Monday, January 4th, 2010
Generally, the only thing a new Gregorian year (there are other calendars out there too, you know) means to me is that I must remember to write 2010 on checks. But since I’ve been reading so many New Year’s posts on other blogs, it got me thinking about what I have to say as we welcome writing 2010 on checks. And here it is:
While eating breakfast this morning, I started thinking about how much of our business’ activities revolve around WordPress – developing sites and blogs on WordPress, hosting WordPress sites, providing WordPress support and consultation, and more. And then I started thinking about how many people there are out there who also make a living from WordPress services. There must be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of WordPress service providers around the world.
In addition, there are thousands of others who, thanks to the relative simplicity of WordPress and the freemium hosted service at WordPress.com, have managed to set up their own dynamic web presence to help them grow their businesses or organizations.
In Judaism, our tradition teaches us that the most ideal way of giving charity is to give someone else the ability to generate their own income (similar to the saying about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him fish). Automattic has not only created their own business, but has helped others create their own streams of income. I think this is particularly significant for those in the developing world: with WordPress they can provide their services to clients all over the world, without the need for expensive software and supplies, thus increasing their ability to generate income for themselves and their families.
Automattic obviously plays a big role in the success of WordPress, but without the community I don’t think WordPress would be where it is today. Automattic’s approach to the community is of course what made it so robust, thanks to the fact that the software is Open Source, and thanks to the implementation of an API system that allows others to add on features through the development of plugins. It’s also due to the environment that Automattic created, whereby the community is encouraged to support and be active in the development of WordPress.
The WordPress community certainly took up the torch, and has helped WordPress spread like wildfire. Three years ago, when I was researching the available Open Source platforms for creating dynamic websites, one of the reasons I settled on WP was because of the amazingly useful community generated information I found. And that’s why I started this very blog: to give back to the community in my own small way.
So thank you WordPress community.
Thank you Automattic.
Thank you for WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, WordCamp, the Codex, and BuddyPress.
Thank you for creating such an awesome piece of software, and for continuing to innovate and listen to the community.
Happy New Year!
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Posted in News & Views | Tags: API hooks, Automattic, Plugins | 3 Comments »
Monday, November 17th, 2008
Being that Wordcamp Israel was a bloggers conference in Tel Aviv, I’m sure there will be tons of people writing up their reviews in Hebrew. But maybe not quite as many in English, so here goes. This year’s Wordcamp was in the ZOA house in the middle of Tel Aviv, a schlep for Jerusalemites, but a great location for everybody else.
The Shmoozing
And they’re off, let the shmoozing begin. Instead of sitting in a corner, hoping someone would come talk to me, I started standing and sitting strategically next to people who looked friendly. The first guy I met was Eyal Sela, who plans to write about productivity on his brand new Wordpress blog, still in its Kubrick diapers. Throughout the rest of the day, I met Itzik Edri of Wikimedia(trying to get more people to use Wikipedia), Eyal Gura, CEO of PicApp (a legal image solution for bloggers), Eyal Beit-On, of Suntrader (online marketing consultant), and Amir Uval(new Hebrew blogger at Geek in the Kitchen). Are you keeping track? So far, that’s 3 Eyals. I also got to hang out with the founders of Nuconomy, Eran Kampf and Yossi Taguri. Toward the end, I sat with Ezra Butler, (of Twitter fame), Charlie Kalech, Debby Benstein, Eyal Gonen, Idan Gazit(new Twitter friend), and Ido Shacham. If you’re counting, out of 13 people that I met, 4 happened to be named Eyal.
The Organizers
The conference officially started with co-organizers Tal Galili (who cut his hair) and Noa Danzig(who may or may not have cut her hair) welcoming everyone and telling us that they planned the conference in less than 2 months, and worked extra hard to include non-profits by creating an additional track of sessions.
The Sessions
I didn’t get a chance to go to every session, so I would love if people added their comments about the sessions they went to. You can see the full schedule here.
Session: Blogs built on Wordpress.com / Miriam Schwab
From what I heard, Miriam gave a great presentation on the features and limitations of Wordpress.com, and its viability only in the short term. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.
