State of the Word 2014

WordPress,

Yesterday I delivered the State of the Word address to the WordPress community, and the video is already up on WordPress.tv.

Here are the slides if you’d like to view them on their own:

If you just want the bullet points, here are the big things I discussed and announced:

  • There will be 81 WordCamps in 2014.
  • This was the 9th and final WordCamp San Francisco in its current form. We’ve maxed out the venue for years, so next year we’ll do a WordCamp US at a location and date to be determined.
  • Milestone: 2014 was the first year non-English downloads surpassed English downloads of WordPress.
  • 33k took our survey: 7,539 (25%) of survey participants make their living from WordPress. Over 90% of people build more than one site, and spend less than 200 hours building one.
  • We’ve done five major and seven minor releases since the last WCSF, and have had 785 contributors across them.
  • WordPress market share has risen from 19% in 2013 to 23% now.
  • We now have 34k plugins and 2.7k themes, and have enjoyed record activity on both — including plugins passing 1,000,000 commits.
  • 16 releases of our mobile apps, Android and iOS.
  • Code Reference launched.
  • 105 active meetup groups in 21 countries, with over 100 meetup and WordCamp organizers present at the event.
  • Internationalization will be a big focus of the coming year, including fully-localized plugin and theme directories on language sites and embedded on dashboard in version 4.1, which is coming out December 10th.
  • Better stats coming for plugin and theme authors.
  • Version fragmentation is a big challenge for WordPress, only a quarter of users are currently on the latest release.
  •  This is also a problem for PHP — we’ll be working with hosts to help with version fragmentation, as well as to get as many WordPress sites as possible running PHP 5.5 or better.
  • Showed off 2015 theme.
  • We will be testing a workflow for accepting pull requests on our official WordPress Github repository before the end of the year.
  • For the first time in 11 years we’re switching away from IRC as our primary communication method. We’ll be moving to Slack, which has helped us set up so that every member of WordPress.org can use it. (During the keynote address the number of people on Slack surpassed our IRC channels, and is currently over 800 people.) Sign up at chat.wordpress.org.
  • Five for the Future, with Gravity Forms and WPMU Dev committing to donate, and Automattic now at 14 full-time contributors to core and community.
  • We need to work hard to harmonize the REST API plugin and the WordPress.com REST API.
  • The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing, which means access for everyone regardless of language, geography, gender, wealth, ability, religion, creed, or anything else people might be born with. To do that we need our community to be inclusive and welcoming. There is a sublime beauty in our differences, and they’re as important as the principles that bring us together, like the GPL.

Driving on the Left

Personal, Travel

We’ve been driving all around the Dublin area, through Slane, Dunleek, Dowth, New Grange, and finally Drogheda and becoming accustomed to driving on the left has been an interesting experience. First in the rental car there are no fewer than 4 stickers throughout the driver area reminding you to be on the left, and there also seem to be signs to remind you about it around all the tourist areas. What I found difficult wasn’t driving on the left side, which was fairly easy to remember, but rather I found myself aligning myself as the driver with the part of the lane I would be in if I was driving on the right side. Needless to say, this can put you dangerously close to anything to the left of you. So my new mantra (oft-repeated by my sister) has become “Guide to the left.” Thank goodness for collapsible mirrors. On the bright side, left turns are easy.

I think there’s a difference between having a bestselling book–meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers–and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list. That’s not to say that I’m Tolstoy or the best writer, but I used Facebook and Twitter more for feed back as I was creating and refining the book than for the actual marketing itself. My main online tool for priming the pump for the launch of the book was the blog. That was the heartbeat and the nexus for all the different tools that I use.

Via Tim Ferriss On Facebook, Twitter And Building A Huge Web Brand – Steven Bertoni – Money Talks – Forbes. I also liked this quote:

SB: How can a magazine catch up to the Web?

TF: If I worked for a magazine that’s very behind the times, I wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. I’d use WordPress as a content management system which has very good SEO out of the box. Companies spend so much time trying to develop something proprietary it’s ridiculous–you have thousands of people already working on WordPress.

Day One at Automattic

Automattic, WordPress

I’m not sure when I first came across the critically acclaimed Day One product, which is the best private blogging and journaling app out there, but I began seriously using it daily in 2016 when my father was in the ICU and later passed. Having a private, safe place to write what I was going through kept me sane and helped me process everything.

Writing has always been a salve for me, and I’ve had local or private WordPress installations pretty much since 2003 to capture and archive writing that wasn’t fit for the public web.

Day One not only nails the experience of a local blog (or journal as they call it) in an app, but also has (built) a great technical infrastructure — it works fantastic (when) offline and has a fully encrypted sync mechanism, so the data that’s in the cloud is secured in a way that even someone with access to their database couldn’t decode your entries, it’s only decrypted on your local device. Combining encryption and sync in a truly secure way is tricky, but they’ve done it.

This is a long intro to say, as you can read from Day One’s founder and CEO Paul Mayne, from Eli at WordPress.com, and on Tumblr, that Paul and the team are joining the team at Automattic. For many years I’ve talked to anyone who will listen about my vision of making Automattic the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet, and Paul’s decision to continue to grow his amazing business as part of Automattic is a great validation of the way we’ve been building our culture and long-term orientation in our business. Day One is a beloved product, and bringing it into the fold is a responsibility I take very seriously and comes from a deep respect for what’s been built and a belief that working together we can create something for users better than we could working apart.

Great software takes time, and the Day One team has been at it for about a decade now, I can’t wait to see what they accomplish in the coming decade and beyond. If you haven’t tried out Day One yet, please check it out in the Apple or Google’s app store.

iPod Won’t Mount

Music

Weird problem: my iPod shows that it’s charging and it shows up as connected (with full info) in the System Profiler but it doesn’t mount, it doesn’t show up on the desktop or in iTunes. I’ve tried two Firewire cables and a USB cable, so I’m sure it’s not that. If I had to guess I’d say it started after the 10.3.5 update, but I’m not really sure.

Working & Exercising

Health, Personal

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.