Oct
31
33

The Express and Star is “Britain’s biggest and best regional newspaper online” and was founded in the 1880s. If you look closely, you’ll notice that their entire site including every article and feature is powered by WordPress. They now take the crown from NY Times for having the best URLs of a news site. (Though the Times now has clean URLs on their blogs.)

26

WordCamp Argentina finished up today and was a fantastic event, great turnout too. Congrats to the many people who contributed to its success. I haven’t seen any coverage in English yet, but I expect that and photos soon. I’m in Buenos Aires until Sunday night so looking forward to exploring the city much more.

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Gallery: 10-31-2007

Auto-imported from old gallery:

This album contains 33 items.




Oct
29
61

WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS. “Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.” Yay!

Oct
20
238

The comments on this blog are now Gravatar-enabled. I didn’t use a plugin, just 2 lines of PHP. It’s pretty fascinating going through old posts and comments and seeing who has a Gravatar already. Do you have an account yet?

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Microsoft will Open Source Windows before 2017.

Oct
19
23

I’ll be at WordCamp Argentina on October 31st. Do they celebrate Halloween there?

10

This snippet from the Wall Street Journal shows the Comscore numbers for the top social media sites, show us about 22 million ahead of Flickr and “Six Apart Sites” (which I think is Livejournal/Typepad/Vox combined) but about 9 million behind Facebook. I think the reason they say N/A for our growth is because a year ago we weren’t even tracked by Comscore. We’re too cheap for a subscription though, maybe someone with one can check that?

Oct
12
28

Since 7 reasons I switched back to PHP there seems to be a trend of Rails-bashing articles, epitomized by this one which is a fine example of the form until it advocates ASP.NET. Through it all, I still haven’t heard of a startup or web service that failed or succeeded due solely to its web framework or language. These articles are like the celebrity gossip stories of Web 2.0, complete with ad hominem attacks, and just as useless. Hacker News tends to be a fairly high signal source of discussions actually relevant to startups.

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When I was in London I had the chance to chat with Tim Anderson who in turn wrote an article in yesterday’s Guardian, WordPress makes a stand for open source morality, which is worth a read. We also got a mention in the same issue in The office of the future is all around by Victor Keegan.

Oct
9
26

S3 News

Filed under: wordpress.com

Tags: , , ,

Three bits of Amazon S3 news:

  1. We’re now using S3 as the primary storage for WordPress.com, rather than just for backups. We have some layers in front of it, notably Varnish, so the majority of our serving doesn’t hit S3. Still, our AWS bill went from around $200/mo to $1500/mo, and rising. It has simplified some of our requirements, but doesn’t look like it’ll save any money.
  2. Amazon now has a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Big companies like this, but in the real world I’ve found there to be a low correlation with service reliability and the presence of a SLA.
  3. In the Amazon newsletter they promoted Content Spooling Network as a good use of their services. Unfortunately, the service appears to be tailored for using Mechanical Turk to “ghostwrite keyword-based articles for SEO,” or more succinctly, “spam.” Get a web-savvy editor for that newsletter, guys!