I thought the initial metric of 100k installs would ensure sufficient testing, but Matt has since changed that metric to the number of published posts, which does not ensure the same amount of variation in testing.

First, it is exclusively for WordPress sites, and both sites have to enable Pingback for it to work.

The only difference between the Trackback system and Pingbacks is that Trackbacks had to be inputted manually.

Webmention’s growing popularity is due to the tool’s ease of use and the fact that it blocks spam effectively with the Vouch protocol.

But Webmentions also look better aesthetically in the comments section. Pingback comments look robotic and aren’t exactly readable; a Pingback comment contains the title of the post that sent the Pingback and an ellipsed summary that doesn’t make much sense.

Go register anything with WordPress in a domain and you’ll be contacted by Automattic lawyers to cease and desist.

Holy smokes Batman. The worst actor in the WP ecosystem? Some dude with a theme?

Why didnt you spend all that cash on something that would benefit the WP community as a whole then?

if Matt heard about Thesis’ proprietary license in December 2012—why wait two years to take any action?

There is no reason for the community to go through this again.

you can be successful if your product is better than the competition.

I actually dig both Microsoft and Taco Bell, but putting that aside, WordPress is free in both its license and effectively in its price as well. Its biggest competitors according to W3Techs are also free, like Joomla and Drupal.

Given price isn’t a distinguishing factor and the other similarities among the top three, I would posit that quality is the primary driver of adoption and market share. It’s a free market expressing its preference. Popularity doesn’t mean something is bad, especially in economics of abundance (which the world is moving to).Report

Sorry for missing you on that first pass, you can get in touch here:

https://developer.wordpress.com/calypso-extensions/

It’s also got a link to the extensions directory that shows the 5 plugins (besides Hello Dolly) that have had work so far:

https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/tree/master/client/extensionsReport

This is a good place to see the legal filings the Foundation makes:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205498932

Note the “notable expenses” through the years.Report

Sure, a lot of this is in the form 990 that the Foundation files with the IRS this year. Currently besides me Mark Ghosh and Chele Chiavacci are on the board; Rose Goldman is also in the filing as she helps out with taking notes for the meetings, and coordinating the outside accounting and legal firms that make sure everything is tip-top, but she’s not on the board. I don’t know exact terms of board membership, my guess would be it’s voted on by current directors.

As you can also see from the filings, the Foundation has no employees and pays no one a salary, there are no board expenses or reimbursements. Its only goal is what’s state on the Foundation website. Most of the revenue comes from the PBC subsidiary of the Foundation which runs WordCamps, and will have about 4.2M in revenue this year.

It feels like you’re looking for more how WordPress is run. (People often confuse the Foundation with WP-the-software and W.org.) Best place for that info is on make/core and here:

https://wordpress.org/about/
https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/about/organization/Report

Howdy Aaron! The Foundation has an independent board, I’m the only person that’s involved with Automattic that’s on the board. Was there something else you’d like to see happen as a result of the Foundation being separated and independent? Do you think the Foundation would do something different than it does today?Report

I thought the initial metric of 100k installs would ensure sufficient testing, but Matt has since changed that metric to the number of published posts, which does not ensure the same amount of variation in testing.

Kevin, to me it’s not a binary thing, it’s just which is going to get us the widest array of feedback. As you point out, 100k posts on sites with no plugins isn’t going cover everything, neither is 100k sites with no posting activity. :) Any metric taken in isolation is going to be insufficient, what I’m advocating for is we take the success action of using Gutenberg (publishing) into account versus just the number of people that have it installed and active.

It’s definitely something we’ll discuss more when everyone feels like Gutenberg is ready for more mainstream and widespread testing.Report

Yes! I try to approach even my strongest held beliefs with a very open mind. I’m interested in the best results for WordPress and the broader web, not being “right” by sticking to an idea or belief just because I previously believed it.

If we continue to learn, I’m certain there are other things we previously thought were true that we find a better answer to.

Strong opinions, weakly held. :)Report

I think a better measure of Gutenberg’s progress won’t be the number of sites it’s installed on, but the number of posts made through it (even though that’s a bit harder to track). We’ll still target getting it on as many sites as possible, but the publishing activity is a better North Star metric.Report

Thank you for keeping an open mind and trying the new betas as they come out. I completely agree we don’t want anything forced on people that isn’t ready for prime time, and I’m really looking forward to getting a lot more usage once the code of Gutenberg catches up to the vision more.Report

The “Gutenberg” name is just for development and internal purposes, it won’t be labeled as such once it’s fully integrated into core.Report

Citation needed. 😀Report

Your CPTs might not have REST enabled. We’ve run into some parts of the API that don’t match with what an editor needs and will fix them up, but in the meantime try enabling REST for them and see if that fixes it.Report

If anyone from Bear / Shiny Frog wants to chat about this, I’d be happy to make sure it’s a good integration.Report

That would be an awesome “generated” Gutenblock.Report

More great work from the Customization team. I think it’s really great how they’ve taken a user-first approach to improvements this year. Just because Gutenberg is on the horizon doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the opportunity to make existing and new user’s lives easier today.Report

“The discussion regarding the new framework continues behind closed doors and is not open to the public”

I want to strongly counter this. The discussion on library choice has been ongoing for months and occurs across Github tickets, Make/P2s, and in the weekly JS meetings. Anyone who would like their view (Vue?) heard in the decision is welcome to contribute at any of those venues.

I am certain the eventual decision will not make everyone happy, but it will be informed by everyone’s views.Report

To understand why core development is hard, note on this thread how Gutenberg is simultaneously being challenged for breaking too much and not breaking enough. 🙃Report

Yes! As we talked about in 2015: http://wesbos.com/learn-javascript/Report

“Has Matt ever, from the point of view of a non-techie, compared the experience building a website with open source WordPress to building a website using Squarespace?”

Thanks for raising this, I have and I definitely think it’s important for more people in the WP community to try the same. If there is a specific type of user you think would be valuable for me to learn more about I’m happy to video or screen share in with you running a test.Report

Plugin authors should absolutely start updating their plugins to work with Gutenberg this year, 2017.Report

Exactly. Market share isn’t a goal, it’s the result. It’s the open market of everyone in the world, choosing between every possible way they could spend their time, saying that WordPress is a good fit for their needs.Report

Hah! Nice quote, it illustrates the problem with the waterfall development method. Luckily we can (and do) run into icebergs every week and can address them with updates, both in plugins and core.Report

Thank you for keeping an open mind about it.Report

Rick, 5.0 will come out when Gutenberg is ready, not vice versa. That’s the idea behind these new feature-driven releases. We will still have target dates, because that helps us think about scope, work involved, and plan for all the supporting documentation, translation, and marketing material to be in place, but we’re not going to push out 5.0 until Gutenberg is something the team working on it and myself agree is ready.Report

WordPress will 100% be a fantastic platform for developers to make sites for clients on, and Gutenberg will save them a ton of time. It’s scary when change happens, but remember that agencies and developers 10-15 years ago would worry that software like WordPress would ruin their business because clients didn’t need them to update their site any more, and maybe could even create a site entirely on their own.

Did you know there are 40M small businesses just in the United States that don’t have a website yet? And another 210M around the world. There’s huge, huge opportunity ahead.Report

Regardless of what you think, feedback on core and feature plugins really does get read, heard, and considered. That’s why every single review of Gutenberg, even the super-rude 1-star ones, has a polite response. Creating great software will never make every person happy, it’s more about choosing a path between many good options, weighing all of the inevitable trade-offs that come from a change, listening, shipping, and then doing it all over again (iterating). There have now been 7 months of vigorous and public debate, chats, tickets, and code changesets that have brought us to where we are today, and I think there’s a fair amount to go before we can really show the vision of Gutenberg to the world in a mostly-complete state.

It is possible that WordPress will go in a direction you disagree with, and I apologize if someone in the community told you go to Drupal or fork, but do know that I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, concerns, and maybe even the occasional kudos on WP as we iterate along. Apathy would worry me a lot more than than disagreement or controversy.Report

Nikki and Richard, some of those tools are excellent and have explored cool concepts and their adoption thus far, though modest, shows there’s demand for this in the WordPress community. So does people choosing things other than WordPress to build their site, though people seem to want to ignore external competition for some reason. (I imagine they had similar conversations at Blackberry.) What we’re doing with Gutenberg is more editor-focused today, but in the future will allow us to do full site and theme customization and building.

The entire history of WordPress is “competing with paid versions,” that is taking software and ideas that used to cost millions of dollars and making it better and making it free and making it GPL.

Benny has an excellent point that standardization is important, it’s the same reason we wanted to bring the REST API into core rather than leave it for every plugin to implement differently.

Nikki, you are correct it would be an ultra-popular feature if we put it in Jetpack. 😀 But contrary to people’s belief my primary motivation is not growing Jetpack, or Automattic’s businesses (which are doing fine). My life’s work is improving WordPress, and this falls 100% in the wheelhouse of work we can do in core that will give the most benefit, to the maximum number of people, and totally in line with core WP’s philosophies and commitment to user freedom.Report

Brian, as I said in another comment, “We’re trying to democratize publishing for everyone, regardless of language, ability, or economic wherewithal.”

Just like in WordPress’ history, the accessibility will be something that gets better over time, even if it’s not always in a straight line. Making something people want is really hard to do, and easy to mess up and we have in the past. Taking something people already want and making it accessible we almost have a 100% success rate with over time.Report

Benny, you nailed it.

MR, Gutenberg is a plugin today, and will stay one until I’m convinced it will be beneficial for WordPress to have it in core.

Many of the concerns or worries with today’s version of Gutenberg I actually share! The main difference seems to be some people think because it’s not ready yet we should stop working on it, and I see today’s imperfect state as just a point on the journey that Gutenberg will have over the next decade of being a fundamental building block for how people publish on the web.Report

There are over a hundred million people that have tried WordPress in the past decade. I’m not aware of any plugin or theme that has had over a million sales or subscribers. If you combine them all you might get a couple million, but I would suspect there’s a lot of overlap (people who buy one thing probably buy other things).Report

I think the biggest benefit of Gutenberg will be to people using WordPress as a CMS. In fact I’m a little concerned that the visual and cognitive overhead of how it works today might be intimidating for people who just want to blog, but I think we will be able to address that in the next few beta iterations.Report

I’ve checked that one out but it didn’t resonate with me, what do you love about it? Mind sharing screenshots of your favorite bits?Report

Wow! What a comparison. Gutenberg is seven months in, completely public, open source, on GitHub, with weekly meetings in Slack, with notes posted to P2, and since WCEU a weekly release in the plugin directory accompanied by a full change log. The entire version history is in GitHub, as well as an extensive discussion on every feature, bug, issue, and idea. Over a thousand sites have it active and are testing it right this second.

I don’t want to touch the political aspect, but it’s hard for me to imagine something more diametrically opposed to how the secret health care bill was approached.

The “A Visit from St. Gutenberg” poem is still pretty funny though.Report

You had me, right until the end.Report

It might be time to retire 80/20 from the philosophy page, as it is seldom used as intended.Report

Thank you for testing!Report

For better than I could put it on why it’s important to encrypt as much as possible, see this essay by Bruce Schneier:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/why_we_encrypt.htmlReport

First, it is exclusively for WordPress sites, and both sites have to enable Pingback for it to work.

It’s already been pointed out, but just wanted to reiterate that Pingback is an open spec that WordPress adopted, but it existed before WordPress and in other CMSes as well, we’re probably the last one standing though.

The only difference between the Trackback system and Pingbacks is that Trackbacks had to be inputted manually.

This isn’t really true. Trackbacks could be automatically sent to any linked site, to me the key differences were:

1. Trackbacks sent what content they wanted to post, rather than the receiving site choosing what it wanted to show.
2. They, by design, did not require a reciprocal link, this is so people could do things like a Technorati-like topic directory with them.
3. Discovery was a much more involved process, and involved RDF on the page. Pingback was discovered purely through HTTP headers which was a bit more efficient.

The RDF was because, at the time, it was common in Movable Type (who invented Trackbacks) for the permalink of a post entry to be an anchor on a weekly or monthly archive, not have its own page, anything in the URL after # wasn’t easily available to a server-side language, and many of the pages were static HTML anyway.

The no reciprocal linking and being able to send whatever content you wanted (rather than it being extracted from the page) did make it a bit easier to write spambots.

Webmention’s growing popularity is due to the tool’s ease of use and the fact that it blocks spam effectively with the Vouch protocol.

I think Vouch is a cool idea, and similar to how a predecessor to Akismet tried to work. If Webmentions doesn’t get much spam now, I suspect it’s largely because it isn’t widely adopted enough for spammers to pay much attention to it. I don’t know if Vouch will hold up to the techniques and machinations of modern-day spammers, who now often try to use multi-step processes of intermediate URLs on social media or other places with lots of user content, legit domains that turn spammy later, and leaving innocuous comments to gain “trust” and then spamming later.

But Webmentions also look better aesthetically in the comments section. Pingback comments look robotic and aren’t exactly readable; a Pingback comment contains the title of the post that sent the Pingback and an ellipsed summary that doesn’t make much sense.

This is entirely up to us! I think improving how pingbacks display could be a really interesting project, and we could completely change it in a new version of WordPress since the entire comment is created by the receiving site, not the sending one. We could support h-cards! I would be very supportive of a feature plugin or patch that iterated on this. Another rich area to work on is that we discard pingbacks sent to places like the home page, but actually that could be a nice replacement to the now-gone APIs that Google Blog Search or Technorati supported to let you know who was linking to your site.
Otto mentions the DDOS reflection problem, which is a real one and difficult to solve in a distributed way. The forwarded header we added to core and Akismet gives more information, but ultimately it’s global throttles in centralized services like Akismet and WordPress.com that mostly neutered the effectiveness of that attack.

More broadly, there seems to be a trend of doing something that was done a decade ago, but taking out XML. It’s Webmentions and Pingback, and we’re also doing it ourselves with AtomPub API and WP-API. For adoption it’s important to think about what makes things 10x better, not just 10% better. Protocols can have product-market fit just like products, and I think what we’re doing with the API has the potential to be really compelling, but distribution does not guarantee adoption. For Webmentions, I really appreciate the optimism and practical get-it-done attitude of the entire IndieWeb community.Report

I’m glad other comments have said this before me, but this is not legit. Reporting host rating with as little as a single customer’s feedback is incredibly misleading, especially given some of these folks have millions of customers. Big, important players in the hosting space that are even WordCamp sponsors are missing (like Mike mentions Pantheon). In reporting the results without actually examining whether they’re worth reporting you’re perpetuating bad data and conclusions, the opposite of what journalism, WordPress-focused or otherwise, should do.Report

On behalf of the Bilderberg Group, Illuminati, the committer cabal, Forbes 30 under 30 alumni, World Economic Forum, and the Freemasons, I’d like to thank you for convincing the world that Automattic doesn’t run WordPress.Report

Hear hear!Report

Replace “company” with “organization”, and using WordPress itself is already coming from a single place. It’s usually not the originator that’s the issue, it’s your rights and freedoms inherit in the experience today, and down the line.

