Tag Archives: matt-mullenweg

Why the WordPress theme customizer matters »

July 24th, 2012

Andy Adams of The Theme Foundry:

I’d like to suggest that competitors like Squarespace are going to start eating WordPress’s lunch on the “ease of use” front if WordPress does not adapt.

Adams goes on to say how important the theme customizer is to helping WordPress to keep its competition at bay.

Remember, Matt Mullenweg said that they are focused on “radically simplifying what we currently do”. This is key for WordPress to continue to be the platform of choice for so many sites. There are much easier solutions out there – though arguably more or less powerful – but WordPress really could use a major (radical as Matt put it) rethink because the years of adding features have made it much more complex than its newest competition.

Joe Kraus and the Culture of Distraction

June 4th, 2012

Great presentation by Joe Kraus on the Culture of Distraction and how we’re all training ourselves to be less able to focus on any one thing. STOP WHAT YOUR DOING AND WATCH IT NOW. :)

My take? I think I’ll develop a training program that works the opposite way. Over a year ago in a post titled How the Internet is affecting my attention span and how I’m planning on fixing it I wrote:

We are probably all suffering from this trend. So how am I going to conquer it? Simple; practice. I’m going to retrain my attention span. I’m going to sit down with something – a book, a project, maybe even some time for meditation – and spend 30 minutes with it. Then, I’ll progress from there.

I did manage to regain a lot of my attention span by simply striving to focus on any one thing for a period. Also in that post I remark that deadlines may help with focus also. If you have to have something done by a certain time you’ll focus long enough to get it done.

I’m going to make this a weekly feature here on the blog. How I’m going to recapture my attention. You can follow along under the attention span tag.

/via Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg on a much more simple WordPress

May 25th, 2012

First, yes please.

Now, Matt Mullenweg on what tablets should mean to WordPress:

How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

I’m sort of disappointed that WordPress used to set the trends and now it simply reacts to them. However, I’m very happy that the most influential person in the WordPress world is now focusing on making it easier to publish from something other than the typical computer set up.

I can publish to my blog using my iPhone or iPad. But it is painful when compared to publishing from my Macbook Pro.

“Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition”

April 28th, 2008

Leonard Lin takes out the laundry. Lin decides not to sit idly by while “tech journalists” and “experts” tee off on some of the engineers and programmers behind a few of the more widely used social applications about “scaling issues”.

First, he speaks about Michael Arrington’s crack at Blaine Cook of Twitter.  In short, Arrington puts a lot of blame on Cook for Twitter’s stability issues and then some “experts” reply in the comments.  Then, he talks about some of the opinions being spewed out about WordPress and its supposed downfalls as it pertains to scalability.

Lin is much more versed in the technology, especially the infrastructure, behind-the-scenes in both of these cases than I am – so I will not be offering my opinions here and ask that you read his.  Also, I will not be linking to the other sources of this story, because I’d rather you read them with his context.

Side note about this link: I found this article through Matt Mullengweg who wrote and published a post called Armchair Scaling Experts which has been taken down since and I don’t know why.

Source: random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition.

Ma.gnolia Blog: On Our New Front Doors

April 4th, 2008

Ma.gnolia, my favorite social bookmarking service, recently switched from merely supporting OpenID to actually restricting all new user signups to use the authentication platform. This received a lot of attention – most good – while Matt Mullenweg (and others I’m sure) chimed in to say that this method shouldn’t be viewed as a good strategy to cut spam.

Larry Halff, founder of Ma.gnolia, chimed in today via the site’s official blog to give some background on the discussion, statistics that made the reasoning come up in the first place, and why they believe that while it isn’t a strategy to cut down on spam, it has, indeed, cut down on spam.

So now you know the rest of the story.

Source: Ma.gnolia Blog: On Our New Front Doors.

WordCamp 2007 – Day two

July 22nd, 2007

I suppose I might as well semi-live blog the second day of WordCamp. (Somehow, this post has been dugg, you’ve been warned.)

10:45am – The first session of the day HyperDB and High Performance WordPress lead by Barry Abrahmson and Matt Mullenweg focused on making WordPress run smoothly when dealing with high traffic sites or even small personal sites that end up getting on sites like Slashdot and Digg.

A few tips if you do not use any caching and yet you’ve found your site down because of a Digg. There are a few options that were suggested. The first is to modify your .htaccess file and limit access to your site to only your personal IP Address. Then, create an index.html file of the post that is getting all of the traffic. Next, FTP into your site and create the same directory structure on your file system as your post has (i.e. /notes/wordcamp07-day2/ for this post) and upload the index.html into that file. Don’t forget to edit your .htaccess file again to allow everyone back in again.

After that I’d suggest installing WP-Cache, a free plugin, so that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

11:00am – “Blogs at the New York Times” by Jeremy Zilar is focusing mainly on the struggles of training people to use WordPress, upgrading multiple copies, and just general workflow for their authors and how they use WordPress at the New York Times.

Something interesting that the New York Times blogs does is have “comment of the moment” which spans across off of the New York Times blogs. Many social networks will highlight specific content but not usually highlight comments. I like it.

11:15am – Designing massively multiplayer social systems lead by Rashmi Sinha, Ph.D. is focusing on how to design massively social systems like SlideShare. (View her slide presentation here.)

Notes: Interaction occurs around objects not “just connecting” like; coffee, concerts, wordcamp, etc. Even tag searches are “objects” that people virtually “gather” around. I don’t like that she is limiting interaction models to only four, though she didn’t say they are the only models.

Side notes: Slideshare was built as “the Flickr, or YouTube, of Powerpoint presentations…”. “Did you know that 5th graders do their homework in Powerpoint?” Church 2.0 (clergy are using them in churches). “Powerpoint pornography, does exist”.

Designing for the individual: Usability. Can you find information. Quickly access what you are looking for. Documentation clear, concise.

Designing for groups: How are people interacting? How will people share? “Group think”, or Wisdom Of Crowds, says that you can intelligent decisions being made by a group of people only if certain rules are kept and followed. The system must encourage everyone to be individuals, yet work together. Popularity is one of the most important things on social networks. Unfortunately: The rich gets richer.

11:45am – Almost time for lunch. I’m starving! I just posted my MeToday video, that I did this morning before WordCamp was really full.

Regarding Apple, Inc. “They do invidual design very well. They can’t do social design at all.”. Wow. I’m not sure I get this blanket statement, and I suppose I should take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I will email her.

“Any other activities, besides favoriting and tagging, to gauge popularity?” Favoriting and tagging “go together” on Slideshare. If you favorite something, you are asked also to tag it. (I like this feature). “You don’t get the same credit for favoriting, as you do for commenting.”

Rashmi is taking questions from the audience.

BBQ Lunch!! Wow. That was some delicious BBQ! It felt good to be able to eat, unlike yesterday.

2:15pm – I’m recording parts of Dave Winer’s discussion about the Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing which has touched on some very interesting points. He touched on future-safing your data/content as well as opening up social networks so that users do not get “siloed” into using the service. Example: Facebook’s APIs all point inward, and not outward.

The video for Dave’s presentation is now available on Viddler.

5:15pm – The last few presentations for the day included Liz’s presentation on how they are going through the WordPress admin testing it for usability issues and planning the next (or 2.4) version that will, hopefully, feature many improvements to the WP-admin.

Matt Mullenweg did a presentation on “The State of the Word” (video now available here) updating everyone on what has happened with WordPress since the last WordCamp in 2006. Impressive numbers, huge growth, and many plans for the future. (I have a good portion of this on video and will be publishing it on Viddler the moment that iMovie “does its thing”).