Curious about what the famous Wapuu character came from, and the alternative designs for it? The Wapuu Fan Club has a great write-up of the origins of Wapuu, much of which I had actually forgotten already even though I was there.
Calypso for Linux
We just announced and released the Linux version of the desktop client for WordPress.com, also known as Calypso. Also all of the code behind the desktop client itself (built on Electron) is now available as open source too.
By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. […]
My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical. That is very much working in support of a particular ethos, and one simply hasn’t called it forth.
From The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists in the Atlantic.
If you’re curious what I sound like in German, here’s an interview with the German version of Wired about the future of the web and WordPress, complete with a Gutenberg reference.
State of the Word 2015
Here is the State of the Word presentation I delivered on Saturday, and the following Q&A.
If you just want to check out the slides, here they are on Slideshare:
LetsEncrypt is available as a beta so everyone can have free SSL, and PHP7 is released which will double the speed of many PHP apps, including WordPress. And it was the first day of WordCamp US, if you missed it definitely livestream tomorrow. (I’m doing the State of the Word at 5pm ET.) A pretty awesome day for the web.
George Lakoff is an academic whose books I came across in my college years, and he’s been very influential on me, especially his approach to language through metaphors. He has an updated version of a classic book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is a great read if you’re interested in progressive politics. I noticed a link to a PDF to a WordPress-sounding address, and it turns out his entire site is on WordPress.com!