Automattic is a commercial company, but I hope that the experiences are as open and free as pretty much any company out there. And at the end because things are open source you have control even if Automattic went a direction you didn’t like. Today things in Calypso rely on Jetpack and the .com APIs, but I bet within a year that won’t be the case any more, especially now that the code is public and open source.Report

WordPress.com has had a full REST API available, widely documented, and in production use since April 2012. On a given day we still see 25-30% of *all* posts come in via XML-RPC. (Our REST API usually gets about 4%.)Report

This is definitely one of the most misinformed and misleading things I’ve read on Tavern in a long time, but I guess the author was trying to create “controversial issues.”Report

Oh goodness. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Some days internet comments just outdo themselves.Report

Because he’s twisting a core philosophy and trying to apply it to themes, which have never and will never target 80% of the user base. (We want people to use as many different and customized themes as possible.) That’s not the goal of the Twenties. Also 80/20 is a rule of thumb, and sometimes we may override it for something niche but that we think is important for the platform, like post revisions.Report

No, and I would be surprised if any single theme ever gets above 10-15% usage. For reference, the top-selling premium WP theme of all time (that I’m aware of) is Avada, and it’s significantly smaller in usage than all six of the twenty* themes individually. I think they represent an incredible resource for the WP community, and I’m excited there are more options of Twenties to choose from. We have a while until the Twenty-Ones start. :)Report

The Twenty* themes dwarf all other premium and free themes, and they actually do come in above 20% of active WP themes in the world. I think they are well worth the investment and maintenance. They’re named with years, but can be timeless.Report

There will be a BBQ lunch!Report

I can’t wait to see everyone there. :)Report

It was actually way before that (from Mark, over Skype in Dec 2012), I just hadn’t looked into it personally and had basically forgotten about it before Siobhan brought it up.Report

Go register anything with WordPress in a domain and you’ll be contacted by Automattic lawyers to cease and desist.

That’s not true, but seems to keep popping up in this thread. Here is some info that might clarify what actually happens here, and the thinking behind it.

First, if you hear from anyone it will probably be the Foundation lawyers, not Automattic ones.

Second, you would get a letter first, not a legal action. Many people who use “wordpress” in the domain are just not aware of our domain policy, which actually goes beyond pure trademark law, and the vast majority of people just update their domain when they find out about it. Many want to be be able to be linked from wordpress.org, participate in WordCamps, and many of the other benefits that come from following the community guidelines.

Third, not every use of “wordpress” in a domain is going to be a trademark violation, as Jeff sometimes uses the example, if you pack swords together and call it SwordPress dot com that’s not going to be

Fourth, you don’t have to attack everyone who might be violating your trademark to maintain it. If your legal counsel told you that, they’re not the best. In fact it creates a lot more risk as you’re opening yourself up to defensive legal action.

Fifth, there are some domains we haven’t been able to get that people pointed out earlier in the thread, but just because you have a US trademark doesn’t mean it applies in other countries.

Finally, battles have to be picked. If the foundation tried to go after everyone who had “wordpress” in the domain it would cost many millions of dollars We focus on sites that actually get traffic, and people who combine several things, like our logo or site design alongside the domain, in ways that will confuse users into thinking they’re on an official/actual WordPress resource. (I don’t think anyone can visit Themeshaper and think they’re on DIYThemes, FWIW.) We also target people who are using confusion (even without “wordpress” in the domain) to distribute spam or malware, something we often do in concert with Google. If I were Chris, I would have gone after one of these sites first: https://cloudup.com/c1qJEJ0l1KA

I hope that helps clarify a bit about domains, trademark law, and what the Foundation actually does around it.Report

Here are the four freedoms the GPL aims to protect:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The GPL FAQ has a ton of information, if you read it top to bottom you’ll be very well-informed on licenses in general and the GPL specifically:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html

Here is a link with information on that specifically related to WordPress themes:

https://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/Report

And thank you for being polite! It can be a rare thing in online discussions.Report

I have made many mistakes in the past, this might be one in hindsight, and I’m sure I’ll make many in the future. I appreciate your feedback, and all these comments really even the incredibly critical ones. They help me expand my thinking and often see other sides of an issue I may not have considered.Report

I’m sure there are projects with needs, some that we’ll directly support in the future and some we won’t. In terms of other GPL violators, after DIYThemes is finished I’m happy to take a look at other cases if you want to start compiling a list.

In my experience almost everything can be resolved by reaching out, many folks aren’t aware of how the GPL works and aren’t consciously violating it. (Wish that was the case here.)Report

Full reasoning is in our filing (not sure why people say there’s no reason, it’s all spelled out) and that’s all I can say on the matter given there’s pending legal action and could be more in the future, which I hope you understand limits me. In the future when it’s all resolved I will be able to comment publicly on the matter. But to repeat, there is pending legal action and may be more in the future.Report

Darryl, cybersquatting is a serious acquisition: it is what Chris alleged in his UDRP, and that the panel found to not be true.Report

Holy smokes Batman. The worst actor in the WP ecosystem? Some dude with a theme?

You’re right, the malware and spam people are probably worse. But at least they’re not violating WP’s license. (Funnily enough.)

Why didnt you spend all that cash on something that would benefit the WP community as a whole then?

I have personally donated millions to non-profits outside of the WPF, including six figures annually to the Apache Foundation; Automattic has invested tens of millions into WP core and the ecosystem around it, and supports the jQuery Foundation. And all that will continue! The domain and the subsequent legal work will not impact my or Automattic’s ability to contribute much more to WordPress for many decades to come.Report

if Matt heard about Thesis’ proprietary license in December 2012—why wait two years to take any action?

Chris, I really, really didn’t want to be drawn into dealing with you again. I was busy with WordPress 3.5 and many aspects of Automattic, which was around 130 people at the time, and it seemed likely that this would turn into a big public thing as it has.

It is not my preference to go to legal action, but in hindsight that was a mistake and I probably should have done something in 2012, which was apparently the same time you were doing your patents. Busyness is no excuse.

There is no reason for the community to go through this again.

The community is going through this again because you picked a fight that shone light on your license and patents. We’re going through this again because the GPL is at the core of everything we do in WordPress, and it touches a much wider community of open source around the world. Even Envato themes follow the GPL, you’re the only one out there repeatedly and flagrantly violating WordPress’ license.

You can’t just initiate a legal battle and then say the whole thing should be called off as soon as things start to not go your way — there are important and crucial issues outstanding. Whoever told you that you had to litigate Automattic to protect your trademark, to change your license to violate the GPL again, and to patent common templating, was incredibly poor legal counsel. I’m sure you thought you would win when you started this, and maybe you still do now.

Given how much you’ve benefited from GPL software the past 8 years, I don’t understand why you fight it so much. You can’t claim ignorance on the issue any more as we talked about it extensively in 2010. If the GPL really bothers you that much, there are hundreds of other non-GPL and proprietary platforms you could build and market software for and I’m sure make a fine living from.Report

Chris, let me know if I’m following this correctly.

In 2010, after a protracted public battle in which you tried to claim the GPL doesn’t apply to you, you changed your license to comply with the GPL.

In 2011 you filed for trademarks.

In September 2012 you filed a patent – http://www.google.com/patents/US20140095982 .

Sometime between 2010 and Dec 2012, you changed your license back to proprietary and started violating the GPL again.

In Jan 2014 you knew I got the domain thesis.com.

April 2014 your patent was published.

All of 2014 there is no promotion of thesis.com except a joking mention on stage during my State of the Word address (October 2014). There is no harm to your business.

Over a year later (!) in April/May 2015 you initiated litigation against Automattic trying to seize Thesis.com, claiming infringement and bad faith.

In June 2015 Automattic challenged the trademarks you were claiming that were infringed as part of its defense against your litigation.

In July 2015 you lost that litigation, and have proceeded to publicize the issue of Thesis.com, which almost no one had heard of before the your UDRP filing became public.

Is there anything factually inaccurate in that timeline?

I’m guessing the primary harm to your business and credibility has come from you creating a ton of drama around this, not thesis.com pointing to a site primarily about theme education, from the group who contributed _s and the last few Twenty themes to the WP world.

I would also say your credibility was harmed by going back on your word on the GPL.Report

I’m not going to give a domain worth several hundred thousand dollars to the worst actor in the entire WP ecosystem, someone who keeps repeatedly violating the GPL and now has gone beyond that into patents. Why reward that? I wouldn’t sell it if he offered a million dollars.

There are so many people doing amazing things in the WP community, and 100% GPL! I can and have supported them almost every opportunity I can, and one of the things I’m most proud of in the world is how many fantastic open source businesses have been built on top of WordPress.

And it’s just the beginning — if you remembered in 2010 Chris said that going GPL would destroy businesses and sticking to the principles of our license would destroy investment in WordPress — we all know how that’s worked out since then.Report

Very good feedback to have in mind as we look at the next iteration of the page, and thank you for sharing.

One thing that worked well in the previous iteration of the page is having hosts monitor their tag in the forums, and I would forward complaints that would come in via the feedback email directly to management. These were always handled quickly and in a way I thought was fair. If they weren’t, the host would risk being removed from the page.

They haven’t applied yet via the survey, so it might not even be an issue. (Though I think a lot are working on things to have better answers to questions and submitting their response right before the deadline.)Report

I think it’s clear you have an axe to grind and issues much larger than what we’re talking about here. I’m sorry that your experience in the WP ecosystem or with the organizations I lead has been so negative, and I do hope it gets better. I stand by only wanting to promote 100% GPL plugins and themes from WordCamps and WordPress.org.Report

Frankie, the $99 is for the WordPress.com premium plan, which includes VideoPress, a domain, space, premium Typekit fonts, custom CSS, premium support (usually livechat), and more. We haven’t announced separate pricing for .org users yet, it’s a .com-focused release right now.Report

You can’t buy your way onto that page. It’s editorially driven and chosen. Inclusion and ranking will be driven by who I think is best for its audience, not anything commercial.

I think you missed the part where this very site, which gets plenty of traffic, is hosted on Bluehost. Check out Jeffro’s comment above.

On the elephant / Godaddy thing — yes that was terrible. (And don’t forget SOPA!) It was also four years ago, and the entire management has changed since then. Is it fair to penalize an organization of thousands of people for something so far in the past, done by people no longer there? Just like people deserve second chances, so do organizations.Report

I’m seeing a lot of hate on the big hosts (Godaddy, EIG, etc), but the truth is that they mediate the experience for many millions of active WordPress installations, and the work they’ve done around upgrades has been probably the biggest improvement to the WordPress ecosystem overall the past 5 years. I also try out these sites myself, as Jeff mentioned earlier Tavern used to be hosted on Dreamhost, and is now on Bluehost. I help out family and friends with .org installs on a pretty wide variety of hosts, and sometimes even call up support or livechat myself to ask questions and see what the experience is like. I also get hundreds of emails a year on the host feedback address. I read tons of hosting threads on our support forums.

A very small % of new WordPress users are going to set up PHP/MySQL/etc themselves, so the host is key to their experience.

But there are a lot I’m not familiar with, and I’m interested in giving a fresh look to a wide variety hosts big and small that will help assist in giving folks a fantastic WordPress experience with complete flexibility to use any plugin, theme, or custom code. The ultimate result will of course be completely subjective, but I want to give everyone a fair and well-informed consideration regardless of whether they’ve been in the WP community a long time or not, and the survey gives us a big head start. Hopefully we can have a process that becomes streamlined enough we can re-do it every 12-24 months, giving both old and new entities a chance to be highlighted.

I’m sure I missed some questions in the survey though, and it’s still a very English-centric system. I’d like to figure out in the future how to highlight hosts that meet our quality bar in other languages, and at different price points than just the $5-15 of typical shared hosting.Report

It’s a fun experiment regardless, especially if people don’t think of it as Official WordPress Policy or Future (which it isn’t).Report

It would probably be better to start from scratch, it’s not even close to up to date with current WP code it was meant to emulate.Report

Love it!Report

Do you think we could display them better or auto-trim so they don’t get too crazy?Report

Yeah the rules would mostly kick if it was commercial.Report

You have a good point — the W logo part of Wapuu is the WP trademark, and falls under the rules of the Foundation: http://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/Report

Cloudup is super useful, especially when you install the desktop client, and in fact anyone can sign up for it now without an invite: https://cloudup.com/

Our editor work has shifted a bit, you can see the results of what we tried in Zeditor but the main improvements coming this year will be TinyMCE based.Report

There’s a ticket about that:

https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/pull/2148Report

Yes!Report

Try the invite code “matt”. :)Report

Thanks for everyone checking out the paper, as Otto said above I’d recommend you really read it.

As to where the source is hosted (which repository), can we just appreciate for a second that it’s a public thing anyone can contribute to, like the WordPress book? And that it’s under a CC Zero license! :) We’ll probably move it to another repo eventually, but just wanted to get it out there sooner rather than later.Report

Why not have your plugin in the plugin directory so it’s easy for people to install?Report

That is correct!Report

you can be successful if your product is better than the competition.

In your testing, how is the product better than the competition?Report

Well, we actually have over 60% of the CMS market, just most sites don’t use an identifiable CMS yet. That’s our green field.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/ms/yReport

Could you clarify what you thought got worse last summer?Report

It’s okay, no one thought we could make it to 10% either.Report

There’s a lot of fair criticism in your comment, and it is true that the attention paid to the core software far outstrips what we’ve been able to muster so far on feature plugins, canonical plugins, handbooks, Glotpress, and (perhaps most importantly) the plugin and theme directories.

There is some good work underway, and I hope that what happens in 2015 will help shift the balance here a bit more. You can see the beginnings of it in the plugin and theme directory improvements in wp-admin in the past few releases.Report

The closest thing we have to a crystal ball are the lessons learned by running the service that hosts about half of the WordPress sites in the world, WordPress.com, and the information we get from the 50k+ signups we get every day still. Jetpack brings the features we know makes WordPress much more compelling for a mainstream audience to the .org side of things so people can have the best of both worlds — the complete freedom of running your own code wherever you want to host it and the functionality of a world-class cloud service.

It’s entirely possible, as you suggest, that in a world without Jetpack alternative solutions would have been created, but I think the examples in other OS communities like Drupal and Joomla suggest otherwise, and also that everything similar in the WP world has been paid (rightly so, some of it is expensive to run). You’re correct that we’ll never know for sure because we haven’t figured out how to surf the multiverse yet.Report

BTW, happy to come on your podcast to debate Jetpack more in-depth.Report

My entire life is WordPress, and my intention in talking above the above (please re-read my words and try to really understand them!) isn’t to hurt the project, it’s that we have a critical self-awareness of our strengths and weaknesses in the market.