Session: 70 unusual uses for Wordpress / Sarit Amar and Tomer Lichtish
While it was hard to decide which sessions to go to, I ventured for the “70 unusual uses for Wordpress”. But, according to my desktop scientific calculator, only 4 were mentioned:
- Contact Manager – Using a special template, you can enter each name as the link the a post which contains someone’s contact details. You can also find people through the tag cloud.
- e-Commerce/store
- Portfolio – using thumbnails as links to each piece in the portfolio.
- Lifestreaming – updates from Twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, etc. to represent your “online” life. A way to bring the focus back to the blog.
This session was a little basic for me and could have used specific links to themes and plugins that help you create these special Wordpress sites. I’m hoping there’s a link online to the other 66 interesting uses.
Session: Blogging with Video / Ron Yekuteal, Kaltura
Kaltura is the first open source video platform, and they have a plugin for Wordpress. Ron said that Kaltura is free, flexible, and most importantly, open source. This plugin supposedly offers a lot of functionality and I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Session: Social Media Marketing / Miriam Schwab
Since I couldn’t clone myself and be at Miriam’s talk, even though I wanted to, I listened to other people’s reviews. People said Miriam encouraged quality content on your blog, your home base, and to be a part of the conversation on social media sites by contributing and helping others, since that’s where your audience is. She also listed Wordpress plugins that can boost your ’social proof’ on your website by displaying your activity around the web. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.
Session: Statistics / Zvika Jervy of Statistics Web Control and Yosi Taguri of Nuconomy.
Zvika spoke about the basics of Google Analytics to check number of visitors, referrers, time spent on the site, and top content, Technorati to check incoming links/authority, and Feedburner to check feed count.
Yosi spoke about Nuconomy’s plugin for Wordpress which offers statistics beyond pages, such as clicks on video and Ajax. It also lets you see stats on commenters and compare lots of different data sets for a bigger picture of stats and user interaction with your site.
Session: Virtual Collaboration, Raanan Bar-Cohen, Automattic
Originally from
Israel, Raanan now lives in California working for Automattic (the company who created Wordpress), and playing Adam Sandler roles on the side (Miriam pointed this out, and I have to say, I agree, they do have a striking similarity). And, to my delight, Raanan delivered his presentation in English, a welcome treat for my Hebrew overloaded brain. Raanan was a really great speaker and offered some tips on running a virtual company, since Automattic has 30 employees scattered around the globe in every possible time zone.
- Empower your team – everyone should have ownerships of their projects, and set their own hours.
- Go real time – yay for searchable, storable group chats and boo to email
- Go semi real time – use internal blogs and Prologue (group twitter)
- Get together – coordinate conferences and meetups for real, in-person get togethers
- Open Source – more opportunities to get help and gain insights from others
- Metrics - compare many different tracking services and data points
- Go bite size – ticket tracking, break down a project into small pieces
He also gave a sneak peek into Prologue Groups, Wordpress’s project tracker, plus Twitter-like chat, which launchesin 2 weeks at Wordcamp Australia. And finally, he gave a heads up that BuddyPress, Wordpress’s Social Networking Platform will be available in December.
Session: Panel with Knesset Member Miki Eitan with host Jonathon Klinger
Set up like a late night talk show, Jonathon Klinger played host to Likud MK Miki Eitan and 3 other guys. I apologize, but I didn’t see their names in the program or online. Please feel free to comment with their names and organizations. [Update: Other panelists were Yoav Lerman from a blog about the renewal of Tel Aviv, Zvika Bashur from CityDov blog, and Yochai Ilam from Black Labor blog.]
MK Eitan was invited to be on the panel because he started a blog built on Wordpress. When asked why he chose Wordpress, he said, “it was the cheapest option”. Other memorable quotes (probably not exact) included “You don’t need to be a Likudnik to believe in Miki Eitan”, a subtle plug, and “As you can see by my ability to choose a low-cost solution for my blogging, I also know how to create a balanced budget for the country”. As the wise Miriam pointed out, Miki is trying to take Obama’s strategy by creating a trendy site and a new slogan that translates roughly to: “To prove that things can be different”. What Mr. Eitan didn’t cover exactly was what those changes would be and how he would implement them. Sheesh, people, who can be bothered with details?!
