecar for that.) Now you’ll have a reversed copy of your screen on the teleprompter mirror. I like to put the video of the person I’m talking to right over the lens, so near the bottom of my screen, and voilà! You now have great eye contact with the person you’re talking to. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how to horizontally flip the screen in MacOS so all the text isn’t backward in the mirror reflection. For audio I usually just use a headset at this point, but if you want to not have a headset in the shot…
Use a discreet earbud. I love in-ear monitors from Ultimate Ears, so you can put one of these in and run the cable down the back of your shirt, and I use a little audio extender cable to easily reach the computer’s 3.5mm audio port. This is “extra” as the kids say and it may be tricky to get an ear molding taken during a pandemic. For the mic I use the audio feed from the Camlink, run through Krisp.ai if there is ambient noise, and it works great (except in the video above where it looks a few frames off and I can’t figure out why. On Zoom it seems totally normal).
Here’s what the setup looks like all put together:

After that photo was taken I got a Mac Mini mount and put the computer under the desk, which is much cleaner and quieter, but used this earlier photo so you could see everything plugged in. When you run this off a laptop its fan can get really loud.
Again, not the most practical for day to day meetings, but if you’re doing prominent remote streaming appearances—or if your child is an aspiring YouTube star—that’s how you can spend ~9k USD going all-out. You could drop about half the cost with only a minor drop in quality switching the camera and lens to a Sony RX100 VII and a small 3.5mm shotgun mic, and that’s probably what I’ll use if I ever start traveling again.
If I were to put together a livestreaming “hierarchy of needs,” it would be:
- Solid internet connection (the most important thing, always)
- Audio (headset mic or better)
- Lighting (we need to see you, naturally)
- Webcam (video quality)
We’ve put together a Guide to Distributed Work Tools here, which includes a lot of great equipment recommendations for day-to-day video meetings.
In Boston
Okay so I’m finally here in chilly Boston, living it up. I’m open to recommendations on places to eat, things to do, and people to see. (Besides the Boston WordPress Meetup this Saturday.)
CNN on WP
Many of you have written in that CNN’s new Political Ticker blog is on WordPress. We know! They’re part of our VIP program which allowed them to launch quickly and serve millions of pageviews with no problems. The team there has launched dozens of blogs on the system, including ones for Fortune.com and CNN Money and is a real pleasure to work with. To the extent blogs are going to have an impact on the 2008 election they need to be able to reach millions of people in a short period of time without problems, I hope that WordPress.com provides that platform for folks.
WordPress.com Growth
Even though we post a wrap-up post each month, I don’t think the story of the growth of WordPress.com is very well-known. As Narendra Rocherolle said to me a few weeks ago, “Pound for pound you guys get less press per pageview.” Webware just publish some Nielson numbers that show WordPress.com as the #4 blog site in July, after Blogger, TMZ, and Typepad. Number four isn’t that hot,but the year over year growth was 398% which is 7-10x more than those above us. Of course Nielson/Netratings doesn’t match anyone’s internal numbers, though people generally assume they’re precise relative to each other.
But what about something more accurate? I’ve been a supporter of Quantcast since they launched and we run their code on all our blogs. It provides some interesting stats like demographics that we wouldn’t have on our own. (I also like that it’s fast and has never caused us problems, better than even Google Analytics.) Their numbers place us fairly well, #29 in the US with 16 million uniques. However there’s more…
Apparently the Quantcast numbers are just for blogs on a wordpress.com subdomain, none of our custom domain traffic is counted. They’re experimenting with a new feature called “networks” that aggregates the traffic for WordPress.com-hosted blog even with their own domains. Those numbers place us at 25 million US uniques and 70 million global a month, with a bit over 300 million monthly pageviews. We don’t track uniques, but their pageviews mirror our own closely so I feel this data is pretty accurate. 25 million US uniques would put us at #19 right next to Facebook.
The growth and reach isn’t a credit to us, it’s to our bloggers, but I am happy we’ve created a platform where some of the most creative bloggers can express themselves and attract a meaningful audience. Imagine what those numbers would look like if they included WordPress.org blogs.
This is a long way of saying happy 2nd birthday, WordPress.com. Thanks for the incredible ride over the last year.