My #1 goal is to grow the pie, meaning WordPress’ market share, which means everyone in the broader WordPress ecosystem, including plugin authors, agencies, themers, bloggers, podcasters, and consultants will benefit.Report

It’s worth repeating what I said above: “Naked WordPress (without plugins) is not competitive to Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.”

Which is the direct opposite of “That’s a slap in the face to the 100’s of high-quality plugin authors and companies that build great software to make the experience of WordPress better for users.”

I’m saying that plugins are crucial to WordPress being competitive — it’s the only reason we’re even in the game right now.

“I’m perfectly happy with my iThemes Sync account”

iThemes Sync provides a lot of good functionality, however if that goodness is behind a paywall most users will never see it and will choose a platform where things like updates, security, and backups are included.Report

As Wix is a public company, you can read quite a bit about their numbers and financials online. You’ll also see them in the Super Bowl this Sunday. Collectively the organizations you mention are going to spend more than a hundred million dollars this year advertising to gain new sites, grow their brand and marketshare.Report

Saw this linked from the WP Engine footer — has anything happened here yet?Report

That sounds really odd, definitely get in touch with Jetpack support and we’ll help you look at this.Report

I don’t like approach of the Sidekick tutorials in general, but it is worth noting that this was a mistake of noble ambition: GD wanted to help more people be able to publish with WordPress, which is very near and dear to our core mission to democratize publishing. It’s a big, tough problem and anyone trying to tackle it is going to make mistakes along the way, I know I certainly have! I’m sure this has been a learning experience, and overall I’m looking forward to see what strides GD will be able to make in 2015.Report

Check out previous surveys from State of the Word talks — people’s top complaints are around plugins: security problems, compatibility with core updates, compatibility with each other, and not knowing which are good.

Jetpack solves all those, and it’s telling that all the folks that run millions of WordPresses (Automattic, all the web hosts) support Jetpack.

And lots of other goodies — I’m keeping up with comments here because Tavern is a Jetpack-enabled site, so I get a notification in my toolbar and mobile apps when there’s a reply to me here.Report

I thought a lot about putting it into Akismet, or VaultPress, but ultimately decided against it. These days Jetpack actually gets better distribution, and is a better place to put free functionality that we want available to as many people as possible. I’d like as many of the WordPresses in the world as possible to be protected. BruteProtect also can auto-update plugins and themes — something like that just doesn’t make sense for Akismet, which is best with its narrow focus on the commenting experience.Report

I don’t think so — some things really make sense to be on for as many people as possible. That’s the promise of Jetpack, why it’s become one of the most popular plugins in the world in just a few short years: complete, integrated, hassle-free functionality, always the latest and greatest.

Some advanced users may not like that, and they can have plugins or filters to alter how JP works, but it’s the right answer for the vast, vast majority of WordPresses in the world, the same way that new features in core are “on by default.”Report

I agree that a pure blacklist approach is not a good idea. Fortunately we’ve learned a lot over the years building Akismet (now blocking 7.5M spams a hour) and will put some of that learning toward this problem as well.Report

Many of the features in Jetpack, like Photon, actually speed your site up. Others like the sharing buttons and related posts are way faster (and protect your privacy better) than many of the standalone alternatives. And finally the promotional aspects of hooking in your Twitter, Facebook, etc and some connections we have to search engines and SEO stuff built into Jetpack will get you more traffic. Jetpack is absolutely for developers, just not everyone has caught up to that fact yet.Report

It’s weird that the linked site doesn’t use WordPress.Report

What would Tavern look like with 2014?Report

Nevis1 — WP has built-in export, and numerous plugins that support backing things up both free and paid. It’s really more of a hosting responsibility than an application responsibility.Report

Welcome to the Tavern. :)Report

Redesign coming soon…Report

I think simplicity is relative, and the first few years of WordPress were actually pretty complex.

Milan also nails it that people don’t necessary want simplicity or their site to be cookie cutter. If you look at the comments on the Ghost article it is a mix of people who want simpler blogging and some who want crazy built-in post types.

I have some ideas for the post editor, though, that I think people will really dig. You can satisfy both camps, it just takes iterations and probably a few missteps along the way.Report

I thought it was a great interview, and it’s always cool to hear Mike talk.Report

Sorry for the title, it was my attempt at something link-baity like you see on Buzzfeed or Huffpo. :)Report

This is really sad. Jeff, you will be missed and I hope you come back to it someday. Let me know if there’s ever anything I can do to help.Report

Proof of conceptReport

Ben, you need to get laid.Report

Jane’s not so bad…?! She’s awesome!Report

@_ck_ — bbPress.org 2.0 is under way and should be live within a week or two — we kicked off the project after we got the design source files from Sam.

Forum plugins for WP are popular, and would be more so if they were as powerful as bbPress already is. With better integration with WordPress tens of millions of users will be one-click away from having a forum perfectly integrated with their design and user system.

This is sort of possible today, but it’s too hard right now. Themes don’t really mesh. BuddyPress does some juggling to make integration easier but it has too much overhead.Report

For the record, I think that his assertion that Thesis is faster than WordPress because it bypasses page selection logic (paraphrasing) is technically inaccurate.Report

Donnacha I was about to say that! REEEEEMIIIIIIIIX.Report

@Paul – thank you for saying that. I think a lot of us were thinking it.Report

@Dave Doyle – if you’re smart enough to use patches, you’re smart enough to wrangle SVN. SVN can give you arbitrary diffs between any release or revision of WordPress, compare it to your local version, allow one-click reversions and updates, and you can browse it visually and even download diffs of any file or changeset on the WordPress Trac. It also works great with binary files, something patches really can’t. Any patches we provided would be inferior to what you could get yourself via SVN, so if that’s important to you I would recommend diving into it. There’s a fantastic free book on SVN available here:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/Report

Perhaps as a community we could do like an “upgrade barn raising” where the more tech savvy folks (the audience of WP Tavern) could volunteer a little bit of time every day to help get folks set up correctly on the latest version, like install4free used to work for installations.Report

@Barry – It was because wpmupremium (at that time) violated the GPL license, sorry if that wasn’t obvious from my comment. It’s not an issue anymore because they’ve switched to being fully GPL compliant.

I should clarify that I think the local shortlink part is useless, external shortlinks is a harder problem.

You could generate extremely short URLs for WP by just using a base62 of the post ID (that’s what wp.me does) and catching the 404 handler. If your domain is too long just alias it to yours and WP’s canonical features will take care of the rest.

Stats are redundant because all of the clicks go to your site, which should already run a stats package like Google Analytics or WordPress.com Stats. Click tracking is only useful to know about traffic you’re sending someplace else. (WP.com stats already tracks outgoing clicks.)

Shortening other people’s links is useful. Long term, though, I hope shortened links go away for everything but severely constrained mediums, like SMS. (And who clicks on links from their SMS anyway?)Report

I encourage you to continue to attend, I don’t think Jane’s intention was to ask you to not.Report

This seems like a rip-off.Report

John is full-time, not part-time.Report

Miroslav, this login problem has been there for years, it’s just no one has noticed it until now. If this had been told to us in the 2.7 branch, we would have had to do a release then. There was nothing more or less tested about 2.8 than previous releases.Report

For a while it sounded like you were trying to talk Scott out of writing plugins.Report

Poetry is poetry. (more words because your comment form requires it.)Report

It’ll get a design refresh, I just wanted to get the content going. It had been sitting on my laptop for too long.Report

WordPress will be around and thriving long after I’m gone, and I’m only 25. :)Report

It’s not for everyone!

That one is on my list! Will try to get to it this year.

Mostly word of mouth, and some randomness thrown in.

Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for the question. If you are able to find an hour or two a day I’d say you’re on the right track. I tend to read in spurts when I travel, or on vacation, where I’ll often finish a few books, and then might go a week or two without getting to read too much. I’m trying to be more consistent.

These are a few of the habits I used this year to read more:

1. I moved social media and such off the home screen of my phone, and put the Kindle app there, often where I used to have say Twitter.
2. My favorite way to read is the latest Kindle, second favorite is on phone, third favorite is a paper book. Books mainly frustrate me because of their portability, especially since I’m usually reading a few things at a time, and that the notes I may take aren’t synced anywhere.
3. I started listening to audiobooks for the first time, and have enjoyed them especially when I’m in Houston because I end up spending a lot more time in the car.
4. I also started listening to audiobooks sometimes when I run or exercise. Music is better for a motivational boost, but I don’t need it every time anymore.
5. Having a reading buddy or group can be very motivating, especially if you set a date to discuss the book.
6. I’ve found first thing in the morning is one of the best times for me to read, especially if I put the phone out of reach and the Kindle within reach.

As for three recommendations, I’d say:

Fiction / memoir: All the Light We Cannot See, The Rules Do Not Apply, and the short story collection.
Non-fiction / business: Principles, Dance of the Possible, and My Gita.

Thank you!

In the talk I mention that they’ll be released in a blog post, which is being worked on. I did decide they weren’t interesting enough for the finite time in the presentation.

The survey results were pretty boring, I think we need some new questions for next year. We’re going to publish these survey results and previous years in a blog post.

Check out the part of the demo where Matias shows a theme applying styles to Gutenberg, so it looks exactly as it does on the front-end.

Both good questions!

On the WP.com Business plan you can install and test the Gutenberg plugin in wp-admin. We’ll be adding Gutenberg to Calypso sometime before April to try to get as much testing as possible, but not sure the exact date yet.

Plugins and themes can add and modify blocks today, there are APIs for everything already in the Gutenberg editor.

Sorry about that! I think we’re still hooking up the thank you / receipt system.

I either highlight, take a picture, or just write something down in Simplenote, Wunderlist, or Todoist.

The 1.4 release of Gutenberg just came out and has some really cool updates:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/10/10/whats-new-in-gutenberg-october-10th/

It would all be compiled down to be fast and lightweight.

I think the idea is it’d be compiled down to something common and fast, not loading multiple libraries.

It means that React is back in the running, but WordPress is still evaluating a few different directions.

I think the server-side of WordPress will remain PHP for a long time to come, especially with the improvements in performance PHP has in the past few years and its continued ubiquity.

Haven’t come across it before but will add it to the list.

That’s not the motivation — take another read of the post.

You can certainly interpret things in that way if you like, it’s a very cynical and worst-case assumption approach. I don’t think it’s true, but also not sure what I could say to change your mind. The key difference may be that you’re mixing up Automattic, the commercial entity, with WordPress, the open source project, and the respective decisions for each.

That would be violating Facebook’s IP rights — IP rights are the basis of all open source including the GPL so it’s something we wouldn’t do.

I had really hoped the license would change, and had hints that it would.

The plan from the beginning was to redo the entire editing screen — you can’t make a great experience with taking the old TinyMCE-in-a-box approach to editing and customization. Metaboxes are there, and totally backwards compatible, there’s just FUD saying they won’t be. (I don’t know why this is so persistent, I feel like we’re fighting fake news.) My hope is many (not all) of the plugins using meta boxes upgrade them to Gutenberg boxes, but even if they don’t they’ll still work, it just won’t be as slick and integrated as the ones that update.

Honestly that hasn’t come up yet, but I’ll note it.

Preact is definitely one that’s being considered.

That’s another one the team has been spending a lot of time with.

That’s been a frequently suggested one and the team has met with Vue’s lead developer.

Piet, I do! 96% of sites that run Jetpack have a single author. It’s a little higher on .com. The “grabbed out of thin air” part of your comment stung a little, please consider being nicer when writing on the web because comments can read harsher than you may have intended.

Thank you so much for actually digging in!

There is nothing to announce about Gutenberg licensing today, but it’s something on a lot of people’s minds.

Thank you for your feedback, we’ll definitely keep multi-author support in mind for future versions. The vast majority of WP sites only have a single author, so it’s been an area we’ve thought best left to plugins so far. There is an update for co-authors plus on the horizon, and it will be updated for Gutenberg, it would also be great for other enterprise WP hosts besides VIP to contribute more to foundational enterprise plugins like that.

There won’t be a version of WP like that, but there will definitely be a plugin that gives you the legacy / old edit page. Make sure to let ACF know that Gutenberg compatibility is a top priority.

1. Best to engage on Github and the Slack chats for highly technical questions, not Tavern or forums.

2. We anticipated a decision on React around the Apache deadline (closer to now), will have more to announce about WP and Gutenberg’s approach here in the next few weeks.

3. Some things like toolbar buttons will definitely need to be updated to work with Gutenberg, other things like Metaboxes there will be no problem to provide a legacy interface for a few releases. But I would say that plugin authors should start updating their plugins in late September if they want to benefit from Gutenberg’s launch.

4. Gutenberg 1.0 will just be the next update, then it will go to 1.1, 1.2, etc. The version numbers are incrementing every week. I also would love more testers of the the Gutenberg plugin. Development has been coming along really great and based on everything I’ve seen so far I think it’ll be ready long before the timeline you are imagining.

In a few weeks we’ll be able to do some programs and promotions to get wider use of the plugin. Today it’s not quite ready for that as we’re still addressing known issues, so there’s not as much utility for additional users or testers yet.

Gutenberg uses TinyMCE, so a better way to think of it is that Gutenberg is a new version of our approach to TinyMCE. It will the default experience of WP, for people that want to use something more like what’s currently there we’ll have a plugin they can use.

Thank you for sharing!

1. The first version will be a page and post builder, and then we will take the block concept to replace widgets, menus, and have themes that allow you to build entire sites. It’s more structurally focused than a pure WYSIWYG approach, but people will be able to see and understand the relationship to the structure and visual appearance of their site much, much better than now.

2. The goal of the plugin is to come into core so that other plugins and themes can start to build on it as infrastructure. Over time it will allow us to reduce and simplify a lot of the code and interfaces in core.

I agree something like a rollback or Time Machine would be really useful.

There definitely is a contingent that seems to think that, but if you think through it logically it doesn’t make sense: if it were just to benefit Automattic it would be far easier and more advantageous to just do Gutenberg unilaterally in Calypso, where it would primarily benefit WordPress.com. Doing it in wp-admin and core first involves a lot more discussion, public feedback, backwards compatibility concerns, and breaking a lot of new ground for how core uses Javascript, and because it’s in core the benefits will accrue to all hosts of WordPress, many of which directly or indirectly compete with Automattic. We are reading and trying to learn from all the negative feedback though, even when it’s from people who haven’t used Gutenberg much yet.

Actually I agree, for Automattic I like if someone has a resume attached in addition to whatever cool / special thing they did like a website.

Actually that was yesterday, this will be this afternoon’s link: https://youtu.be/e88INrSX5yk

It’s going to be at 3pm Paris Time.

Will try that out, thank you!

This particular site is hosted on .org, so I run Jetpack on it to get all the latest and greatest. 🙂

The closest I’ve been able to find is this Washington Post obituary: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/maurice-sendak-and-childhood–we-ate-it-up-we-loved-it/2012/05/08/gIQAhfcwAU_blog.html

I’m falling out of practice with it!

