Automattic – Page 2 – Something Odd!

This is odd… dot blog

I’ve had some sort of online presence for twenty years, and that presence has been this blog for most of that time. When I started posting stuff online, PHP was still a toddler and I used a simple Perl script to merge html files with a content file before it was squirted up to an FTP server for publication. I’ve always put the newest news at the top, pushing older entries down, just like it is now. Ah, the glorious days of editing the file in Vim, copying and pasting posts from the “main” page to my “archive” page. I don’t miss it, WordPress makes that much easier now!

In those early days this site would have been called an “online diary” or journal. Apparently the term “weblog” was coined at the end of 1997 but I didn’t hear about that until a few years later. Blogs have been so very important to me in my personal and professional life so I’m really excited that this blog now lives on a .blog domain at odd.blog!

Automattic is rolling out the .blog domain, and as Matt says,

The namespace is wide open, and if you’re interested in reserving or bidding on your favorite name you can go to get.blog.

Ten Years at Automattic

Working

I still remember the day in 2005 when Matt asked me to come work for him. I still remember the exact spot I was standing where I took that call. It was only a couple of metres from where I sit typing this now.

Ten years, time has flown. I work for an absolutely amazing company with great people. It’s hard to believe there’s well over three hundred people there now. Remember when you needed an invite? It’s a far cry from WordPress.com today.

I wish I could provide an insightful comment on the challenges and rewards of working remotely but it’s late and I just wanted to get this post out there to mark the day. If you want to experience the remote work lifestyle for yourself, come work with us!

Food for eating

Polldaddy is in Marrakesh for a week, staying in a riad in the medina. We had a delicious lunch today, probably the nicest we’ve had here in the riad and that’s saying something as they’ve all been exceptional.

Delicious Grillmarkaðinn

If you ever find yourself in Reykjavik make sure you book a table in Grillmarkaðinn. Every single bite was a taste explosion. So delicious!

Monk Fish

Beef Sirloin

The ice cream dessert was actually a disappointment after the previous tasty dishes. As Lenny says, food in Iceland is damn good.

Akismet Asteroids

Akismet, the anti comment spam service run by Automattic recently announced that they had stopped 25 billion spam messages.

It’s quite an achievement of course and worth worth celebrating with a game of Asteroids. I’ll let you find the game yourself, it’s not hard to do so! 🙂

Sunset at Seaside

It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it…

PollDaddy join the Automattic Family

You’ve probably heard the news that Lenny and Eoin of PollDaddy have joined Automattic. PolDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, but on a personal level we’ve been joined by two great Irish guys from Sligo bringing the Irish contingent of Automattic up to three. Lenny did completely trash me at Wii Tennis but I won’t hold that against him!

We’ve even taken over a house here in Breckenridge, calling it the Irish House. The Irish Tricolour is flying outside an Irish pub downtown. They might lend it to us if we ask nicely ..
Raanan is staying there too so I guess we’ll make him an honourary Irishman for the week!

As well as the great PollDaddy news, expect a few more enhancements to WordPress.com soon, and if I have anything to do with it, a plugin or two that will make it into the WordPress MU community too!

Hold your breath

Life here in Colorado at 9,600ft is much the same as at sea level except for one major difference. The air is noticeably thinner at this altitude and takes some getting used to.

Thankfully we’re not here to train for the Olympics or do anything strenuous like that. Lying in bed is difficult enough! I tried reading last night and became breathless just because I was looking down at my book. Rolling on my side helped, but it’s scary when you can’t catch your breath. It feels like someone holding a bag over my head.

There’s an oxygen bar in a local town, and cans of oxygen can be purchased at the local store. Hopefully no more frights.

No previews of what we’re working on right now, but you’ll see the fruits of our labour soon enough!

For photos see the Automattic Group on Flickr and/or my Colorado Set.

PS. Check out the WordPress MU plugin contest winners. Well done to everyone involved. 🙂

Gravatar enabled WordCamp Badges

Andy has the very exciting news that Gravatar icons will be printed on attendee’s WordCamp San Francisco badges this year!

On supporting websites, Gravatars have become a de-facto identity for comment threads and discussions so to carry through the identity to the conference floor is just a logical conclusion.

There is one caveat. Gravatars can now be up to 512×512 pixels. The bigger they are, the better they’ll print. If your Gravatar is a measly 32×32 pixels it’s going to look like a dirty smudge next to the shiny badges of the big boys. Andy has created a handy form for checking if your image is the right size. If not, please upload a new Gravatar before August 14th!

I won’t be at WordCamp this year but after seeing the line up of speakers I’m looking forward to seeing the blog coverage afterwards.

PS. Andy has a new post showing how to create those badges with the help of a PDF library.

Sitewide tags pages for WordPress MU

For WordPress MU only. My latest plugin is the sitewide tags pages plugin.

This is the initial release of a plugin that creates a set of pages like the WordPress.com Hot Topics pages. It’s a lot more simplistic, but by feeding posts into one blog it also creates a sitewide feed of all posts plus feeds of any tags and categories too.

Sitewide Tags Options

WordPress MU is a multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com. If you use the regular version of WordPress this plugin is not for you and you can ignore this post.

PS. In other MU news. Raanan has a new post on the Publisher Blog about Nationen! blog, a new Danish blog site based on WordPress MU that looks rather nice!
The site was developed by Incsub who are also the guys behind wpmu.org where you’ll probably find all sorts of useful nuggets of MU goodness on a regular basis!