Some sites, like WordPress, where I’m typing this right now, pushed out retina upgrades right away. The result is amazing. I’m typing this, and it looks like I’m typing out printed words. Text is so crisp.

From MG’s review of the new Retina Macbook Pro. There is more news on the retina-WP front coming soon. My review of the Macbook Pro Retina: best computer I’ve ever used. Amazing screen, great speakers, I’m willing to put up with the extra size and weight after being on 13″ or smaller laptops for… 8 years I think.

One of the cornerstones of Automattic’s web-scale infrastructure is a project out of Russia we started using in 2008 called Nginx. Don’t let the sparse website fool you, Nginx (pronounced engine-ex) has been taking high-end websites by storm, and is used on 24% of the top thousand websites (a good chunk of them WordPress). I was very proud of our team helping sponsor and debug SPDY support in the latest release. Hopefully this accelerates the adoption of technology like SPDY that improves the user experience of the web.

Ten Years of Blogging

Meta

I got an inkling to check my archives today, because I faintly remember started blogging in the summer, lo and behold today the 16th is my tenth anniversary of blogging on this site. Hooray!

From Friendster to Flickr to Facebook I’ve always been active on other sites, what we now call social media, but as my interest in those has waxed and waned I’ve always come back to my home on the web, powered by Open Source software on a domain I own. This is definitely the longest sustained activity I’ve done, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t continue the rest of my life, however long or short that may be.

A little of my personal history with blogging: the first blog I remember reading was Zeldman.com, who also introduced me to building websites as a craft rather than an output of a program. His site was personal (and still is) but mixed in technology with a flair and often linked to the other strong voices on the web of its day, like Anil Dash and Jason Kottke. (Both still blogging today.) Everyone seemed to be using software called Movable Type, so I fired that up on matt.mullenweg.com and began haphazardly publishing. (I might dig up those entries and import them here at some point, though it would be really embarrassing.)

Continue reading Ten Years of Blogging →

Ray Bradbury passed away last week, leaving a legacy large and full of gems like this 2001 advice to writers. Care of Elise Hu, here is a snippet of a 2002 interview Bradbury did on NPR, portions of it unaired, relevant to our culture of distraction thread:

But if we finally correct this in our school system, what kind of student should we deliver to the world? A student who has wide ranging tastes — all kinds of literature, and basically, we should head in the direction of having young people read science fiction.

Why? Because we live in a science fiction time. The last century we invented flying, we perfected the railroad system, we made telephones available to everyone in our culture, and then we invented radio in 1922, and it began to dominate our culture. Then television came along in 1945. So we’re surrounded by all these devices.

We are a device oriented culture. So how can you not want to read about what these things are doing to you and to others and to the world?

And we invented atomic power in the middle 40s, and that became a Christian invention. Why do I say that? Because it prevented wars after the first big dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. After that we were able to back Russia down and make the wall in Berlin fall, all because of atomic power. All this being true, you can’t neglect it, you must write about it. And the mainstream writers of our time didn’t write about it. So they became very boring.

Young people graduating from high school should be curious about the impact of the fax machine, of the telephone, of atomic power. So you write stories for them. And during the last 20 years, science fiction has come into its proper place and is being taught in middle schools and high schools and colleges, because people are curious about a world where we promised to go to the moon, and we finally do.

Tumblr Support in WordPress

WordPress.com

Earlier today WordPress.com turned on the ability to push new blog posts to Tumblr, alongside the existing capability to do so for Twitter, Facebook, et al. This is interesting for a few reasons.

While the tech press often likes to paint companies in a similar market as competing in a zero sum game, the reality is that all are growing rapidly and services feed each other and cross-pollinate more than anyone gives them credit for. Tumblr built a dashboard reader product that has tons of pageviews and lots of followers, which can provide distribution for blogs much in the same way Facebook and Twitter do. (Its 85%-on-dashboard-centric usage looks more like a social network than a blogging network, actually.) WordPress has fantastic content that people on Tumblr love, and Tumblr has a rich and diverse content and curation community that can drive new visitors to WordPress — it’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

It’s true that we’re becoming simpler and more streamlined and it’s a process driven by our design vision and our community, not what any particular competitor is doing. WordPress has always flourished because it’s a hassle-free digital hub — a home on the web you can control, customize, and truly own due to the fact that it’s Open Source software. WordPress is the antidote to walled gardens.

Culture of Distraction

Essays

From the Hacker News discussion of my Silicon-Valley-is-destroying-the-world remark I came across a Joe Kraus talk on We’re Creating a Culture of Distraction. (I’m a huge fan of Joe and excited to see he’s on WordPress now.)

It’s also important to read Paul Graham’s Acceleration of Addictiveness where he compares addictive technology to alcohol and cigarettes, society developed “antibodies” to the danger of cigarettes, but it took about a hundred years, and technology is changing much faster than that now.

The most prescient here is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, originally published in 1985. It’s long, but I’m going to quote the foreword in its entirety because it’s worth reading a few times over:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Oh, and we just launched new comment push notifications for iPhone and iPad. It’s one of those days. 😉

Radically Simplified WordPress

WordPress

Had an interesting chat with Anil Dash today at the GigaOM/PaidContent conference in NYC, here are some tweets from the talk:

If you’re curious about P2 check out p2theme.com where you can sign up pretty easily.

https://twitter.com/RonHogan/status/205325798889095169

I learned this from the Complex interview with Young Guru. (Which they present in slideshow format, for some reason.)

A few very kind words from Jay Rosen:

And finally we talked about how WordPress is actually on its third or fourth pivot, as in the most important contributor to growth of the platform changes over time, which turned into this article which has been making the rounds:

WordPress was first for pure blogging, then became embraced as a CMS (though some people still deny this), is seeing growth and innovation in being used as an application platform (I think we’re about a third of the way through that), and just now starting to embrace social and mobile — the fourth phase of our evolution.

As with each of our previous transitions there are large, established, and seemingly unshakable competitors entrenched in the same space. This is good because we can learn from those that came before, as we always have, and good competitors drive you to be better. As before, people will probably not notice what we’re doing at first, or deny it’s happening as folks who still say WordPress “isn’t a CMS.”

Function reforms form, perpetually. As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

There are hints of this already happening in our iPhone and Android apps, but even though I’m thinking about this all the time I don’t have all the answers yet — that’s what makes it fun. WordPress is going to turn nine years old this Sunday and I’m as excited to wake up in the morning and work on it as I was the day we started. I think when we turn 10 in 2013 the ways people experience and publish with WordPress will be shorter, simpler, faster.