It’s easier for a pen with a clip to fit in the pen holder in the backpack, the Pico doesn’t have one so it floats around or needs its own pocket.

Thanks for sharing!

I used to use a Cocoon but I feel like stuff would fall out of it over time, which would kind of defeat the purpose. Now I try to find bags with lots of internal pockets so not as much need for a Cocoon.

We use Zoom pretty extensively and are happy with it.

Here’s a story about how they came to be:

https://design.blog/2017/05/18/how-a-detroit-hackathon-turned-into-wordpress-coms-first-ever-tv-spots/

Have been — it’s amazing!

Well it’s not totally anonymous when they chat with me, because they might have a Gravatar or similar that shows more about themselves.

Let me know how it goes!

This feature fixes that! Try it. 🙂

It’s totally random.

I think mostly around the neighborhood I was staying.

Fair criticism!

You can’t just change the license willy nilly, it depends on where the code came from. This code was MIT, and then our 1,000+ changes and commits to it were GPL, which you can do.

Other comments talk about this already, but the short answer is: MIT code can become GPL licensed, but not vice versa. Here’s a longer explanation: https://ma.tt/2016/10/wix-and-the-gpl/#comment-586319

I know — I didn’t ask for attribution. (Copyright notices need to be maintained in source, though.) I asked them to “Release your app under the GPL, and put the source code for your app up on GitHub so that we can all build on it, improve it, and learn from it.”

There are a number of ways Wix could come into compliance with the GPL, their CEO’s post seems to indicate they’re going to publish the source code for the entire app, I’m guessing to Github. That would resolve everything, and I would applaud them for doing so.

Given the context it seemed like a public discussion was the best way to get things resolved as soon as possible, with neither side having to get legal involved. I also think it’s important for the broader tech community to understand how open source works (or doesn’t) better.

Not entirely, it’s worth reading some more on this, here’s one place to start: https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/wordpress-licensing-the-gpl/

Commercial software is fine, but your license needs to be GPL.

There is nuance, but that’s the general gist.

We did ask, in the above post. 🙂 It’s not clear to me what Avishai meant there, but hopefully you’re correct.

People make honest mistakes, and licenses can be confusing. I’m giving Wix the benefit of the doubt here.

This is all about the mobile apps, which is definitely downloaded and distributed in every interpretation of the GPL.

Paul’s comment addresses this misunderstanding: https://ma.tt/2016/10/wix-and-the-gpl/#comment-586319

Also this thread on Hacker News has lots of folks who have a good grasp of open source licensing, and apparently had some comments from Avishai himself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12826088

This one in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12828814

Miriam Schwab, an organizer in the Israeli WordPress community, wrote a great post about why Avishai’s and Tal’s responses don’t really address any of the core issues:

http://wpgarage.com/news-views/weak-wix-response-wordpress-gpl/

The signs are very clear when you look at the apps, I wouldn’t have posted if there was any doubt they were using the code. I’m not saying you or anyone has to like the GPL, but if you use the code you have to abide by the license. Like you say, there are many other non-copyleft licenses available, however this code was GPL. The GPL has had a fantastic impact on the development of WordPress, and that’s why we do our best to protect it.

I don’t think going straight to legal is a good approach, especially when it’s possible this could have been a mistake, and it’s easy for them to resolve to everyone’s satisfaction by open sourcing their app.

When you embed and use GPL code, you have to release the entire thing as GPL. (That’s why it’s called a viral license.) So they need to release not just their changes to the editor, but the entire app that was distributed.

I would much rather they just release their app as GPL rather than have to get into a legal fight.

I started full-time at University of Houston but dropped out after my second year.

Apparently voter fraud in the US is incredibly rare:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/24/voter-id-laws-target-rarely-occurring-voter-fraud.html

Somewhere around 11% of eligible voters don’t have access to government ID that would enable them to vote, which could be because of something like their name changing (marriage) or an address change:

http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf

To the extent fraud is possible, it’s much more possible with voting by mail since in most cases ID laws don’t apply. If it were just about fraud ID laws should apply to voting by mail as well:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/why-voter-id-laws-arent-really-about-fraud/

I just voted by mail myself today, actually! (Just once, not fraudulently. :))

I’ve had an ID my entire life that I can remember, so requiring some sort of ID seems like a common-sense measure, but this story from Houston (my home) opened my eyes to how it can actually be a huge time and money cost to get a new ID, for a 65-year-old who was born in Texas and lived his entire life there:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a-photo-id-so-you-can-vote-is-easy-unless-youre-poor-black-latino-or-elderly/2016/05/23/8d5474ec-20f0-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html

I used just the iPad time-lapse feature for this.

Oh wow. I just finished this book which I found very helpful, and also talks about Alzheimer’s:

https://www.amazon.com/Grief-Grieving-Finding-Meaning-Through-ebook/dp/B000FCKB02/

I might move matt.wordpress.com over.

That’s a great link, thanks for sharing!

Awesome comment. Thanks for the thoughts and the links, I’ll check them out.

Sorry about that, it’s my fault.

That looks like something in the Skymall catalog. 🙂 Thanks for sharing.

Haven’t tried Bellroy but I’ll write it down to check out. I love Muji and Uniqlo, mostly because they work well, are simple, and unbranded. I don’t know why but in my 30s I’ve definitely come to appreciate that something unbranded is an incredible luxury. I just have the Chromecasts in one of the internal pockets of the Lululemon backpack.

Maybe start a meetup there: https://make.wordpress.org/community/meetups/

We’ll hold a spot for you Dec 2-4 at WordCamp US:

https://2016.us.wordcamp.org/

That’s usually covered by the SD card and reader, but I did used to carry around a little USB-C plus regular spinny USB disk.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V62XBY8/

But I gave it to someone and haven’t replaced it. I don’t generally need more space than that because the laptop has 1TB internally.

No but I do grab one sometimes, or I might stick a Soylent in the bag if I know I’m going to be on the go a lot in a day.

The water bottle I just empty out before I get to the airport, they’re fine with you having an empty one. (I’ve forgotten once or twice.) No knives for me.

The old version wasn’t but I think the new version is.

Thanks for the tip, will keep an eye out for that one.

I haven’t had that happen, I think they just start to take stuff up and then they give up.

Thanks for the tip! Since I never need the old iPod dock anymore I find the cables that are Micro USB with a lightning attachment (like the ones above) to be more reliable and smaller.

Go to a WordCamp!

Good questions! I sometimes travel with the long power cord in my carry-on suitcase, but it’s too big and I don’t use it enough when on the go for my backpack. I’ll love the day when everything is USB-C and I can just carry around a monster 12ft cable for it.

I run with my phone, just holding it. I take it out of the wallet case and just switch hands every ten minutes. I haven’t tried a ton of the running cases or holsters though.

It’s items that were in the pack last year.

Good question! It’s basically this, which comes in a few different sizes:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N823WF2/

It’s a perk of working at Automattic, people can get a customized one (in any color they like) after they’ve worked at Automattic for 4 years.

The Momentum totally could be used, but it is a little clunky to take out the extra cable, unwrap it, and plug it in two places. What’s amazing about the USB headset is it’s just one cable, when you plug it in everything just works, and the sound cancelling is really good — you sound like a NPR broadcaster.

I think they just did a firmware update to make this better, but I haven’t tested it in a rocking chair. 🙂

Yes I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not as good as a standalone camera, but being fully integrated with the phone makes it worth it for me.

I’ve seen those on people before but never knew what they were! I like that there’s no branding on them.

I carry all of this all the time, this is the base. Sometimes a bit more depending on where I’m going. I agree that I love the 12″ but it wasn’t quite there for when I was on the road for a while.

I dig it, and way cheaper than getting something custom. Thanks for sharing!

Oh good idea!

I used the 13″ for part of the year, but found myself going back to the 15″. Sometimes the laptop might be my primary computer for 4-6 weeks at a time if I’m on the road, and the extra screen space, battery, and performance feels worth it.

I like it, and think it’s beautiful hardware. I didn’t love having to carry and charge something additional, which required its own special cable, and needed to be charged every single day. The fitness stuff wasn’t compelling, and of course since it has to charge over night I couldn’t get any sleep data from it. I found notifications on my wrist to be distracting when my phone (in the pocket or on the table) was already buzzing.

That’s awesome.

Congrats on Dvorak! You have a lifetime of more comfortable typing ahead of you.

I’m sorry about that bug, that’s a pretty embarrassing one. If you update to 3.9.4 it’s fixed.

Nope I went back to an iPhone 6s+.

Donating some, selling some, trashing some. Depends on what it is.

Of course the Coolest Pope Ever has a much deeper and better look at this, including talking about the globalization of indifference:

http://time.com/3714056/pope-francis-lent-2015-fasting/

Yes if something breaks that prevents me from working I’ll replace it (just had a hard drive fail on a NAS for example), but no new things.

It’s on my list!

It’s better to have that discussion for the REST API in the Slack channel or at one of our meetings, not some random comment section of a blog, even mine. 🙂

If you want a good heuristic to use generally: there were decades of cars, millions of vehicles and drivers, before they had air conditioning. The core value proposition of a car is transportation, AC just helps you get there more comfortably. You didn’t need a car to get AC, you could have it in your house. AC might cause you to chose one car over another, but you probably wouldn’t walk or ride a horse if the car didn’t have AC, you’d just roll down the windows.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to be very specific in feedback when we don’t move forward with someone. Also sometimes people come back with very pointed or detailed questions that would honestly take a very long time to answer. The best I can say is that we publish a lot about what we look for in the positive sense, including the Creed, so the more you can embody that the better.

I do.

Public code on Github counts as open source and is great, but participating in a project is more of a substitute for work experience because it has more in common with having a job in the field.

Contributing to open source isn’t required, but it’s definitely a way for candidates without as much relevant industry experience to stand out from other applications. Everyone can spend their time however they choose. Folks going through coding bootcamps have already made a very significant time commitment, this is just a slight tweak to how that time is spent that will assist them specifically with Automattic. (Other companies may not care.)

Expertise in version control systems like Git are absolutely crucial as soon as you’re working on something with more than one developer. (And many would argue before then. :)) So I’d strongly encourage you to dig in there. It’s also something these boot camps already teach — I don’t see a huge skills gap in these applicants, just they could stand out more with participation.

I think (and hope!) that article and the data it cites is very out of date and behind the current state. You would hope since most open source is done exclusively through online identities (which can be whatever you like) that it would have evolved to be more welcoming. In WP it’s something we think about and work on a lot, and of course in the context of Automattic experience with WP be it a plugin, theme, core, accessibility, support, or any side of the project is a bonus.

Sounds like you’re on a roll, I don’t have anything to add to that. 🙂 I’m going to try and spend some time this year with other instruments like guitar and piano to get my chops up a bit there, be able todo at least some basic songs.

The best way is to make the open alternatives as compelling or even more than the proprietary options.

Oh that’s super cool, thanks for the heads up.

PHP is great for some things, not for others.

1. PHP still makes a lot of sense for the server side of WordPress, to power the API.

2. Themes and front-end display of a blog are also still PHP, and there are no plans to change that currently. But plugins will need to evolve to be API-driven.

3. Today you can manage and publish to your standalone WP sites from Calypso, including auto-upgrading plugins. If Calypso is successful, I could see the core wp-admin interface taking a similar technical direction in the future.

We’re working on it.

I don’t think the need is as urgent there.

This is just for the admin, so the front end of the site is still served via PHP and totally accessible to search engines.

That’s a misconception, there is a lot in Jetpack like Photon that actually makes your site faster.

You can still visit sites, this is just for the admin area.

There isn’t a framework for it yet, it’s something we’ll have to figure out.

It’s around the corner!

Nope, but the design in the template for it, but the iOS app is fully native code.

It’s not my area of expertise, but worst case using the new APIs an accessibility-focused client could be created, or even different ones for different use cases be it mobility or vision. The WP-admin is still there as well for fallback.

That’s fine, I meant for it to be inclusive of WP-API stuff.

Probably very low because of the W3Techs methodology.

I think it can if the software is proprietary, but I think open source generally grows stronger and more secure the more popular it is and more people it has working on it. We all benefit from a common platform we can build on and then differentiate on top of it, instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again for no good reason.

The predecessor to WordPress was b2, which was started by Michel Valdrighi in Corsica, France.

Oh thank you! It’s okay though, it’s probably all things I’ve said in English before in other interviews.

That’s good advice. I did get to play a little at the gGrand Meetup. 🙂 I need to check in on the mouthpiece, pretty sure it was an Otto Link Vintage Series rubber mouthpiece, with a Rovner ligature, and Vandoren Java 2 1/2 reed. The sax is a Selmer Paris 74 Reference 54. I have a lot of practicing to do…

I have! Not for long periods yet though. I’m looking forward to trying it more.

Nope. 🙂

We’re pretty happy with it. Some other people are working on an OS alternative already:

http://www.mattermost.org/

As soon as you expand past one P2 a lot of extra stuff is needed, and we’ve built all that internally, so have some interesting things to offer companies larger than a few dozen people.

Depends on what you watch on it. For travel I bet one of the HMDI sticks like the Amazon or Chrome ones might be better.

Not too much any more on the pre-release software, just been bitten with bugs too many times.

Kendrick is great! Have met him at many gigs around the world.

Both are pretty exciting.

No, but if you follow this blog and read everything I link to you probably have a lot of knowledge that will be useful as an Automattician. 🙂

I would say the more you can do beforehand to make your application stand out the better. We’ve never stopped hiring for Happiness Engineers so there isn’t a time limit.

That sounds great.

It was done by a firm called Assembly in San Francisco: https://vimeo.com/assemblycreative

I just used the time-lapse feature of the built-in camera on the iPhone.

Four Seasons.

No — on one you’re buying support, service, and hosting typically for a yearly recurring fee, on the other you’re buying a download of a file typically for a one-time fee.

Check out my post again and the links inside of it.

That’s a very good question — thanks for raising it.

I’m going to change the wording on that page to no longer say “licensed”, it’s really not the right word to use there.

What you buy on WordPress.com is hosting and access to a premium theme. Because it’s not distributed (downloadable) the GPL actually isn’t required — that said, we only work with premium theme partners that have 100% GPL code. Some people buy themes for a one-time fee, but more often they’re getting access to a premium theme as part of one of our plans, and we share a portion of the revenue for the time that theme is active with the theme authors.

What you’re really buying with most premium themes is support, we can’t ask third-party theme authors to support a theme on .org that they sold to a .com user, though some may choose to do so if you write in to them. For themes that Automattic owns and sells we provide the support anyway, because as long as you’re on WordPress you’re part of the family.

It’s not planned yet but probably.

There will be developer sessions in addition to the user ones.