When asked if Mr. Eitan writes his own posts, he said yes! Can you believe it?! Haha, Just kidding. He’s a politician who doesn’t see the ROI in blogging himself and therefore asked his assistant, hiding in the corner, how much time he invests in the blog. The assistant responded by saying 1 hour a day.
I’m sorry, but a Likud MK showing up at a bloggers convention reminds me of a similar situation (((Twilight Zone music here))) when Bibi Netanyahu showed up at the JBloggers Convention. Why does every blogger convention end with a rally for Likud? Am I missing something here? Have we finally caught on to their sly little plan?
Session: Introduction to Wordpress Plugins / Ziv Perry
This session was very high level, and I think should have been publicized as such. Ziv showed how to create a basic Wordpress plugin, but If you don’t already have a solid grasp of PHP or the guts of Wordpress, then this session was probably way over your head.
Session: Home, sweet Jerusalem
Sorry to say, I didn’t make it to the very last sessions, but Kol Hakavod to the organizers, and to meeting and seeing lots of fellow Wordpress junkies, er.. people. My recommendation for next year’s Wordcamp would be to have 2 tracks, one for beginners and one for advanced Wordpress users.
And last, but not least, I got a hilarious sticker that says “Lo Nachon” (Not true), and the purpose being that if you ever see a bumper sticker you disagree with, you can discredit it by placing your “not true” sticker next to it. Oh, people, you are so witty, how did you know that is exactly my type of humor?!
Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic, Wordcamp Israel 2008 | 9 Comments »
Monday, August 4th, 2008
Weblog Tools Collection has published an overview of the features in store for us in WordPress 2.7. As I was reading the list, I noticed that many of them them are based on existing popular plugins, like the Google Sitemaps Generator, Better Comments Manager, YATCP (Yet Another Threaded Comments Plugin), and Subscribe to Comments.
I had mixed feelings about this: on the one hand, these plugin authors had enough vision to see a need and fill it with some plugins that became standards for experienced WordPress blog developers. If WordPress makes these features part of the core, than these plugins become legacy and are no longer needed, and all the developers will no longer get recognition for their innovation and leadership in the WordPress community.
On the other hand, these types of developments are par for the course in an open source community, and is what makes the WordPress software so fantastic. The people at Automattic give free rein to the community to develop new features, and then these features are tested by thousands around the world over many years, and “survival of the fittest” helps the community identify the best and most important features to be added to the WordPress core.
The result: one of the best pieces of open source software around, and a celebration of the culture of open source.
What do you think?
Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic, open source, upgrades | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
To my chagrin, my blog is telling me that it’s time to upgrade again.
It’s an urgent security release because if you allow registration on your WordPress blog, users can edit other users’ drafts. WordPress development also mentions the vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that I mentioned recently. This is the first time that I’ve seen WordPress themselves mention a plugin security problem. It must be really serious.
Can we discuss WordPress’ security for a sec?
I know that WP fans say that the reason there are so many security breaches is because WordPress is so popular and widespread, more people try to hack it.
WordPress detractors say that there is no excuse: WP gets hacked too much, has too much spam, and too many security problems.
So which is it? Let’s take a look at what a pretty objective group of people have to say about WordPress security: BlogSecurity.net.
BlogSecurity.net is a great blog that reports on social networking and web blog security. A large percentage of their posts are dedicated to WordPress issues. This could be because WordPress is so popular so they’ve decided to dedicate most of their energies to covering it, or it could be because WordPress has more security issues to report about.
It seems to be the latter, and BlogSecurity.net addressed the general issue of WordPress security recently:
We have seen alot of critical vulnerabilities being discovered in WordPress core and its plugins of late, who’s to blame?…
One of the major problems I see with WordPress is that it provides little (if any) protection against input validation attacks. So where does the problem lie?
One of the main problem lies in the way WordPress sanitises user input….
