Dave Pell on building the NextDraft platform. Spoiler: It’s WordPress, but a really cool implementation of it across a blog, iOS app, and newsletter. I wish more publishers worked the same way.
Aside Archives
Jay Rosen (and Barry Eisler) on the surveillance state’s efforts to make journalism harder, slower, less secure. The gist: why would they destroy hard drives they know there are copies of, and detain couriers they know they’ll have to release?
I’m really excited about the launch of WordPress.com Connect. Yes Facebook et al offer similar APIs and have more users, but there are two key differences. First is Automattic is not an advertising-driven company, so our priorities around users are different than ones who are. Second is that these APIs are the basis for interacting with any element of an entire website hosted on WP.com or not, meaning themes, widgets, posts, content, CSS… any company that does something that ultimately ends up on a website should be looking at the APIs on developer.wordpress.com and pushing us where there isn’t one yet.
I’ll be speaking three times this weekend: First Saturday at noon at Techweek Chicago, where I’ll be chatting with Bing’s Stefan Weitz. A few hours later at 4pm I’ll be at WordCamp Chicago doing a town hall. Then Sunday at 4pm I’ll be up with our Quebec friends at WordCamp Montreal doing another town hall. Then, I will sleep.
Michelle Atagana from Memeburn posted an interview we did when I was in South Africa: Matt Mullenweg on how open source is democratising the web.
The Wall Street Journal interviews Annise Parker on Houston and calls it “The Modern American Boomtown”. I think Houston is the most under-appreciated city in North America, as anyone who’s hung out with me for more than a few hours has heard me preach.
Wired has a great cover story on Audrey portfolio company SmartThings: In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One.
Four Little Numbers, Joen Asmussen talks about working on this year’s new default theme for WordPress, which also just launched on WordPress.com.
Dave Winer tweeted this on Saturday:
I have a little spare time today so I decided to start on River3. It'll be much much smaller and more focused than River2.
— Dave Winer (@davewiner) April 13, 2013
One of the things I love and admire about him is that many, many years after he doesn’t have to anymore he’s still learning, hacking, and taking free time on a weeknd to make something new.
Almost 3 years ago we released a version of WordPress (3.0) that allowed you to pick a custom username on installation, which largely ended people using “admin” as their default username. Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).
Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).
TechCrunch writes WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers. I’m very proud of the 8+ years we’ve been a home for, and protected, our users blogs. Protection covers many aspects: backups, scalability, security, speed, permalinks, mobile versions, forward-compatible markup, clean exports… the list goes on. We’ve done the same with other internet-scale services, like Akismet, Gravatar, and Jetpack, and I hope to earn the same trust in the coming decade with VaultPress and Simperium.
No to NoUI by Timo Arnall is one of the better pieces I’ve read on design and interfaces, and is also chock-full of links that will keep you busy for hours.
Rapping Truth To Power. “The study’s authors concluded that ‘the overwhelming message in hip-hop wasn’t that the rappers disliked the idea of justice, but they disliked the way it was being implemented.'” This is part of why sites like Rap Genius are so important. Hat tip: Elise.
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, a long read but fascinating story of how we’re getting hooked on food. See also: Paul Graham’s Acceleration of Addictiveness.
Creative Market just announced that all of their WordPress Themes are now 100% GPL, meaning to list in their marketplace and reach their users your theme must provide users with the same freedoms that WordPress itself does. They have some great themes already. This is fantastic news and I’m very proud of their team for taking this bold step, and as promised WordPress.org homepage promotion is forthcoming. I think we’ll see more of these down the line, especially as WordPress consumers start demanding 100% GPL from anything they buy.
As Liz Gannes wrote in AllThingsD, Automattic has acquired Simplenote, the coolest notes service around which you can get on the iTunes app store or for a variety of other platforms, and Simperium, which if you’re a developer you should watch the video on their homepage and see how the technology can make what you’re doing even cooler. You can read our official announcements on the Simperium blog and the Simplenote blog, which also includes some future plans. I’ve been a daily user and fan of the service for a while now, and I’m looking forward to how we can use Simperium across WP.com.
I’m attending the World Economic Forum in Davos for the first time, if you’ll be there I’d love to meet up and of course open to any tips you have about the event, it’s very intimidating to attend a first-timer. Also: Switzerland is beautiful! Also my first time in the country.
“For one experiment in the study, Wilcox and Stephen asked 84 study participants to either browse Facebook or read CNN.com for five minutes. […] The Facebook group was much more likely to go for the cookie, while the CNN group picked the granola bar.” — Does Facebook Praise Kill Self-Control?.
In addition to having a great new single, Suit & Tie, with Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake has a spiffy new WordPress-powered site.