Announcing WordPress 1.5, okay now you should link it and spread the good word. 🙂 1,400 words and it still doesn’t cover everything.
Think Different
Pretty heads down at WordCamp US, which has had amazing energy and talks so far. I wanted to take a moment to note two things, first being a great essay from Dave Winer asking people to Think Different about WordPress.
I’ve done this before — asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said “we don’t do that.” They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.
And in light of the news of Typepad shutting down, note that WordPress has a Typepad importer. A big advantage of putting your content into an open source platform like WordPress with an active community, vs just static pages or something custom, is that you’re getting constant upgrades “for free” as we maintain and iterate on the software, enabling new APIs or things like allowing your AI to talk to your site.
WordPress is built by a community of people deeply passionate about backwards and forward compatibility, radical openness so it’s easy to get things in and out of it, and relentless iteration building for the long term. Despite literally billions of dollars spent trying to kill or crush WordPress, and frequent proclamations of its death, we keep trucking along and doing our darndest to make the web a bit more open and free every day. It’s a life mission of many people, including myself.
TechFellow Award
Earlier tonight I won a TechFellow Award in the “Product Design and Marketing” category. I thought this would be a good opportunity to thank the two people who have had the biggest design influence over the past few years on WordPress (and me): Jane Wells and Matt “MT” Thomas.
Web Spam Summit
The Web Spam Squashing Summit announcement has quite a bit of spam on it. Unfortunate, but an excellent illustration of the problem.
On Labor Day
Mac Attack
Forget the Mac triumvirate, I’ve got a new photo up reminding you to Think Different, just like everyone else in San Francisco. 🙂
New Akismet
I’ve been really enjoying the new features in Akismet:
I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict.
Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services.
Simplify: WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, djbdns, SQLite.
Not enough engineers have studied under the code of Daniel J. Bernstein.
Firefox Theme
New Milanos
My new favorite cookie is French Vanilla Milanos. Too bad they don’t come bite-sized like the mint ones do now.
New Gatekeeper
Eric has a new version of Gatekeeper, the very effective spam plugin that lets you quiz people before they leave a comment. Compare installing Gatekeeper under 1.2 and 1.5 to see how far the plugin API has come.
Blogspot Spam
Matt Haughey says Blogspot is hurting America, which is silly but he probably knows that. It’s just too easy to automate the creation of Blogspot blogs. I would estimate about 4/5ths of the spam pings we get at Ping-O-Matic are Blogspot blogs, which makes them harder to filter en masse because we have thousands of legitimate Blogspot users too. Hat tip: Mark.
Gambino Mixtape STN MTN
The ever-creative Childish Gambino has released a new mixtape STN MTNÂ (track by track)Â which is part of a longer EP Kauai that was just released on iTunes. Donald is a friend and an artist whose work fluently spans much more than music. And I’m not just saying that because, as Techcrunch noted, he shouts out to Krutal and I at the end of Go DJ.
Photo run through Stockholm
I went for a run this morning and ended up with a pretty slow pace because I kept stopping to take pictures of the beautiful scenery around Stockholm. Here’s some of the snaps from that run and afterward. Amazingly, all of those photos are from an iPhone 6+. It blows me away the images you can capture with it.
In Texas
It feels great to be in Texas again, so much about this state is so beautiful. My sister is picking me up in a few minutes, I’ll see the rest of you tonight.
WordCamp Registration Open
If you check out the WordCamp San Francisco site you’ll see that registration is open and we’ve already announced some great speakers: Matt Cutts, Tim Ferriss, Philip Greenspun, Doug Hanna, Tara Hunt, yours truly, Andy Peatling, and Steve Souders. (More coming.) It’s going to be a killer event. Mark your calendars: May 30.
Tim Kaine on WordPress
At SxSW Mike let me know that Tim Kaine, Virginia governor candidate, has a WordPress blog.
WordCamp Indonesia proudly presents the first WordPress Board Game. I gotta try this.
Beware Unearned Wisdom
One of Carl Jung’s famous quotes is to “Beware unearned wisdom.” Sometimes it’s brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache:
Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our normal capacity.
It’s all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become a deep and profound person, but this is a fool’s delusion.
Even when psychedelics allow us to experience the person we are in the process of becoming, we have to face the fact that we have not become this person yet, nor have we fully internalised the wonderful qualities we may have temporarily touched.
I’m starting to see some of the same things happening with vibe coding and LLM writing.
Sam Kriss at the New York Times took on the inevitably meta task of writing Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? It’s a good read that will tickle your mind, as the mimetic effects of model training data overfit and influence society, even in how we speak and write when not using AI.
I’m starting to get that “feel” now, sometimes when using software. The demo or functionality seems amazing, but when you begin to poke around the edges, it all crumbles. We think we have something amazing because a chatbot one-shot an application, but there may be a hidden technical debt there.
A big focus for me in this coming year is “back to basics”: ensuring the core functionality is robust. You can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. It’s very exciting and tempting to go to the new shiny thing, but you only earn that right when the fundamentals are solid.
It’s been funny hearing about OpenAI’s Code Red, because about 18 months ago, I declared Code Blue on WordPress.com. In a hospital, Code Red means a fire, which I don’t think is the analogy OpenAI was going for, but I unfortunately learned when my father passed that Code Blue means all hands on deck because a patient has a cardiac or respiratory arrest; it signals a critical, life-threatening medical emergency. All the best specialists swarm in and, hopefully, save the patient. (BTW, on WordPress.com, the team has done a fantastic job of shipping literally thousands of bug fixes and quality improvements, and keeping focus on that despite the pull to new initiatives. There’s much left to do, but it’s headed in the right direction.)
The Cambrian explosion of new stuff built by AI is just a phase, and AI-assisted coding can actually be incredible for maintenance and bug fixes. But the tools are only as good as the questions we ask them, so it will have to battle with human nature’s addiction to novelty.
Retina 5k Mac
To me one of the most meaningful shifts in computing the past few years has been how the resolution of displays is getting higher and higher, and interfaces are starting to become resolution independent. I feel like when pixels disappear there’s less of a wall between people and the technology, it starts to blend and meld a bit more. It’s something I’ve been personally passionate about since the first retina iPhone, tirelessly beating the drum at Automattic to make everything we do shine on hi-DPI screens, or leading the WordPress 3.8 release that brought in MP6 project to make WordPress’ aesthetics cleaner and vector-based.
I’m sitting in front of a Retina 5k iMac right now typing this to you. (It was supposed to arrive on Friday but came a few days early.)
It’s the most gorgeous desktop display I’ve ever seen, breathtaking at first and then like all great work becomes invisible and you forget that there was ever a time when displays weren’t this beautiful. (Until you look at some lesser monitor again.)
I’ve been using 4k displays, the Sharp and the ASUS, with Mac Pros for a few months now, and to be honest they come close, but this takes the cake in every possible way, including the design and aesthetics of the computer/display itself which is laptop-thin at the edges. If you’ve been on the fence, and you’re okay with the tradeoffs an iMac has in general, get one. I can’t wait for them to do a 5k Thunderbolt display (but it sounds like it might be at least a year away).
P. S. If you’re looking for a gift for the iMac that has everything, consider a slipper to keep its feet warm.