If WordPress is going to get serious about security, we need to come up with hardcore secure functions, that the WordPress core, and its plugin developers can use. These functions should take the security considerations out of the plugin developers hands and secured from within the WordPress core!…
This is one area, where I think blogging platforms like Drupal do a far better job! (my bold)
So is WordPress insecure by design? The answer seems to be yes!
Ramifications? I don’t know. I’m not jumping ship any time soon because no other blogging or CMS platform offers what WP does: flexibility, ease of use, extensibility, and great community support.
I’m no software developer, but I would say that it’s probably in Automattic’s interest to concentrate all their efforts in tightening up security issues now, and only once that’s done to add any new features they planned on implementing in the next release.
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Here are some other plugin vulnerabilities that were recently discovered, in case you missed them:
WordPress WassUp Plugin “to_date” SQL Injection Vulnerability
WordPress AdServe Plugin “id” SQL Injection
WordPress WP-Footnotes Plugin “admin_panel.php” Cross-Site Scripting
dmsguestbook, st_newsletter, Wordspew, wp-footnotes vulnerabilities
wp-calc & wp adserv plugin vulnerabilities
Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic, security, upgrades | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Michael over at WPCandy brought up the question recently of whether it’s ok to use the word “WordPress” in the domain name of sites about WordPress that are not affiliated with Automattic. I came across this issue about a month ago thanks to Lorelle, who actually mentions this repeatedly in her WordPress Wednesday posts on the Blog Herald. Lorelle states that you need to get permission to use the word WordPress in your blog’s name and domain, so I immediately contacted someone over at Automattic to see what they had to say on the matter. He pointed me to this page: http://wordpress.org/about/domains/.
Of course, if I had known about this policy before I started WordPress Garage, I would never have used the current domain name. But here we are, almost a year later, and the question remains: do I need to change my domain name? And do all blogs that use the word WordPress in their names need to change that too?
I think there are two issues at hand here:
- Trademark dilution
- Consumer evangelism
Trademark Dilution, i.e. “I WordPressed so much today on my WordPress”
Based on my modest understanding of trademarks (I worked a bit in the field), the reason Automattic doesn’t want anyone using WordPress in their domain name is because they (or their lawyers) are concerned about “trademark dilution.” Trademark dilution is when a brand name becomes so tied to the product that it becomes the general name of the product, and even a verb. Some good examples of this are the use of the word “Xerox” instead of “photocopy,” “Kleenex” instead of “tissue,” and “Saran Wrap” instead of “plastic wrap.” While this may seem like great success since the brand name became so widely known that people just call the product by the brand name, it is problematic for companies because it makes it more difficult for them to protect their trademarks against infringements.
So, in the case of WordPress, their trademark would become diluted if people started to call blogs “WordPresses,” or would use the word “WordPress” as a verb, i.e. “I have to take a break from WordPressing while I go on vacation.”
I’m no intellectual property expert, but this seems unlikely to happen. Blogs will be blogs.
Consumer Evangelism, i.e. “I love WordPress so much that I’m actually going to write hordes of posts about it and create themes and plugins – all for free”
Which company is the king of consumer evangelism? I’ll give you a hint: their name rhymes with Snapple. Yes, Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple have succeeded in creating products that people LOVE. Their customers love their products so much that they talk about them, write about them, tell their friends to buy them, etc. They have armies of consumer evangelists all over the globe hugging their iPods, and coveting the iPhone (the iPhone still hasn’t come to many countries).
Now, Apple is a pretty big company, so you’d think their lawyers would be freaking out over trademark dilution issues. Well, here are a few examples of blogs and sites that are not affiliated with Apple that write about Apple products and use the word Apple or iPhone in their domain and blog name:
The Apple Blog
Apple iPhone
Apple Fun
Apple Are
Apple iPhone Blog
Apple Matters
I don’t know if Apple encourages this, but as far as I know they aren’t publicizing any policies related to the use of their trademarks in domain and blog names. Maybe they understand that this type of marketing is gold – people who aren’t on the company payroll, and are therefore “objective,” who are willing to dedicate time and money to promoting their products for them. Now THAT is a marketers dream!