Stallone
Sylvester Stallone’s website is WP-powered. (I saw The Expendables last night.) Also, am I imagining things or did I read a longish profile of Stallone that talked about his production company, his office, the legacy of Rocky… can’t find it anywhere and search on my Kindle is broken.
Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative.
I’m not sure the provenance of this quote, but I read it and it really resonated with me, and I’ve found myself repeating it frequently.
Automattic Beta
Automattic.com is no longer a placeholder, it now has a bit more info about the team behind WordPress.com and Akismet. This is what I’ve been working on since I left CNET. The site is still just a shell though, a lot more tidying up to do there. Your mileage may vary. (Should we call it Beta?) This week is pretty jam-packed with announcements, so stay tuned. 🙂
South Africa: Stormhoek Tour
Sunday tour of the Stormhoek wine farm; pizza + pool.
2.1 downloads
Version 2.1 of WordPress has been downloaded an average of 19,483 times a day since it was released. The increased traffic on the site as a result has put a strain of the single server it runs on, we’re adding more soon.
Nerd Attention Damage
I would like to award the prize for the Most Damage Inflicted to the Geek/Nerd World in the Past 5 Years to Michael Lopp, author of the seminal Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder in 2003. No article more effectively romanticized an inability to do one thing at a time, and do it well. On the bright side, Digg and Bloglines should probably give him stock. Need an antidote? Spend 10 minutes collecting everything you need to work on a problem, and unplug the internet for 2 hours. You’ll finish in 30 minutes.
On the new Simplenote
Last week we relaunched Simplenote, an app Automattic acquired along with Simperium earlier this year. The coverage so far has been really overwhelming with great articles:
But, even after my foray into Simplenote alternatives and doing research and trying out other note-taking apps, I’ve stuck with Simplenote as my iOS note-taking app of choice. […] However, I could consolidate them all into just one app if I had to. And that app would be Simplenote. The reason I’d choose Simplenote is because it’s a quick, easy-to-use app with great search and it has fast, reliable sync.
Shawn Blanc: The New Simplenote Apps
Go check it out. For me it was easy – even though I dropped Simplenote, I had kept NVAlt syncing with it in anticipation of an update as good as this one. I launched it, logged in and a few moments later I was back up and running. Best of all, Simplenote is back on my first home screen.
Charlie Sorrel: Like Rocky, Simplenote Is Back In Front After Years Of Neglect
Simplenote has always kept the focus on content — your content. With a bare minimum chrome in its apps, Simplenote has stayed away from flashy gradients, big UI elements and detailed icons and instead, has offered a minimal, mostly white user interface to its users. I liked everything about Simplenote, so paying for its Premium subscription and supporting the service was a no brainer for me.
Preshit Deorukhkar: Simplenote — The Perfect Notes App Suite
Also the Simplenote for Mac app rising in the app store listing. I am excited about all of this above and beyond what any rational measure would support.
Probably the most comprehensive was by Ellis Hamburger in the Verge, Simplenote reborn: the first great notes app is back. I’d recommend reading the entire thing. Ellis asked me a number of questions via email and I’d like to share the entirety with you here:
What is so compelling about Simplenote, and why exactly was it worth “reviving?”
From the day I first used Simplenote it felt like a breath of fresh air in a crowded sea of cluttered apps. I use and rely on the service every day. We do many things at Automattic, but our core passion is creating great products. When we see something we feel isn’t our best work it bugs us until we’re able to loop back and iterate on it — it’s a blessing and a curse. This latest iteration of Simplenote on Android, OS X, and iOS is something we’re all very excited about sharing with the world.
How big a role did Simplenote play in Automattic acquiring Simperium?
It depends on how you look at it: I probably would have never heard of Simperium if it wasn’t for Simplenote, and the app really demonstrates the power of the Simperium API and the tastefulness of the people who created it. But the bigger interest was in what we could build alongside Fred and Mike on top of Simperium across all our products.
Where do Simplenote and Simperium fit with Automattic? Will any of each service’s features make their way into your other products, like WordPress, or do you intend to operate them separately?
Simplenote and WordPress share one key characteristic: they’re about writing. They both aspire to become invisible and be a canvas for your creativity. WordPress has succeeded above its competitors year after year because we’re ruthlessly focused on the experience of the author, and I saw the same spirit in Simplenote. It fits in Automattic like a glove.
