I’m putting together the State of the Word address for the upcoming WordCamp San Francicso, and one thing I like to do every year is highlight some cool WordPress-powered sites, especially ones that show off the power of the platform. I have a few in mind already, but are there any WP sites you’ve seen recently that really blew your mind? Leave links in the comments.
Aside Archives
Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”
An oldie but a goodie: Your New TV Ruins Movies. I’ve been known to do this to TVs of friends and family without telling them.
By selling tickets directly and putting restrictions on them Louis C.K. drops scalping by 96%. This guy is on the very edge, just like VHX is making video sales and distribution available to everyone someone will do the same with this ticketing platform. It’s impressive what a creative mind paired with just a bit of technology can do.
Interesting note: WordPress Comes To Chinese Users Via Sina.com’s New Cloud Service, costs CNY1 a month.
I’ve been going retina-happy. It’ll be tricky to do the main graphics of this site (might just be easier to do a new design) but if you visit any of the photos on ma.tt on a retina display you should get double-resolution images, it really shines on photos like this one from South Africa, this one from Napa Valley, or this one from Ethiopia.
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.
I thought I could skip this one, but have been getting lots of ribbing on the NY Times Bachelorville article that was in their style section yesterday. To answer the FAQs: 1. My eyes are not always red. 2. Dvorak really is a thing. 3. I, too, had to look up what they meant by “unreconstructed.”
The Verge has a pretty epic feature on the history of Palm, Treo, and WebOS. Not many people know this but I started and ran the Houston Palm Users Group after getting a Handspring Visor in high school. PalmOS had apps, connectivity, handwriting input, infrared beaming…
Via an excellent article by Dan Phiffer I came across this NY Times article Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era. Give both a read, it adds a new dimension to the culture of distraction.
The Breadpig guys fundraised a billboard to go up in Lamar Smith’s district in Texas saying “Don’t Mess With the Internet.” I’m a Texan and I approve this message.
The video from last night’s PandoMonthly interview isn’t up yet, but there have been five blog posts that came out of it on their site if you want some of the highlights: Facebook, You’ve Got a Friend: Matt Mullenweg Thinks You Own the Future of Advertising; Distributed Workforces are All About Results; Matt Mullenweg and the Cult of WordPress; I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Might Be Destroying the World; WordPress and Tumblr are Complementary, WordPress Founder Says.
Been in New York since Sunday — I really love it here. I’m speaking twice this week, first in an interview with Anil Dash at the PaidContent conference, which has about 15 tickets left. Second, will chat with Sarah Lacy in the inaugural New York PandoMonthly event. If you’re in New York and a WordPress fan, please swing by.
Wade Roush writes about the Bay Lights Project, a remarkable endeavor to put 25,000 individually addressable LEDs on the cables of the Bay Bridge. I think it would be cool if they opened up the algorithms to reviewed contributions, especially if they ran at a set time like between 2-4 AM — far from “public-playground interpretations” I think the creativity of the Bay Area (and beyond) would delight everyone involved. But in the meantime the non-profit needs to raise a fair amount in a short period of time to have a chance: you can donate to the Bay Lights here.
With all the hubaboo going on about WordCamps right now, it’s nice to read Siobhan McKeown’s Diary Of A WordCamp on Smashing WordPress, a great story about her experience at WordCamp Netherlands.
10up partner Helen is now a core WP contributor and 10up highlights that contribution on their blog. It’s very exciting to see more core involvement springing up all over the WP ecosystem, as it has a big impact on the quality of the core software we all depend on. Let me know if you spot any more examples and I’ll share them here.
Liz Gannes writes for AllThingsD, Automattic Grows Up: The Company Behind WordPress.com Shares Revenue Numbers and Hires Execs. In addition to Stu joining as CFO and Paul as Consigliere/Automattlock, we’ve been on a hiring roll the past month or two with excellent folks joining at every level of the company, including two more Matts. If you’re passionate about Open Source and making the web a better place, like we are, there’s never been a better time to join. My favorite thing about logging in every morning is the people I work with. Friends say I work too much but it hardly feels like work at all. Update: Now in Techcrunch too.
Pingdom writes WordPress completely dominates top 100 blogs. I’m quoted in the article saying that the 49% marketshare we have among top blogs will continue to grow, and I’d like to expand on that a bit because it’s a strong statement.
Typepad and Blogsmith, the two platforms that dropped the most over the past 3 years, are going to disappear either through blogs still using them losing relevance, or their active blogs switching away. Movable Type will likely follow suit, unless its now Japanese-led development makes a pretty drastic change in its product direction. (Consultants focused on Movable Type and Typepad have already started shifting focus to switching their clients to modern platforms to avoid losing the relationship.)
The other big shift will come from the ~22% on custom platforms — this is going to become as niche as writing your own web server instead of using Apache or Nginx. Some organizations like Huffington Post might continue to make the necessary investments of over 40 engineers to maintain a platform at scale, the rest will find better return investing those resources in editorial. Great stories find an audience regardless of their platform.
WordPress’ biggest challenge over the next two years, and where we’re focusing core development, will be around evolving our dashboard to be faster and more accessible, especially on touch devices. Many of our founding assumptions about how, where, and why people publish are shifting, but the flexibility of WordPress as a platform and the tens of thousands of plugins and themes available are hard to match. We might not always be the platform people start with, but we want to be what the best graduate to.
I used to use three 27″ monitors vertically, then switched to two 30″ Dells, nowadays I’m on a 13″ Air screen most of the time, and occasionally plug into a Thunderbolt Display. Here’s a cool article on how to increase productivity per square inch of your screen by Peter Legierski.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” –- Zen Master Shunryo Suzuki. Read more about Beginner’s Mind on zenhabits.