Don’t worry, it will be warm indoors.

Automattic didn’t fork WooCommerce, and the people who did at Woo were the original developers. It’s tough to compete with the original author, I agree with that.

At least people will know to expect it to be cold. 🙂 Folks would come to SF thinking it was summer and have to buy pants and jackets.

What’s that?

It’ll be cold but not snowy! Really pretty on the East coast that time of year.

I’ll post when they are for sale. The site hasn’t been set up yet.

Good point on forking, thanks Mom!

I’m sure it’s happened somewhere, somehow, but it’s probably similar (or less) to the number of proprietary businesses who get damaged by piracy.

That looks much better than Editorial Calendar which is what I was using.

Thanks, I updated the video!

Sorry about that, I saw someone in the background (Mike Hawley) I thought was at MIT.

It’s usually some of both. 🙂

It does wear me out!

Not off the top, but it is a pattern you can see across many industries. (Sometimes it takes a long time.)

They will be totally separate.

Thank you so much for sharing, very much in the spirit of open source.

It’s a great idea to build your business on WordPress, and we want to continue people to do so for many years in the future.

Thanks for pointing that out, caught the typo later. Glad I’m not in charge of the numbers. 🙂

If or when we do SAAS, the plugin isn’t going away, it’ll continue as it has.

Someday, but definitely separate from what we’re doing with Woo. 🙂

Definitely not on both — WooCommerce works best as a standalone plugin.

I’ll defer to the team there, they’ve thought about their pricing more than I have. The value you can get from their extensions seems a lot higher than the prices.

The blog I think we might have covered. Academic paper I’ll have to go back to school for. 🙂

We’ll see as it goes — Woo has their own roadmap already that they’re executing with at least 6 months of work on it.

Nothing yet, but perhaps down the line.

WooCommerce will not be integrated into core, it works great as a plugin. There will definitely continue to be a marketplace for extensions.

Yes, plan is to keep it going.

Right now just for .org users, but we know there are a lot of people interested in it from the .com side as well.

All of their products including themes are coming over, and I think there is lots we can learn both directions once the teams start working more closely together.

Speed, security, and optimization is definitely a passion of ours here at Automattic. 🙂

We’ll definitely have Automattic engineers on-call to help Woo out with anything they need, and the teams will become more merged in the future. I’ll pass along this to their team along with your email.

I think it didn’t work for them well the last time around, but definitely something could reconsider in the future once things settle down. Automattic is considering an affiliate program for our other services right now too.

I think they’re also great! The Woo team is a great complement to ours, and they have a product we think will address an even larger market than they do today.

You can check out the work-in-progress book: https://github.com/WordPress/book

That’s an excellent question! I’ll have to give it some thought. Perhaps I have a finite reserve of “issue passion” and exhaust it on software- and tech-related issues. It’s also possible that I haven’t directly observed or experienced negative effects or externalities from how my food is made (except in obvious cases where you get sick from a meal), where I have experienced and been burned by a lack of software freedom.

From what I’ve read and learned so far, the science says there’s nothing inherent to genetically modifying crops that make them dangerous. (I’m sure you could make a dangerous GMO if you tried.)

The business practice around Monsanto in particular is still a cause for concern, similar to how I worry about how patents are used in software and technology, but that’s orthogonal (interesting but separate) to what the article and I were talking about.

It’s important to break out Monsanto stuff and GMOs in general — as the article shows the latter can be created and useful without all the bad stuff that Monsanto does.

Personally I’m sure I eat GMO food, as well as a lot of non-modified stuff. It’s not too important to me.

I’m definitely an overall Apple fan — there were plenty of problems before 2011, and have been some good ones after, but it’s the overall pace of iteration and response to problems that put them so far ahead of their contemporaries.

Here are some that are going currently:

https://threatexchange.fb.com/
http://insights.fb.com/
http://newsroom.fb.com/
http://media.fb.com/

That’s why I said “make sure you stay up-to-date for everything in your stack as well from the OS on up.” It’s true that WordPress is only a small part of it, but that was what the question was about. 🙂

Based on everything I’ve learned about what he’s released so far, I think history will look back on him as a patriot who served his country at great personal risk and sacrifice.

Yep! Every day I’m at home, and love it. Wish I could get my hands on one of the new laptops to try it on a trip.

Feels a lot better than any Android Wear devices I’ve used so far, though there isn’t an equivalent of Google Now yet. Won’t know for sure until I get one though, because in the demo mode you can’t really get a sense for how it’ll weave into your actual life.

It’s free but not open source, so not correct yet!

No I don’t.

I’ve been using that as well! I subscribed. There is also some good alpha music on Youtube as well, here’s one I’ve been using:

Here’s another really excellent read on the issue:

http://feld.com/archives/2015/02/final-thoughts-fcc-title-ii-ahead-tomorrows-vote-net-neutrality.html

Not to my knowledge.

I do a sun salutation, if you google image search it there are some good guides.

Best to talk to the organization directly.

If the companies were doing good stuff when they were un-regulated, I’d be more open to the idea of leaving them alone, but ISPs do really crummy stuff to their subscribers, and if they were able to do what they want (fast lanes) it would have a chilling effect on entrepreneurship, with new companies and startups getting hit the hardest.

Check out this paper about the economic incentives of net neutrality:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1756-2171.2010.00107.x/abstract

And this page is also a good read:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-what-you-need-know-now

I noticed you work for Verizon, did they inform this view you have at all?

I can confirm we’re not under pressure by the global financial system.

These will probably change over time, and maybe even this year, but if I had to answer today it would be: WordPress, running, and reading/writing.

Thanks, fixed!

Drive is a good book, I’d recommend it. It’s good to try and have an impact on the world, and you’ll be more effective if your own personal world is in order first.

New York is probably my favorite city in the world right now.

Houston, but I’m on the road pretty constantly. Lots more time in New York too.

Nice. 🙂

I just found it surprising, and thought my readers would as well. It generated some good conversation on Twitter as well.

Well, Helen can type faster than me and is on QWERTY, so we know it’s possible. 🙂 I think it’s more about practice than anything.

I agree that I hope the church’s stance on contraception changes soon. There is a lot of cleanup going on in general though, it seems, so maybe it’s just a matter of tackling one big thing at a time. Leading a 300 person organization, I definitely see how hard it can be to spread change, especially when something is pretty entrenched, I can’t imagine what it’s like at his scale.

I’ve been a bit bummed since Jamey Aebersold removed everything from Spotify! That was so nice before. Very open to suggestions.

Familiar with the first one. I agree that online isn’t great at everything, and in fact teams at Automattic get together in person once or twice a year which is where a lot of the rapport in the team is built and there are good brainstorming sessions, but the default (the other 50 weeks) is online.

Mostly for practice when I think of it, I took a class with Beau where we learned basic lockpicking a few years ago. I have used it a few times when there’s a missing key, and once to some notoriety at the start of an Automattic grand meetup when someone was locked out of their luggage, but I’m not a pro yet.

Might be a problem with your internet connection? All our services are showing online from multiple locations: http://status.automattic.com/

You can send a traceroute to [email protected] and someone can take a look at it.

To be honest I haven’t heard that argument before — tech salaries I think are very robust now.

You don’t have to worry about most of that to start, and when you’re big enough that it matters you’ll have a HR/etc infrastructure in place to make it smooth.

Folks have linked me to two other blog posts that make similar points, and I think are worth reading:

http://blog.salsitasoft.com/remote-developers-not-immigration-policy-are-the-real-solution-to-americas-tech-skill-shortage/

https://www.larrysalibra.com/2014/12/29/paul-graham-let-in-the-programmers-but-not-the-lawyers-bankers-doctors/

There’s also a pretty vigorous discussion going on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811019

That’s so logical. 🙂

Anything remotely hosted, including Jetpack and Intense Debate, potentially have tracking issues. But the business models for those products are not ad-supported.

Very cool!

Many of the things you suggest are outside the scope of the core software, and really require a network approach (centralized service) to be effective. I’d encourage you to explore some of the alternatives to Disqus that don’t have an advertising model, and perhaps make a list of what you miss the most with screenshots for other product devs as feedback.

If you don’t sync, though, you lose your data. The fact you can sync is actually one of their better features. I’m actually a big fan of the Disqus *product*, just not this business model. I wish more companies would have the courage to really try for a non-ads route, at least at first.

I’ve heard people say this before but haven’t seen any data that Disqus is actually faster for users, seems like it’s loading a lot of code (and now ads and tracking) from a third party which is going to be slower and bigger than anything on-site. I could see if you were doing static page caching and didn’t want comments to invalidate that, which any JS-included solution would help with.

I wasn’t sure about your own URL in that regard, which I’ve removed. It is tough when you get comments from real people with very commercial sites, but I see that across every platform including Facebook.

That looks cool too.

https://twitter.com/joshm/status/525380438031106048

https://twitter.com/joshm/status/525380524429570051

I really loved the 13″ and used it for about two years, but I like the specs bump on the latest 15″ and I’ve been doing more photo processing, more time away from external monitors, so I switched to 15″ as an experiment. Been enjoying it so far, but it’s not a huge perceptible difference.

I used to be on a 13, but just switched to a 15. That stand is called the Roost: http://www.therooststand.com/

Good to know, I’ll update the post to link to the original WP.com blogger.

For Automattic we’re pretty much completely a WordPress-based company, and the things we want to contribute tend to take bigger chunks of time, so full-time people make sense. Others it might make sense to take a little bit of a lot of people’s time rather than all of a few people’s time. It’s a rule of thumb that I’m sure people will interpret differently, what really matters is the impact.

Any percent that people can pitch in is fantastic! Some tasks divide into smaller pieces better than others, I’m sure over time you’ll find the balance that maximizes your impact. That actually brings up a good point, it’s good to look at what impact you’re having — I’ve seen companies dedicate a person full-time that hasn’t really had a big impact, and people working just a few hours a week that have had a big one. Look at the outcomes and results of what you contribute objectively, and if it’s not working try something different.

Powered by WordPress, natch. 🙂

Brent, I linked some other articles about GMOs before:

https://ma.tt/2014/03/whole-foods-and-psuedoscience/

Yep!

Never even heard of that!

Great find, thanks for sharing. 🙂

I haven’t tried desktop Linux in a year or two, if I did it now it would probably be as a full-screen Parallels instance, so would still get power management, wifi, etc from the host OS X.

For me it’s to take screenshots of long pages.

I don’t think many people got this joke. 🙂 It’s a site from the Onion, and it’s the text of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick with a sensational headline over it.

Nice connection! Hadn’t thought of that.

I don’t have strong opinions here yet. I’m generally supportive of automation of many things people currently do, including driving, but I guess I have a perhaps naïve notion that it will also dramatically drop the cost of quality living at the same time, and free up more people time for the pursuit of humanities, and spiritual and physical enrichment.

Thanks! Typo fixed.

Who do you recommend?

Yes! And we should chat about the Grist.org office, too. 🙂

Cool, good to hear!

I don’t think the canvas thing is specific enough to stick around as an identifier, but regardless they’re correlating this with other unique identifiers they develop and building a profile of you as you go throughout the web, and using that to target advertising. As they say on their “What We Do” page, “Our data goes beyond following, liking & pinning […] AddThis audiences are modeled from across 1.7B unique users worldwide […] Consumers are engaging with your brand off-domain. Being able to find and reach them can help drive a successful campaign.”

We could look into metrics, also many of the services (FB, Twitter) have pretty good built-in analytics now, though of course not cross-service. I’ll keep that in mind next time we loop back on stats.

ShareThis is not in the article, and to my knowledge doesn’t use this technique, but their business model is the same — get the widgets on a ton of pages and make money from selling your audience data to third parties. From what I understand Clearspring/AddThis is a much larger business, so just more prominent.

ShareThis is worth avoiding as well because of their history with the WP community: Alex King open sourced the “share” icon under the LGPL, GPL, BSD, and Creative Commons (basically everything). ShareThis later bought some of Alex’s IP and now uses the share icon as their logo, they tried to un-open-source it and began using legal threats to try and put the cat back in the bag for people who had already adopted it. See this page, and where the “Share Icon Project web site” (shareicons.com) now redirects to

http://alexking.org/projects/share-icon

It basically says how you can’t actually use the icon for anything that doesn’t support their commercial enterprise — super sketchy, and makes me question the moral compass of the entire enterprise.

Because we’re about publishing, not keeping things private, we actually don’t get a ton of requests. For products we do have like Simplenote I’m interested long-term in doing things like client-side encryption so we couldn’t turn things over even if we were forced to.

Pretty much. 🙂 Regardless of Snowden’s ultimate verdict, I think these sorts of things are corrosive to a free society.

It largely looks like what we’re doing but faster, with more people, across more geographies, and better infrastructure.

It’s a short trip!

Thank you for your presidential endorsement. 🙂

Thanks for your presidential endorsement. 🙂

Being on the board of Grist.org that would be tricky. 🙂

This is a website they made just like anything else, I’m guessing they put it on the fb.com domain so it’s separate from all the main code and cookies that run the main facebook.com site. I don’t think it has anything to do with combining FB pages or WP.

I don’t have any problem with it being tied to religion, or any tradition. I grew up Catholic and it’s a useful marker for me, I have lots of friends who aren’t Catholic who do it as well.

I was probably talking about the editorial team at Automattic or a publication we sponsor called Next Draft: http://nextdraft.com/current/

I might also start carrying around a camera again.

Things that send a text message or phone call should still be fine. For Google Authenticator style ones I don’t know yet.

You gotta re-read. 🙂 I’m not looking for another smartphone, I’m giving up all smartphones (including my Nexus 5) for about 6 weeks.

See also: 68 things your iPhone replaces:

http://www.allforapps.com/68-things-your-iphone-replaced/

This post by Jason Kottke captures my thoughts pretty well:

http://kottke.org/08/12/does-the-broken-windows-theory-hold-online

Thanks for sending questions in! Looking forward to them.

I haven’t heard that in a while — Facebook, WordPress.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and many more of the top sites in the world rely heavily on PHP, so I think most people now feel if it’s good enough for those, it’s good enough for them.

There’s nothing to say that coders can’t enjoy the fruits of their labor, in fact in open source the projects often grow far beyond what it ever would have if it was just the efforts of a single developer or company.

I don’t see any reason why not.

That’s more of a terminology difference between Open Source and Free Software that’s explained on the linked FSF page, he prefers people use the term Free Software because of the additional connotations it brings.

I thought he still had an office there, thanks for the info. What do you think would be the most accurate way to put that sentence?

It’s been an honor. 🙂

Thanks, all fixed up.

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing. 🙂

You should check out WordPress, it would be a great upgrade for your blogs, and there’s a Blogger importer that will bring over all of your posts easily.

Totally fine.

Ella for president!

He’s already in there!

How’d you get banned from Spotify?

