If companies don’t try it, workers may force them to do it anyway.
Category Archives: wordpress.com
Journalism and Newspack
WordPress.com is partnering with Google and news industry leaders on a new platform for small- and medium-sized publishers, called Newspack. The team has raised $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others. We’re also still happy to talk to and engage […]
Tumblr Support in WordPress
Earlier today WordPress.com turned on the ability to push new blog posts to Tumblr, alongside the existing capability to do so for Twitter, Facebook, et al. This is interesting for a few reasons. While the tech press often likes to paint companies in a similar market as competing in a zero sum game, the reality […]
WP.com Marketplace Idea
At WordCamp Argentina yesterday I talked about an upcoming feature for WordPress.com, a theme marketplace, and while the feedback has been universally positive amoung everyone I talked to some folks who weren’t there and don’t speak Spanish seem to be criticizing third-hand, Google-translated information, which is a little sad to watch, so here’s some details. […]
S3 News
Three bits of Amazon S3 news: 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 […]
WordPress.com Growth
Even though we post a wrap-up post each month, I don’t think the story of the growth of WordPress.com is very well-known. As Narendra Rocherolle said to me a few weeks ago, “Pound for pound you guys get less press per pageview.” Webware just publish some Nielson numbers that show WordPress.com as the #4 blog […]
New WP.com Design
We just made the redesign of WordPress.com live. Watch how when you make your window smaller the tags on the sidebar drop to the bottom.
WordPress.com Private Stats Now Public
We’ve decided to open up 99% of our internal aggregate stats at WordPress.com to the world, really everything except our PayPal graphs. There are still some todos, such of the language signup information we track, but all of that will come with time.
Anonymous Blogging
Anonymous Blogging with WordPress.com and Tor, by Ethan Zuckerman. Hat tip: Lorelle.
WordPress.com VIP
The WordPress.com VIP program is now public.
Blogging from Space
The Day Has Come, Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. This is the last post before the first woman space tourist heads into space. Is there wifi up there? This Xprize blog is part of our upcoming VIP program on WordPress.com. Update: This BBC article says “Ms Ansari says she will write the first blog from space.” […]
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg has launched, it’s the tool I used to generate this heatmap of the WP.com front page.
Big Day
Just launched some pretty major features at WordPress.com: private blogs, store, and custom CSS.
Our Tail
Someone had asked me about traffic patterns on WordPress.com the other day and whether or not they followed a "long tail." I knew the answer was yes, and I guestimated the numbers from memory at around 80% outside the top 10 blogs. It's actually a little more acute: 92.63% of the traffic to WordPress.com is […]
A Little Funding
The best thing that can ever happen to a web service is to have passionate users. Users that notice and email you the second there’s a database problem, users that really push the limits of what you can provide, and users that are phenomally successful and bring thousands of others to your doors. As a […]
Open Source Legal Docs
Not technically open source, because I don't know which license is best for regular text, but I just put a Creative Commons Sharealike license on the WordPress.com terms of service and Automattic privacy policy. People were stealing them anyway, might as well make it legit. 🙂 Feel free to grab bits and pieces and search/replace […]
Widgets
WordPress Widgets, we just enabled editable sidebars and some bootstrap widgets on WordPress.com. Plugin for WordPress, API, and a few more widgets are on their way. Right now widgets are just for sidebars, but I see no reason the concept couldn’t be adapted for the Dashboard as well. It’s ultra-simple, if you know HTML you […]
Get Random
Get random on WordPress.com, I really really really like this feature. (We’re about to hit 100k blogs.)
WP.com Performance
It’s nice when people notice these things. There are a few more performance changes planned that may help even more, even while we’re adding more than a thousand blogs every day. Right now we’re in noodle mode, throwing things against the server walls and seeing what sticks. 🙂
Automattic Beta
Automattic.com is no longer a placeholder, it now has a bit more info about the team behind WordPress.com and Akismet. This is what I’ve been working on since I left CNET. The site is still just a shell though, a lot more tidying up to do there. Your mileage may vary. (Should we call it […]