One of the keys of Simplenote is, well, its simplicity. I think as we integrate it more with the broader Automattic ecosystem it’ll look more like Simplenote inside of WordPress rather than vice versa. It’s all backed by an easy-to-integrate API so if people want something more complex someone will build a client for that.
Simperium is at the core of several new things we’re either building or hope to build in the near future. We’re investing quite a bit to make the service robust and flexible for our needs as a top-ten internet site, and that development will benefit everyone who uses the service much the same way our investment in anti-spam benefits the internet at large through Akismet. You will start to see the Simperium engine make its way into almost everything we do.
Will Simplenote someday be a fruitful business? If so, how?
The beauty of Simplenote being under Automattic’s wing is that we are already blessed with incredibly fruitful businesses in WordPress.com, Akismet, and VaultPress. The biggest thing I didn’t like about the old app was the ads, and as you’ve noticed those are gone in this new version. Our main goal is to pour our heart into something and make it great, then share it with the world. I find Simplenote indispensable, delightful, and use it every day, and I hope you will too.
That’s that, I hope that you check out Simplenote and give it a try. It’s now available for Android, iOS 7, and Mac.
Hot Blogs
Speaking of lists, I have a small list of well-designed WordPress blogs I’ve come across. I’m open to suggestions, so if you have a favorite that isn’t on the list let me know.
Wikia Search
Wikia Search is pretty darn cool. Not sure what I was expecting, I guess I assumed that search would be much harder than doing a wiki. The “Visvo” index seems good enough for daily search use. Their social networking stuff is clean too, here’s my profile — please add me as a friend! (I hope those links work post-alpha.) If they can pull off an open source ranking algorithm… that’s pretty exciting.
Dvorak on Linux Console
For my benefit more than anything. I always forget how to change the keymap on a linux console session:
loadkeys /usr/share/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak.map.gz
This seriously could have saved me an hour or two earlier today.
QWERTY is so painful! Switch to Dvorak. You’ll thank me later.
Update: Matt Brubeck informs me I could just use loadkeys dvorak in most modern distrobutions. Thanks!
General Motors using WordPress
General Motors Embraces Open Source for New Community Site. “GM has introduced a new website called GMnext. The site utilizes WordPress and launching in spring a Wiki allowing General Motors to get better feedback on topics such as energy, design and technology from the community.”
Here’s an update on WordPress woes in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. As far as I know we’ve had no contact with KazakhTelecom. Typically this happens when they don’t like something a blog is saying, so they block or degrade service for everybody. The footer of the site links to Global Voices Anonymous Blogging with WordPress and Tor guide, which is still excellent all these years later.
WordPress.com
You can now sign up to be notified about WordPress.com. Tell your friends! First come, first serve. Thanks again to Ric Johnson for releasing the domain to us.
More Googlebot Flailing
Now I’m seeing the Googlebot request /about/ pages relative to known blogs that don’t have any links to any /about/ URI. The last time the Googlebot flailed around like this it was fun to watch for a little bit and wonder what they had cooking in the labs, but then it got annoying. I don’t know if there are rules of bot etiquette, but requesting imagined unlinked resources while spidering can’t be a best practice.
There is of course one blog vendor who consistently has about pages at Now my question Google is: what should the rest of us do if we want our about pages indexed by this new system? Mine happens to be in the /about/ URIs, and that’s Typepad.about subdirectory of my blog, but what about people who have about.html or about-me.php? Should I set up a permanent redirect for every blog I have redirecting to the real about page?
(Note: That’s faux indignation. I don’t have any juicy conspiracy theories, and I’m not really that peeved, mostly I’m just curious what they’re up to. However juicy conspiracy theories are welcome in the comments. [As long as they don’t make fun of me for noticing these things.] )
UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /contact/ URI.
UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /stats/ URI.
DEVELOPING . . .
WP on Yahoo
Check out the new bundling of WordPress with Yahoo Hosting, which is why I was biting my tongue so much last week. 🙂 We’re sitting next to Movable Type on their blog page, but I’m completely comfortable with new users trying out both and making their decision from there. (I often recommend it.) The other part of why this is interesting is the Akismet angle, which I wrote more about here.