You can enter any email you like in the email field. If you want to be anonymous, don’t attach your real email (or the same email) to different places if you want people to think it’s from different people. People are enjoying getting worked up about this issue, but it’s not a real issue for people trying to be anonymous because it’s so obvious.

They’re up for two years, but everyone is hoping to extend it for longer.

Looks like it’s working again, we must have overloaded the server. 😉

11 xh bn ajrzn cjbqtg. 🙂

Thank you! Not sure how that happened.

I don’t think they’re doing a baseboard OS.

They have 90% of my usage. 🙂

Also I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting the product you use every day and have significant investment in to be better. I use an iPhone despite this failing, but every time my non-preferred app launches it frustrates me, or every time I have to copy and paste an address into Google Maps instead of just clicking it (which would launch Apple Maps).

There are already alternative apps in the App Store — why not take the logical next step from a user experience point of view and allow those to be what’s launched by default? I can’t think of any reason that’s good for users why not, and I haven’t seen any proposed.

I’m super pro-Apple, that’s why I don’t want to switch to Android just to have my preferred browser come up when I click a link.

I’d much rather Apple just give us the same flexibility on iOS they do on OS X.

It’s not that there aren’t other browsers, calendar apps, etc, it’s that when you click a link only Apple’s are launched, you’re locked into their defaults with no flexibility or control.

Markdown is definitely one of the more popular requests, but as a plain-text editor that doesn’t display things, what does “Markdown support” mean to you?

No plans for photos, but you can tag notes.

Here’s more from Lifehacker talking about Simplenote:

http://lifehacker.com/note-taking-styles-compared-evernote-vs-plain-text-vs-1379778864

Evernote (and apps like it) aren’t for everyone. They’re complicated, take a while to use, and since they can handle everything, it often takes longer to open up the app and get to a note then it does to actually write that note. If that sounds too complicated, plain text might be the best way for you to take notes.

We talk a lot about plain text because, as the name suggests, it’s just text. For people who only take text notes, plain text is usually the most efficient way to do it. To get the job done, we’re fans of the plain text capture tool (that just got a fantastic update), Simplenote.

Don’t know yet.

Of course.

Very cool!

It’s pretty public knowledge as I announced it before and they’re on the Automattic.com homepage, but thanks for raising it.

I’m not alone, The Verge just named Simplenote one of the best new Android apps: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4720428/best-new-apps-simplenote-for-android

S4 and an iPhone 5. Not crazy about having two but we’ve been testing lots of stuff on both.

Totally.

He has a lot of charisma and the experience was so novel that while there were some slower moments it was pretty exciting the entire time. When it was slow was when he wasn’t performing.

I heard that! He’s in good company too — Basquiat, Rothko, Condo, Bacon, Roa, Picasso, Koons, Warhol, Da Vinci…

Here’s the RapGenius explanation of that line: http://rapgenius.com/1911518

Not sure what it has to do with WP Engine at all.

They are still accepting donations, the group Illuminate the Arts has some other projects planned.

Yes! Check out http://wp10.wordpress.net/

An introduction through a mutual friend.

It is, because you get fewer copycats or competitors with cashflow in other businesses trying to leverage into your space.

I have an extraordinarily high opinion of the value of Automattic that would be tough to be matched by any investor or acquirer, but it’s influenced by our products, team, user growth, and revenue, not any particular investment event.

This is a modified TwentyThirteen, worked on by Joen. I didn’t know as much about starting companies before Automattic, but learned a lot quickly in the beginning. Can’t comment on the last question.

It’s the former.

Great comment. I’m sure Tumblr uses a ton of OS software, and even if the entire platform was open sourced Yahoo could still buy the company. The brand, users, domain, and people are where the value is, not a proprietary license to some # of lines of code.

In an advertising business a lot of it comes down to attention: how much and where advertisers spend to get your attention usually lags 3-5 years from where people are actually spending their time, and when that gap closes it can be very impressive. Of course it doesn’t happen for free, there are lots of organizational changes needed to execute on that opportunity, and probably as many people screw it up as get it right.

I believe there is also an even-larger-than-advertising opportunity around subscriptions and products. The big shift from older forms of media is that people aren’t just passively consuming as they might in front of a TV, they’re creating. It’s a hobby and a passion, not a vice. In that context I think subscriptions are more aligned with users than advertising, and that’s the direction Automattic is pointed in.

A bird in the hand, and all that.

Sure — last week there were about 67 WP.com exports generated an hour.

My reply on Techcrunch: FWIW, I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.

It’s a spam-blog.

Nope, not that I’ve found.

I do a few things that I think are worth trying:

1. I don’t drink any caffeine from soft drinks or coffee, I might have a green tea or two earlier in a day.
2. I go to sleep when I’m tired, but don’t do movies or TV near bedtime because I find those keep me awake artificially. (Screens are fine, just not motion pictures.)
3. I leave my curtains open and wake up with the light usually, no alarms
4. If I get tired in the afternoon I try to lie down or take a nap, though seldom successful it’s nice to relax for a bit.

This is what works well now, but always experimenting and iterating. The exception to my caffeine rule is speaking overseas, where I’ll have some Red Bull to avoid dozing off on stage. 🙂

I’ve just never liked the clip-ons, and haven’t tried their Flex yet.

In my opinion, yes. But I’m biased. 🙂

I don’t know, I suppose we could survey or ask people.

No, that wouldn’t really help much.

It wouldn’t be hard, but probably better to have users choose something so it’s easier for them to remember.

It’s not a great analogy because WP isn’t an operating system, there is an operating system (and many other layers) underneath it. We could do some things around passwords and other stopgaps at the application level, but there are still many user and OS-level issues that ultimately are the result of many, many more problems than core can solve.

It used to be forced.

They claim that, but I’m not a fan of their approach or how they try to drum up PR around things like this so I wouldn’t recommend them.

Obfuscation of login and admin directories is complete snake oil, it doesn’t actually fix any problems long-term and makes things more difficult for legitimate users. If a tutorial or guide suggests that you can safely ignore the entire thing.

I recommend http://vaultpress.com/ — Sucuri also has good cross-site protection.

That sort of thing it’s what’s called a “lo-jack solution”, meaning that it only works if you do it but no one else does. If every WP install in the world did that, or even more than a few %, it would be worth the script-writer’s time to add a few simple heuristics to find and locate the admin. (Or you make it so obscure that regular users can’t find it, which has its own cost.)

Unless it worked for all sites on a host it seems like it wouldn’t help at all, especially resource utilization.

It sounds like something the host did proactively.

As I said in the post, I think single-site limiting or throttling would have been useless against this particular wave. Two-factor is the most interesting of anything we could do in core.

I agree that part could be better — there’s a patch on Trac for it already.

Sorry to break it to you, but I’m getting older every day. 🙂 That photo was just a few months ago!

Do you work for Acquia?

Now I say we’re the Facebook of WordPress Groupons.

Burn!

Hello Mr philoSurfer — While we may disagree on the bulk of your comment, I think we can both agree that this comment thread, on my blog, under your colleague’s email, might be the worst possible forum to have that discussion. I don’t think an errant sales email is proof that Drupal or Acquia sucks, or that WordPress or Automattic is awesome, it’s just funny.

He did send it to at least one of my colleagues first. 🙂

You’re right — I removed the full number and last name.

I think this sort of thing is inevitable when you do outbound sales – I think it’s more funny than anything. 🙂

I need to finish my research first.

Or at least grown-up, you should start a new venture focused on it, call it zippyMAN.

Love your tagline. 🙂

Wasn’t bad at all, pretty quiet day.

Yes we were pretty well hooked-in, usually attached to two cables all the way up.

I can’t say, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they went in that direction.

Sorry about that, I run trunk on this site and there is some funkiness right now with slashes in core.

I think I came across it when I was searching for 100% GPL marketplaces, but it was already closed at that point.

Totally.

What do you mean? Should be live for everyone now. Unless you’re part of one of our test groups.

They’re different, but of course they can be used in similar ways. I would suggest diving in and making it part of your daily routine, then see what you miss most from Asana and then focusing on if plugins or theme updates can fill the gap.

Nothing noticeable.

Nope, hadn’t seen that before.

There was a great stylist (Joseph De Acetis) who presented a few options, but this was the obvious one.

Between JS and CSS you can change pretty much anything on your site. It definitely is a different way of thinking, though, and for devs who aren’t used to working in that way yet it’s going to feel awkward.

We exchange to dollars every day, so pretty limited in our exposure to forex changes.

The Next Web wrote a pretty good article covering the launch:

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/13/automattic-launches-enterprise-mid-level-pricing-for-brands-and-businesses-on-wordpress-com/

It’s linked in the post above.

Haha, that’s an idea. Maybe for now just offer to buy an upgrade for a friend. 🙂

The comment is submitted through Jetpack, everything after that is stock WP.

Sure, email [email protected].

In this election I supported Obama.

You charge for something other than what you’re giving away for free.

Definitely read his post before commenting next time!

I’m very pro-copyright, in fact the entire foundation of Open Source is copyright. (We just chose to license our copyright in a very permissive way, but it’s still copyright code.) But I still think SOPA/PIPA was fundamentally flawed legislation. It’s like swatting mosquitos with nuclear bombs.

I thought “non-straight” covered LGBTQIA, but perhaps it doesn’t.

That’s Isaac Keyet.

I’ve always used the 13″.

Haven’t heard that one yet, but get in touch here and we’ll try to fix it up — http://jetpack.me/support/ .

It can be very intimidating when you first start, so don’t feel bad about asking questions on the forums or support as you start to internalize the topics, and I’m sure within a few months you’ll be helping your friends with the same things you’re struggling with today.

The last release of Jetpack included our cool mobile theme, check it out.

Because the majority require a WP.com connection, and they often rely on each other and we didn’t want a complex dependency system, and finally because the number one complaint I was hearing from users prior to Jetpack was that they had too many plugins and they didn’t work well together. As an advanced user if you just want Jetpack Carousel, you can turn off all of the other Jetpack modules except for that.

That will come out with the release of WordPress 3.5, which we’re planning on for December 5th.

Not sure what you mean — Jetpack doesn’t do any automatic updating right now.

I don’t know if Bitcoin itself will survive, but I’m 100% we’ll have something like it as an alternative to national currencies, unless it becomes outlawed for some reason.

Not possible yet because it’s in an iFrame.

Thank you!

It was just a custom one-off thing.

You have to sign up.

I imported some old post and they sent out.

I think they were local.

Yep! Otto’s real name is Samuel. But I’ll update the tag.

Thank you!

They were all done by Michael Pick, I’m not sure what method he used.

Very cool! Thank you for sharing.

You can customize the comments, but not the comment form.

That’s a lot of percent. Maybe even alot. 🙂

Maybe it’s how it was recorded — in person the crowd was very warm.

Some awesome comments so far — I’m going to hold off on approving / publishing them until after Saturday, so there’s some surprise in the keynote. 🙂

I use it with Akismet.

It’s all built-in WordPress, plus the Jetpack plugin.

Thank you!

They’re all still there, Jetpack complements your existing comments, doesn’t replace it.

It’s impossible to pick one because depends a ton on your taste, but a good re-intro might be Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor. Make sure to check out a few of the meanings behind the lyrics on RapGenius. (More recently, Watch the Throne was a good mix of fun and good.)

I never have, but if you want to use one just leave a comment on it.

Thank you. 🙂

I don’t think copyright is extinct, it’s a very important concept, but I do think these efforts to censor sites like Pirate Bay are short-sighted, though they probably seem like a good idea to the people doing them right now.

It was just off for a few days, should be updating for a bit again now.

Personally? I write a bit of English. 🙂

Nope, was just a bit of holiday.

Thank you. 🙂

Just that it’s a pretty area, just someplace a friend (Tony and fam) decided to go.

Thank you! This one looks especially good on a retina device if you have one handy.

Through angel.co is a good way.

Does that work for multi-color icons?

I had already uploaded the original files, which are much larger than 2x. Have some code here to switch it out if you’re on a retina display.

It did used to be called Fivestar, not sure why they changed the name. Got the tenor but haven’t had much time to shed… this year. Maybe once I’m done with all this web stuff I’ll get back to it.

Thank you. 🙂

What would you like for it to be officially supported?

Both!

You’ll have to teleport over and we can reminisce. 🙂

There’s no reason it shouldn’t work on Thesis, contact support and we’ll try to help you out.

b2evolution was actually the other major fork of b2, and I believe it’s still going!

Not at all, by the time I got started people had been doing a couple of years already, and services like Xanga, Livejournal, and Blogger had millions of users.

Probably wasn’t related.

It’s an outsourced comment form, but all comments go fully back to your local WP database.

I don’t know that much about the cookie laws in the EU, they seem out of touch with reality.

Nope, just deactivate the module, by clicking the “more” button on the Jetpack page.

We have open APIs just like the other guys, and have for 9+ years now — anyone can set something up to post to WordPress. Here’s some details for WordPress.com: http://developer.wordpress.com/

I know, right? NY Times hates Texans. 😉

Would it be retro-cool to use a Treo now? 🙂 BTW will look into your commenting problem.

That’s actually pretty funny, hadn’t heard of that before but it makes sense.

Only WordPress.com for now.

We’re trying to bring the features together with the Jetpack plugin – http://jetpack.me/ . Our goal is complete feature parity. If you install Jetpack you’ll get this feature as soon as it’s available for .org.

The functionality should be in Jetpack sometime this year.

There is a lot more to do, and it will happen on the new WP.com dashboard, in the mobile apps, and in wp-admin. I think particularly the first is very accessible to non-tech people, and getting better. To your post, the customizer coming in 3.4 and the custom design upgrade on WP.com are good examples of making personalizing your space more of a point and click affair.

It started auto-playing music on their homepage. 🙂

Just trying out something new.

Check out the full-screen mode in WP since 3.3.

Not Buddhist or Taoist, though I think both are interesting.

I do think that it’s important to have contextual identity, meaning that you might not be the exact same “person” in every context you’re online. I think this is different than Facebook’s one-true-identity approach.

If it’s commercial only not terribly useful to the community or as the base to build something recommended.

Not really, because I think that would keep us from solving some of the really hard problems in bridging the two.

You should check out the Pods plugin.

I don’t like wpappstore, and I’m not sure why anybody would install it.

I love Path too.

I’ve thought about that a lot.

I don’t think we can dumb it down, but we do try to make it a bit easier with every release.

I think a lot of people are in the same boat as you — think of these as alternative ways to use WordPress.

Also we did full-screen editing in the last release, which is a good model for how things should work on say the iPad.

Keep an eye on http://wordcamp.org/ for all the latest and greatest.

Fixed!

Fixed!

I think that was all the phones / devices that this person had.

Loving it!

You shouldn’t need to log in every time — isn’t it saved?

That’s a really good point — this would probably have to be something that’s a behind-the-scenes deal between trusted partners, like WordPress.com and Twitter could do it, or you could pretty safely assume that Gmail hasn’t been compromised.