Let’s do a quick comparison with the overweight, slightly-balding company to see how they’re managing with consumer evangelists. Here are the Microsoft fan sites that I found:
http://scoble.weblogs.com/ – doesn’t use Microsoft in the domain, but is now dead.
Microsoft’s not exactly about to go under, but I would say that Apple’s position is pretty envious.
Back to WordPress
WordPress has consumer evangelists (me!). Dozens of bloggers are posting about WordPress every day in order to share their knowledge with the WordPress community. And thousands of readers read these blogs every day to quench their thirst for more knowledge about the WordPress platform. In my opinion, this is all part of the Open Source spirit, where people learn from the community, and then want to give back to the community in whatever way they can.
Here are some examples of blogs totally or almost totally dedicated to WordPress (I apologize if I’ve left you out – feel free to leave URLs in the comments):
WPCandy
Hack WordPress
Darren Hoyt
Weblog Tools Collection
Solostream
Lorelle on WordPress
Check out WP Themes Gallery’s list of the top 40 WordPress blogs to get an idea of how many there are out there.
Now let’s take a look at what I would say is a major WordPress competitor: Movable Type. I did a quick search, and while I found a lot of individual posts about using Movable Type, I didn’t find many blogs dedicated to the topic. I actually only found one, and while it is really good, it is written by Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type.
So who’s in better shape: the company with the dozens of bloggers who blog about them daily but use their trademark in their domain and blog name; or the company that doesn’t have anyone blogging about them and also don’t have anyone using their trademark anywhere?
The lawyers say company #2. The figures say company #1.
Conclusion
In my very humble and not-worth-much opinion, WordPress should be careful about taking action that may appear as an attack on their community. Their domain policy is understandable, but it may cause more harm than good. They should remember that a consumer evangelist is worth a lot more than the best marketing or ad campaign.
A good compromise could be for bloggers to add a disclaimer on their site that says that they are not affiliated with WordPress or Automattic. WordPress Training’s About page has a really good example which says the following:
WordPressTraining.com is not affiliated with or sponsored by Automattic, Inc. or the WordPress ® Open Source project.
WordPress ® is a trademark of Automattic, Inc.
And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that.
Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic | 27 Comments »
Friday, January 18th, 2008
The folks at Automattic have launched their WordPress Publisher Blog, which will:
“cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.”
So far the blog has three posts (one of which is sticky – which plugin are you using Raanan?). It’s hard to tell from three posts, but it seems like this blog aims to achieve what a lot of us WordPress bloggers are already doing.
So, are we going to become redundant, or will the WordPress Publisher Blog just join the club? It seems that this is another move by Automattic to take control of the WordPress user community, similar to their creation of the WordPress plugin directory. With the plugin directory, WordPress became the hub for the plugin community, and now they want news and reports on WordPress to come from them too. Makes sense, and I guess they could catch up pretty quickly since they are WordPress.
Anyways, it will be interesting to see how their blog pans out. If they do a good job, I think there might not be much of a point in continuing to invest time and energy in this kind of blog.
WordPress Publisher Blog
Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
It seems that it’s just rumors so far, but Automattic, the company behind our favorite blogging platform, may be up for sale.
This makes sense. They’ve invested money, time and energy in building up a huge user base and community, and WordPress.com is one of the most visited sites on the web. Plus they have actually figured out how to generate some kind of revenue from WordPress.com by selling advanced packages and features – something many of today’s web 2.0 and Internet startups have not managed to do, and yet even they get bought out or invested in.
So from an investment point of view, Automattic could be seen as a pretty solid company. But from a lover-of-WordPress point of view, this rumor makes me nervous. Let’s say they are bought out (and Matt and friends get to live happily ever after, which they deserve); what happens to the open source model? Will the free WordPress platform continue to be developed? Will annoying ads be added to WordPress.com blogs? How about plugins – will they be encouraged or banished into the night?
I guess we’ll have to wait and see. On the one hand, I would be happy for the Automattic guys if they get to enjoy a large exit. On the other, selfish hand, I have to ask: what about me?
Posted in News & Views | Tags: Automattic | 8 Comments »
