wordpress.com – Something Odd!

Harvard Weblogs archived by Automattic

Dave Winer just reported that an ancient WordPress MU site that was shutting down has been archived by Automattic. I wasn’t aware that Harvard were using MU back in the day, but if you search, you’ll find posts like this and this one talking about upgrading WordPress MU.

Gives me a nice, fuzzy feeling seeing those long ago posts about using WordPress MU.

If you don’t know, WordPress MU began life as b2++, a fork of b2 (which became WordPress). The fork was started by me to provide blogs for the linux.ie community at blogs.linux.ie. That site is long gone, but you can see an archived copy of the front page here, where I talk about using Smarty for the theming:

We’re using the b2 weblog software, although heavily modified with the following:

Caching and templates are handled by Smarty. You don’t need to know PHP to create your template! The caching should make your page load just as fast when the server is busy as at any other time. Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that comment, trackback, and pingback counts might be stale until the page is refreshed. (Yes, I know about Smarty “insert” functions, that’ll come in a later version.)

Donncha O Caoimh, blogs.linux.ie, 2003.

I love that Automattic is now hosting the site, but I’m also glad that archive.org is out there preserving the open web. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an archive.org copy of a page show up in a Google search, however. Have you?

So much useful information is now locked in private Facebook groups, or Discord channels, it’s ridiculous. Here’s a very niche example from only yesterday. I wanted to know what bit depth RAW image files were, and one of the more useful hits was a dpreview thread from 2007!

Eighteen Years at Automattic

I started work at Automattic 18 years ago today. Matt offered me a job working on a new WordPress based website a few weeks before. I had just bought a house the year before, I had become engaged the month before, and left my old job at the same time, so I jumped at the opportunity to work on WordPress full time!

It started out small with us working on 2 servers and an invite system. I felt I was doing as much admin on MySQL and Apache as coding. More people were hired. Many of them are still at Automattic. We worked on lots of cool little things like the global tag system, and so much else that I’ve forgotten about. Then moving onto the billing system because I had done billing at my previous job, then on to Crowdsignal, on to Jetpack Forms and finally onto the team working on Jetpack Boost and WP Super Cache.

WordPress.com is unrecognisable from what it was 18 years ago, but if I run “blame” on the right files, I’ll sure I’ll still see my name on some ancient code nobody has touched in all that time.

Fast forward 18 years, and I’m in the same office at home. I definitely made the right decision that day in 2005.

Thanks, Matt.

15 Years at WordPress.com

Yesterday I was notified that I registered on WordPress.com for the first time fifteen years ago. I wasn’t going to mention it but Matt blogged a screenshot of his notification so it piqued my interest and curiosity.

I decided to look up what WordPress.com looked like back then, and it was a very simple message. There was no way to sign up. Nothing to hint at what it would eventually become. It wasn’t until later in the month when a registration form was added.

I took a quick look at what I was blogging about in July 2005. Wow, I used to post a lot didn’t I? See how easy it is to dive back into history? Try do that with Twitter and Facebook!

On the 26th I did blog about WordPress.com inviting people to sign up. Four reactions only but Matt’s post has more comments on it.

I was concerned about the price of petrol in 2005. I paid €1.05/lt on July 27th and Tesco announced they were going to increase prices to €1.20/lt. It hasn’t been that price in the last decade but it did hit a low point during the recent lockdown. I’ve been tracking fuel prices since around 2010 so I should make a blog post about that sometime. One thing it does reveal is working from home saves fuel. We refill the car once every 2 weeks usually.

Two million Blogs

The number of blogs on WordPress.com passed 2 million late last night. I think that’s just amazing and wonderful!

Links …

Frank asks for the facts behind the cocaine deaths in Ireland recently. I wondered what the odds of dying from cocaine are. Is it really as low as between 0.1% and 1%? How does that compare to road deaths?
Can you heat a room with a 100w bulb? Sounds too good to be true …
Dickie Rock looks scary!
Red Mum found a Far Too Much Bertie sticker. Haven’t seen any myself but I haven’t been in town in ages.
2 million blogs. That’s quite a community. The next social network could be WordPress. Looks like I’m not the only one who’d rather be blogging!

In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it’s not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, “For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.”

Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking — along the lines of what Messina envisions.
Gavin complained that he couldn’t copy/paste the Mahon Tribunal transcripts. I was able to do just that using Gnome app Evince. Here’s day 328. Anyone want to help copy them into a DRM free format? Our tax payers money paid for them after all.

A Simply Silly WordPress URL

I’m not sure why I noticed this protest sticker. It’s stuck to a lamp post on Patrick Street, Cork but maybe it was the typo in the URL that triggered my subconscious. One thing I can be certain of is that WordPress.org is not taking sides in any conflict of any sort! GPL software can be used by anyone just so long as they stick to the agreement with which they accepted the software.

As expected, palestinesolidarityproject.wordpress.com points at an old blog of theirs as they have now moved to their own server at palestinesolidarityproject.org.

Glossing over the .org mistake for a minute, why do people still put the “www.” in front of long-winded urls? It gets stripped by WordPress.com anyway. Why not put “http://” there instead? Makes more sense to me. Three cheers for the no-www movement!

So, have you seen any glaring typos on posters, fliers, stickers or blogs that made you look twice? Today’s link post doesn’t count. I did that on purpose to make a point. Sure. 🙂

Stumble upon WordPress.com

Nice! I just noticed that Stumbleupon support WordPress.com by adding the WordPress.com favicon to the SU taskbar.

Of course, it’s not the only way to browse WordPress.com, you can always use the Next link to jump to a random blog. The beauty of Stumbleupon, is that someone recommended the link. I’ve found some interesting blogs including the Doorways Around the World blog which is errr, full of photos of doorways.

Here’s my stumbleupon page. You’ll notice I’ve stumbled some of my own posts. I don’t want to spam my account and stumble everything, but if I’ve spent longer than usual writing some posts, it’s a good way of driving a few extra visitors to those special posts. Stumbleupon is definitely my favourite social bookmarking site. Install the plugin and start stumbling!

PS. I’m not the only one who likes Stumbleupon!

Ye Olde Map of Online Communities

From the Icy North of Yahoo and Windows Live to the Gulf of Youtube there are many online communities out there. Surprisingly WordPress.com isn’t on the map. It must be further south in the warm and lush Tropics. Come join the party!

Knock! Knock! Hallloooooo?

Is anyone out there? Next time you come across a blog post without a comment, take a few minutes to stop and chat and leave some feedback. You’ll make someone’s day, I promise.

You didn't hear? Upgrade now!

On the off chance that you haven’t heard the news yet. You should upgrade your WordPress install straight away. Don’t hesitate, do it now. Don’t pause to grab a cup of coffee. If you’re just waking up then rub the sleep from your eyes and jump to the download page and grab WordPress 2.1.2.

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Users running from svn code aren’t affected, but then you probably already knew that already didn’t you? You should be subscribed to Hackers and Testers lists.

Don’t worry if you’re running a WordPress MU site. That isn’t affected, although you should upgrade to the latest 1.1.1 release as that fixes a number of problems with 1.0 as well as merging in some security fixes from WordPress core.

WordPress.com users have nothing to worry about.

The Schneider Interview

Robert Scoble talks to Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic in this video interview about WordPress.com, Automattic and lots of other stuff. I’ve only watched the first 10 minutes, Toni talks about some of the features of WordPress.com – paid features, making money, adverts, fighting splogs and more.

Do you like Akismet? That’s covered too. Make sure you set aside some time today to watch this interview if you use WordPress!