You are part of a very smart, very small minority. 🙂

Has nothing to do at all with people using passwords in multiple places that require passwords, except in an imaginary world where every site in the world has a seamless oauth integration. It’s not even on the table for things like email accounts.

The comment is saying that PHP’s main advantage is that it maps well to the mental model of people who don’t know how to program yet, while still being flexible enough to scale up to run complex sites like WordPress.com and Facebook. The original article it was in response to was a fairly comprehensive list of all the things that are messy about PHP as a language.

Hopefully to a user it’d look the same. Under the hood it’d be different, but not necessarily better or worse. In a previous life I wrote Perl for money, so I was fairly fluent in that, and I’m conversational in Python and Javascript. Of everything I’ve tried, I like Javascript the best, but it’s also probably my weakest.

We now allow themes to specify stylesheets for WYSYWYG, check it out in the 2011 theme. 🙂

Check out Intense Debate, http://intensedebate.com/ , and there’s something new coming to Jetpack soon.

There is undo (both a button and CTRL + Z), but on the other issues you raise sometimes the WYSIWYG can be quite temperamental. I’ll forward your comment to Andrew who leads the integration of TinyMCE and WP and can hopefully help you some more.

You’re right — anything that hovers doesn’t work on a touch screen and needs to be re-thought. I don’t think it matters from a Big A accessibility point of view (you can always just turn off JS to get completely accessible fallbacks, or switch it off with a 2 line plugin) but for tablets and phones that isn’t really as much of an option.

I think it was humorous. 🙂

I don’t think they did, but my memory doesn’t go back quite that far.

Pretty well, I might do a post about it next week.

Yep!

You can see it better if you zoom in on this photo, it was just a wiring thing for the speakers and I think a light in the smaller chapel.

Sorry I don’t remember it exactly besides the obvious fact that it was soup.

It was fine when I unpacked it. There will be another next year, but I wouldn’t call this year’s model “obsolete” then.

Where were you an hour ago? 🙂

Oh cool, Don Was. 🙂

I was really happy with how the tree turned out in this one, it was really hard to capture the way the light came through it.

If you have the proper support in PHP WordPress actually puts all the EXIF data from a photo into custom fields, which you can display in your template like you would any other, which is what I do here.

I have a tilt-shift lens for my Nikon but honestly I don’t know how to use it properly.

Yeah it’s one of my fav from the album. 🙂

I don’t remember, but I think it was 16th century. This Ethiopian Orthodox church was called Daniel Korkor if you want to do some more research.

Sorry can’t help it. 🙂

Nice! Were you at the show last week?

That was the tiny built-into-the-mountain church from the few pictures before, it was pretty amazing, and quite a climb to get there.

Nice one. 🙂

I guess she wasn’t feline it.

Not in any hurry.

I think it’s going to go really well, they’ve performed well already and are likely holding some revenue back.

Yep, we are.

It’s linked in the blog post.

You can do some conventional things, like keeping a list of major todos in a text widget in the sidebar. A few teams use plugins to track status on posts, I’ll see if any can be posted here.

It’s actually the zip-out interior jacket of a Loro Piana jacket. I almost never wear the outer jacket part, but the inner piece you see here has become my default jacket in SF.

Lots of meeting WordPress users and Automatticians.

Been giving it a lot of thought.

Slowing down I think.

It’s too expensive in the Bay Area. 🙂

It’s really hard.

Journalists can push sources, be honest and harsh, and still maintain them. Kara Swisher is a great example of this.

If MS is not running a tight ship, meaning things are leaking anyway, they’re not really holding up their end of the bargain they made when asking Paul to sit on something until their official announcement.

By the same token, Paul shouldn’t whine and try to tack an “Exclusive” header on his too-late stories when other journalists use the best sources they have to get information to their audience as soon as possible. He did a good thing releasing (he believes) correct information, but he should have done it first, not as a reaction to someone else.

Just added a few Thelonious Monk ones directly written on a scratch sheet from Steve Lacy.

I might be missing something — quotes are only shown on artist pages, where the artist is at the header of the page. Where were you looking for the name?

Maybe I will be more interesting in 2012. 🙂

Nope, we use it more than ever.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Har har har. 🙂

It’s all built-in WordPress. You can download some of my older themes here: https://ma.tt/themes/ .

Congrats!

We ended up not getting to the project, so haven’t used anything myself yet.

Obviously not crazy about it.

Soon. 🙂

I don’t remember, I agree it could be lower.

I’m not a fan of the Squidoo model personally, and I think in the market they haven’t been as successful as they could have been if they took a less revenue-centric approach.

Ha! That’s funny, but not my screenshot, I got it from Quora.

I think they’ve shown a history of being able to thoughtfully move into other spaces while their core stuff doesn’t suffer.

Different brands have different names for it. Some of my friends don’t notice it, but it bothers me a bunch.

Likewise — don’t be a stranger. 🙂

Yep, I still do that 99% of the time.

Every single person I talked to who lived there said the change even in the past 5 or 10 years has been huge and noticeable.

The signature isn’t forced — if someone doesn’t like the creed they shouldn’t take the job! It’ll just cause more problems down the line if they fundamentally disagree with the things the company believes in. Pretty much everyone we offer a job at Automattic is at the top of their field and has their choice of dozens of companies — I want them to choose the one that they’re going to be happiest and most fulfilled at, even if it’s not Automattic.

If the company is sold at a higher share price than you invested, then the difference is a profit, or a capital gain. The money always goes in a bank first, but no set plans after that usually, it depends on what the next opportunity is.

Has to do with light absorption:

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/5C.html

I don’t mind — it’s basic but gets the job done, and with 30 minutes of CSS tweaks would be indistinguishable from a bespoke site.

I’m not as good about it when I travel.

Of course.

Did not this time.

There are lots of plugins for it, here’s one: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/text-control-2/

We range in age from 20 – 60-something, with an average of 32. I think you can read “generation” as more of a philosophical thing — the generation of people who live with technology and believe in Open Source — rather than dependent on the number of times you’ve been around the sun. 🙂

It’s definitely easy to get caught in unproductive loops of checking all the different ways you can get messages, from P2s to Skype to IRC, but that manifests itself in work not getting done pretty quickly. It’s more common for people to work but under-communicate it, at least for us.

The communication aspect is something I’ve been learning as well. My default is to text communication, because I can think through and craft every word, but text lends itself to less nuanced tone and can seem much harsher than it really is. It’s outside of my comfort zone, but jumping to audio or video for a few minutes can be much better for communicating complex ideas or criticism — it’s higher bandwidth in every sense of the word.

Nope it seems to be down here as well.

They’re copyright but if you email me about specific ones I’m happy to open them up for usage.

Just normal copyright, but if you want to use one for anything just let me know.

It’s called Pau Ferro.

Nope that’s my parent’s cat.

Of course, I’ve been guilty of everything on that list. You have to catch yourself because the natural tendency for most of us is for the status quo.

That’s a cool rock.

I worked with Michael Pick closely on this presentation, and he has posted some design notes here:

http://michaelpick.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/sotw-2011/

Doing a boat expedition around here, stopping off at a few locations around Svalbard and then continuing on to Iceland.

Yep!

Yep it’s planned.

Nope it’s tall, just looks a little funky because of the watercolor.

The point I was trying to make is it’s totally fine to charge for themes or plugins under the GPL, and lots of contributors to WordPress do, but you shouldn’t assume that just because you pay for something that its code is higher quality.

I like that idea. 🙂

Slideshare doesn’t quite do them justice, but will probably put a copy there when MP’s post is ready.

If you have any other suggestions feel free to drop them in the thread. I’m just saying two that are widely available and that I personally endorse. They’re reviewed not only by the entire core team but by the larger community of WP developers active on Trac, which isn’t common.

That’s sort of why I pulled the rant: I didn’t want people to see it as a blanket condemnation of paid themes and plugins. The core issue is education — WordPress makes it easy for anybody to create a plugin or theme, and market success has more to do with visible elements, like design and marketing, than with the under-the-hood quality of the code.

Because premium and paid products generally are bought more by users than skilled developers, they just have fewer eyes on them than something that was freely shared or in core. However as we create more resources and WordCamp sessions and videos and tutorials to help people up their skills and standards this problem will fade, so ultimately I’m optimistic.

I think we just discovered a time portal. 🙂

Thank you!

It is ice under the gravel. This is actually in a river bed, with many many braided channels. (The Canning River.)

Thank you. 🙂

It was so vast, didn’t see another sign of humanity all week.

Thank you!

I don’t know — loved it last time and would love to visit again!

It’s a guerrilla marketing campaign. 🙂

They’re hosting themselves, but not sure where.

That’s a secret. 🙂

No it was amazing to me how quickly it took off.

Yeah it’s the antler!

It was some sweet crumbly cookie-like thing.

Nope, except to say that domains are becoming more and more important at Automattic.

We probably would have ignored it, but would at least know what’s going on.

What do you think the article is referring to then?

How so?

I usually view source and look for references to wp-content, or add /feed and see the generator statement. I feel like there’s a Chrome extension that does it too.

It’s ordered by number of sites, so we just need more government sites in the showcase for it to show up.

We have a government tag but it is a little sparse still: http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/government/

Hadn’t seen that, it is a substantial list.

We ended up with about 20 people coming out, a fun night was had by all:

http://matt.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/seattle-wp-meetup-cool-crew/

Don’t worry, we’ll be back in 2017. 🙂

Good point about the FB footer, but followers to our page do provide a lot of distribution for our announcements.

Where’d you come from? 🙂

Install Jetpack and you’ll be set.

A Nikon D3S, mostly.

No worries, it’s from John Varvatos and it’s one of their standard pieces that they do in a different fabric every season. I have another of the same in a thicker black felt with pinstripes but I prefer the one here and wear it a lot.

Thank you! I appreciate it.

Good point. 🙂

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking your fans to pre-order your books, or order bunch of them. Many of my friends who are book authors do similar things with their core audience. I’m sure bad people have used the technique as well, perhaps like the James Ray person you point to, but that doesn’t make it intrinsically bad, or Tim bad by association.

Distributed backup has been attempted before, here’s probably the best out there:

http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Brackup/

The tricky parts are encryption, because you don’t want your data to be viewable by others, equality, because some sites use far more resources than others (we have sites in VaultPress over 40GB), and finally restores, how quickly can you get your data back and is there someone there to help you with it.

The insurance angle of VaultPress is not to be defensive, but to get people thinking more about the value of what they’ve created on their site in more than just bits and bytes. Your site is not just undifferentiated storage usage on S3, it’s the culmination of often years of memories, thoughts, writings, photos, and innumerable other aspects of yourself, poured into a container of WordPress and presented to the world through the web.

Good question, no plans but will see.

Fixed!

I don’t recall.

Thank you!

Really? Are you sure?

Trying to crawl before I walk. 🙂

I haven’t done affiliate links or ads on this blog for a few years now, it seemed weird to start it back up with this post.

I think this quote from Harold McGee’s introduction to Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure is apt:

Do the advantages of the sous vide method portend the mechanization of professional cooking, the triumph of technology over craft? I don’t think so. Precision heating offers unprecedented control over texture and flavor, and consequently more textures and flavors to choose among — just as cooks can now choose from an unprecedented range of ingredients and techniques from all over the world.

The largest version available is linked in the bottom-right of this page.

Thanks for the links I bet some other folks will find that useful too.

The menu will make more sense over time. From your ticket in our support system it looked like all your issues were resolved, but I’ve passed your info to the support team again so they can follow up with anything that’s outstanding.

It’d be hard to build a device as small or quiet with 3-4 NICs, I think this is a good example of a purpose-built device being a good value.

The Balance 20/30 has a USB port as well which you can have a 3G modem in, but it would feel weird to me to pay for one and leave it at home.

Yep it does NAT and firewall (inbound and outbound), as well as supports UPnP and NAT-PMP, which is useful for things like Skype.

I posted about this to the Peplink forums here:

http://forum.peplink.com/topic/performance-testing-of-30-310-and-390

That’s exactly it — if you’re on .com you get all of these features already.

It depends — for stats the way forward is definitely Jetpack, as it has a much more efficient and secure connection and communication profile that’s cut down on support already. I think the benefits of the connection and the goodies you get from it will become a lot more apparent as we iterate on the plugin and bring more of those “coming soons” to you.

Everything is covered by our privacy policy, http://automattic.com/privacy/

Everything in Jetpack right now is free. We have a few paid services for .org users that are part of our revenue stream, namely VaultPress, Akismet, and VideoPress, and those will continue.

That’s the whole idea though, you don’t have to clutter your WP with tons of plugins, just have the Jetpack. Nice and clean.

No worries! Get in touch here — http://jetpack.me/support/

Not sure if it’ll be recorded or not yet.

Of course — you can find a larger version of the photo suitable for printing linked from the bottom-right part of this page.

Nope but mind fixing up the fauxgo?

Also a fauxgo, fix it up and I’ll get you in.

Fauxgo!

Ouch! Sorry you have to be at SxSW already to attend the party.

You got it!

That is indeed a cool place. 🙂 You’re in.

Send me their email on https://ma.tt/contact/, by Wednesday at latest.

Nice effect with the reflection.

That’s my favorite sticker, you’re in. 🙂

Looks like you’ve gotten bitten by the fauxgo: http://wordpress.org/about/logos/

I’ve seen that tower a ton of times.

That’s pretty groovy.

Okay, now you’re on the list.

Sorry, fauxgo violation! Check out:

http://wordpress.org/about/logos/

You’re on the list.

Sorry, rules are rules. 🙂

You already have a ticket Inna. 🙂

Looks good.

Are you in Austin so you can attend the party?

That’ll work. 🙂

This one was taken with a Nikon D3S.

You’re in!

Nope you have to make / take something yourself.

Sure, it’s Thomas Pink.

Because I’m not hosted on WP.com, but I agree it would be cool to have a like button.

I use Windows 7 the most, OS X fairly frequently, and Linux desktop very rarely.

I knew you would like this one. 🙂

I agree that the plugin experience can be a lot better, it’s one of the main focus points for the core development team this year. As for splogs, there’s very little we can do there, but we do invest quite a bit in keeping spam off WordPress.com, which hopefully improves the perception of WordPress overall.

Would you care to expand on that a bit?

For the record, I use and enjoy both Facebook and Twitter pretty much every day, but that doesn’t mean blogging is dead.

I think your last sentence really nails it.

As someone who blogs and tweets what I eat for lunch most days, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. 🙂 I take the photo, email it to WP.com, and it gets auto-posted to my Facebook and Twitter using the Publicize feature.

As always, Dave Winer has a humorous take on the article.

Nope there’s definitely a problem with one of the video transcodes. Thanks for letting me know!

I really enjoyed Eze.

Yep. 🙂

Heh — what brought you to this post?

I went back over the emails with FSF and it looks like I never said that in the interview, so it must have been a mistake where they attributed something Christopher Blizzard said to me, which I guess I didn’t notice because it sounds like something I’ve said before. 🙂

I’ve been using Dvorak over a decade now.

It’s the Cole Haan brown pebble leather one, they make a new one for every version of the Kindle it seems and it’s available on Amazon.

Nothing immediate comes to mind.

Of course, the unstated assumption is that we’re improving quality of releases at the same time, and I think we would if the releases were smaller, more frequent, and more focused.

Thanks mom. 🙂

The bbPress plugin will happen this year, but it’s not a resolution.

Of course it can!

Not sure yet.

“Looking at this kind of stuff gets me amped up and ready to travel.”

Thank you so much!

I have no idea what your comment meant. 🙂 What does the canonical meta tag have to do with anything?

Sure.

I do that all the time, it’s how I do the people tags on my photos.

I’m getting hungry looking at it too!

The fees haven’t changed in years, maybe you’re just noticing them now?

I guess that’s their trick to get us to promote it next year. 🙂

I left it in San Francisco before coming home for the holidays, so I only have two nights in it so far. The website is slick and has some nice features like comparing tags but I still think it’s pretty nascent in terms of what it could offer.

Yep, that’s the lens I use 99% of the time.

EXIF extraction goes into the custom fields of an attachement automatically if you have EXIF support compiled into your PHP.

Because I’m a beta tester and I want to find the bugs in the software before our users do.

They already have, but not worried.

Of course!

The key is to stick with it and don’t switch back. That’s a really fast WPM for your very first day.

Check out trac.wordpress.org.

Nope it’s a Sony Z series, which runs Windows 7.

Signing up for a new WordPress is usually a one-click install or less than a minute on WP.com, so getting the blog is usually no the hard part. As for customization that usually requires someone with some html/css skills to design it the way you want. Posting by email for self-hosted blogs is coming, probably around February.

That’s on Ios island in Greece.

I don’t know their developer, but maybe he’ll see this post.

That’s it!!! That’s why I couldn’t find it on my Kindle… I read it in hard-copy on an airplane. Here’s the link if anyone is curious:

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201009/sylvester-stallone-yo-michael-hainey-cop-land-rocky-rambo

Thank you very much, I got it a few years ago. It’s a reversible Zegna Sport jacket, which I had turned to the waterproof black inner part because it was drizzling. The other side is a grey pinstripe, which you can see here.

He was amazing. I hope I have half that much energy when I’m 80.

Yep, we added over 900k new blogs in the past month.

That’s one of my favorites, I’ll add its link to the closing quote.

I love food!

I’m testing the trunk/alpha version of WordPress 3.1, so you just helped find a bug. 🙂

You caught me — on data structures I usually try to think through the possibilities and plan for expansion, for example how WP’s posts table is structured to hold lots of types of data. However I try to temper this with knowing it always changes. 🙂

To use 37signals parlance, for 1.0 Apple often ships half a product, Google sometimes ships a half-assed product. Check out their chapter for more:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Half_Not_Half_Assed.php

That was my first handheld device and I loved it, but you couldn’t argue that it was an integrated experience the way the iPhone is — think a Good Devices MP3 player vs iPod functionality, OmniSky vs integrated 3G, or the camera thing vs camera thing.

I think hardware expansion can work well when you’re adding one thing, as in the camera and lens example above. When you start to add or switch out multiple things, you start to run into integration or dependency issues.

Someone had to say it. 🙂

Pretty much the only way you can do it is if you know another release is around the corner, so it’s not that bad to trim the scope for this one.

1. I didn’t have a copy of the book handy so I forgot the original title.
2. The opportunity to make a joke was too strong.
3. I try to avoid punchlines from the essay in the title, so it’s not anti-climatic when you finally get to it.

Love it! It’d be interesting to track down some of the same folks now, or just do a rolling 2-3 year review of tech pundit predictions and reviews.

That’s a really good example. (And an even better lens.)

Not consciously, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he said it first — he’s been in this a lot longer! This whole essay is a passive amalgamation between ideas by Paul Graham, Eric Ries, Joel Spolsky, a bunch of iPod launch quotes I grabbed for a talk a few years ago, and my personal experience with WordPress and leading that community.

In the end I think it’s all about balance — like most false dichotomies, the right answer isn’t “ready, fire, aim” or “perfect the product, no matter how long it takes” but something in the middle. However I’ve noticed most people passionate about products, like myself, tend to default to private iterations that don’t evolve in the same way they would if they had the benefit of even a few real users.

The point I was trying to make is that compared to the creator, all critics are amateurs. When you make something, if you care about it, you know its shortcomings at a level far above anyone else could ever imagine, and so there’s a stronger temptation to try to preempt every possible problem by building more, and more, and more. See my example of copy and paste above, or the 1G versus the 3GS (which was almost certainly under development when the 1G shipped).

True — they always have something in there that that “wows.”

I think I’ve owned every one of the devices and for the most part I feel their issues are largely overblown, it’s a function of the conflict-driven technology media cycle that needs an unparalleled success (the iPhone 4) to be coupled with an Achilles heel (supposedly the death grip).

I would argue that they learned that the market wasn’t ready or that the product was a good fit way ahead of when a less agile company would have.

In traditional companies I think it’s balanced out by executive and marketing constraints, that can serve as a checks and balances system against the product inclination to always have one more thing. Open Source has to be particularly vigilant because contributors can stake their contributions on “15 pixels of fame” or their pet feature being included in the core distribution, which 20% of the time is awesome and 80% of the time should probably be in an extension or not exist at all.

I haven’t seen a hardware platform yet that incorporated plugins in its core the way software can — I’m not sure if it’s possible. Having software be more frequently updated, though, can breathe new life into an old device, as we’ve seen with several iOS and Android updates. I can’t wait for a day when it’s like Chrome, constantly updating in the background.

Follow the link — you’ll see the rest.

Thank you. 🙂

Oh cool — I updated the guest photographer credits. 🙂

Right now the gallery tab is your best bet, but someday I hope to compile more of my photos into a book or something.

Actually it was completely painless, just dropped the absentee ballot in the slot.

Sure! You can also submit captions in the bottom right box.

It was completely bespoke development from the ground-up.

No plans currently, but I believe the latest version of Dreamweaver has some WordPress-related features.

That’s just the default, but if you have any questions you should contact WP.com support — http://en.support.wordpress.com/

That one was custom too.

No, would push people to Google Apps for your domain.

Twice now — https://ma.tt/?s=brazil

It’s from-scratch.

Broadly, to committee- and consensus-based development.

Nope, being a domain registrar has nothing to do with that. Automattic already runs a hosting service, it’s called WordPress.com.

It will definitely be more expensive than Godaddy. 🙂

Cost is actually pretty high, and getting higher every year because of the way the system works. Most people sell them at a loss and make it up in up-sells.

Maybe we could buy an island somewhere and declare independence.

There are emails in my inbox from Steve Barnes and Elliot Noss which I’ll reply to soon!

Actually Posterous charges 34.99 for domain registration, Weebly is also pretty high. Mapping is less or free, but that seems to set up the logical motivation for someone to register their domain elsewhere and just map it. I’d like for them to be comparable from a cost point of view.

Yep. Right now we allow mapping, meaning you keep the domain at your current registrar and just point it at WordPress.com, but once we build better management tools it makes sense for some folks to transfer in as well.

Definitely a collector. 🙂

It was fun to snap a bird after all the jets screaming by.

This is my favorite one too!

We charge for it because we also charge for domain mapping, so it seemed logically consistent for them to be the same price because they do the same thing, just one you host with us and one you host elsewhere.

I stopped using it because it was a bit too slow for me, and the screen was a bit too small. I’m back on the Z-series full-time.

They were pretty far away. 🙂 The best were when they went right above, about 2/3rds down.

Yep, it’s the same cost as domain mapping.

People should have their own domain name in general, but this helps you even if you don’t start with that.

You can still add it.

Nice. 🙂

Huh, I’ll try to be a more equal-opportunity commenter. Which are you? 🙂

Yep, will try that after I have more than a few hours of data.

For levels I just have a script that open each maildir directory, looks at the number of non-deleted messages, and then stores the number in a DB at an hourly resolution. That script runs one a minute. On that page I show the info for the current hour.

For the outgoing, I already have table logging all incoming and outgoing emails, so it’s just a simple query and a COUNT( DISTINCT ) for the people number.

We worked together closely on the import tool, but there’s no planned product collaboration after that.

I love and use Xmarks, but they haven’t reached out to us, and given the amount of money they raised it might be too expensive to take over.

Yes we do! Rest assured we have a killer team working on it though.

That would be an amazing opportunity. Blogger is our #1 importer for WP.com and I think we could create a really great experience for Blogger users.

I would love to meet Bill Gates someday! No check though, there was no financial component to this particular deal.

I loved it.

My favorite of the past few years is Black Swan. I’m not very good at keeping a list of what I’ve read, unfortunately.

Probably, there’s a plugin for pretty much everything these days.

Sure, basically Microsoft gets to focus more resources on what they consider their core businesses, and we take the burden of hosting all the blogs but in exchange we get to introduce a whole new audience to the wonders of WordPress.

That’s not strictly true, there are dozens of services still out there (just search for “free blog”) but the biggest are Blogger and WordPress.

Like I said in the post, I think it speaks to their respect for their users. It was probably a good business decision to discontinue investment in the service, so they looked for the best alternative to their users. They know that on WordPress.com there’ll be a team living and breathing making blogging easier every day.

Now that process will be much easier, we’ve worked closely with their team to make it as smooth as possible.

Just to clarify, the bulk of this post is a quote from the linked article, it was Mark Zuckerberg saying that not me, though I do agree with him.

No but I’m sure there’s a plugin that can change where people go after they login, perhaps someone here could share.

I think it’s a killer combo.

I haven’t used the Kindle’s PDF support much yet.

You can put it in a baggie, works well.

If you use the Kindle app, they’re portable.

The main thing that bothers me about reading on the iPad isn’t the screen (I’m not often on a beach) but more the weight. I can hold the Kindle comfortable for hours in one hand, the iPad not so much.

Who reads in pitch darkness? 🙂

You should watch this video. 🙂

It varies from attendant to attendant. I find they mostly ignore my Kindle (it might be helped by the case I have it in, just a soft brown leather one) but will always ask for iPhone or iPad to be turned off if I’m using them when they walk by. They also seem to be more lenient in business than economy, and of course once you’ve flown a few times you get a sense for when they’re walking by and can close it for a few seconds while they do.

Automattic is a rapidly growing profitable business with more than 65 employees and tens of millions of users. 🙂 The WordPress name is hugely valuable but this has nothing to do with taxes (which aren’t a concern or most startups anyway because they re-invest all the money they make).

Break dancing!

All of WP.com will continue to run as always.

Currently there are no rules against that.

Thank you very much.

They’re somewhere, if I don’t post photos right away it sometimes takes a year or two to get to them.

Correct — WordPress.com (Automattic) and .net/.org (me) are grandfathered in as part of the transfer, so they’ll continue to operate as before, but no special rights for any new domains which would need to go through the Foundation just like anyone else. I’m not really worried about that as there are no plans to call anything new “WordPress.”

Thank you for fixing up your domain! I know it’s harder to switch Twitter and FB and we don’t have an official policy there yet, but I do think it makes sense for them to match the domain.

Just added a contact form, so you should drop by over there.

Might be Typekit-related, sorry about that. Instapaper it. 🙂

Not at all, the domain policy on WordPress.org still holds, and complemented by the new (draft) trademark policy.

To be fair they’re not all turn on/off devices, I’m including support items like cables, adapters, etc.

Nope, I should probably add them using the new Sharedaddy plugin.

Same here! I expected more security going in, not leaving.

Perhaps. I have been attempting to grow a beard.

Man I always get the A and E backward. That’s what I get for writing this from my iPhone. 🙂

It was no big deal, I found it a good opportunity to practice my patience. 🙂

Jane isn’t in NYC anymore! She’s down South.

Wow! Thank you so much for dropping by. 🙂 Really appreciate you sharing the names of some of the other musicians as well, I’ll check out their work.

Sorry I never figured it out.

Vibram 5-fingers.

I imagine if someone did that it would be very popular.

We could definitely do that.

Did they tell you why?

Wow that looks terrible — look for an updated version soon.

There’s a bug in the Theme Directory :/.

I don’t mind — after next iteration will probably set up a tag on wordpress.org support forums to follow.

That’s just a silly feature.

It’s under appearance. You can also Google for documentation for 3.0’s menu feature.

It’s not released.

Probably not, but it’s Open Source so you’re welcome to modify it and release your changes.

I believe there will be, though I don’t think the videos will be great quality because they’re coming from Flips.

I always get there eventually. Sometimes projects take much longer than I planned though.

I use some custom PHP code I wrote, with a DB managed by a WordPress plugin.

Perhaps, will run it by the theme team to see what they think.

Everything in the WordPress.org directory is GPL or compatible.

Thought about it, but it’s just so specific. It would be hard to make into a more generic theme.

I agree!

No problem, looks like you got bit by the no-menu bug. If you add a menu it should fix things. Watch for an update in a few days to fix up some bugs that slipped past.

Yep!

But of course! They couldn’t be listed in the directory otherwise.

Keep an eye on this blog the next few days.

They’re called Vibram 5-fingers and they’re the shoes of the future — ultra-comfortable.

Uh, pixels. That would be a lot of inches.

We strive to always make new mistakes.

GPL was not created to protect developers, it was created to protect users. I can’t tell you that you’ll get faster and better growth and still be protected, because in fact you’re putting the very core out there and (gasp) someone could take your work and re-sell it for half and all your customers would go there. Except that never happens because regular consumers want to support authorship because more of the same gets created, and you can bundle services or things like forum access with a subscription, if you choose. Some people will not care about that stuff and find your work online for free somewhere, but guess what they were going to do that anyway regardless of your license. However savvy consumers, which WordPress is cultivating, have become accustomed to their rights being protected and will demand nothing less. (The Thesis license says they can revoke it for any reason, including criticizing the developers of Thesis. Is that a solid foundation to build a business on? All the cards are stacked against you.) There are plenty of other platforms, like iPhone or Facebook, where the emphasis on Open Source is not as big or nonexistent so those might be better choices if you want your rights protected over those of your users.

The reasons to use the GPL are moral ones: you respect your users enough to guarantee their freedoms, and care about your work enough to say that if someone builds upon it (like you built upon WP) it will carry the same protections. You don’t have to be a first mover for it to work, there are dozens of others and more created every day. Using the GPL is not going to guarantee your success — 90% of small businesses fail and your license choice isn’t going to change that one way or another, but at least if you’re lucky enough to succeed you do it in a way that leaves the world a better place than when you found it. That’s not for everybody, and it might even be harder, but few things worth doing are on the easy path.