After recently going through the juggernaut of a 30 day campaign myself on the veritable monster that is Kickstarter it’s been very interesting to see a ton of new players that are entering the WordPress ecosystem as WordPress-centric alternatives. Must be the soup du jour or something like that. I have a few issues with explosion of the crowd funding space and these new niche-within-niche-within-niche crowd funding sites that appear to be cropping up nearly every day – got a fascination with pottery? There’s a crowd funding community and website for you! That type of stuff, if you will. With the […]

As you may have noticed, things look a little different today as we’ve spent most of our time locking in our account and setting things up with BuySellAds. For this introductory experiment (and you know that we love to experiment) we’ve got a very large top banner (728×90), some sidebar squares, and a content/comment interstitial for the time being. For stage one of Operation “Make this blog pay for itself” we are simply mimicking some of the more common practices that audiences are familiar with on some of the other major technology blogs. To be sure, no innovation here my friends, […]

Every once in a while I review my personal blog publishing process to analyze what I’m doing so that I can ensure maximum levels of productivity and limited amounts of waste. I do this for the obvious reasons as just listed but also because I’m generally curious as to not just what I’m doing but also why. I often question the very things that I do so that I might gather a new perspective or see if I can better myself incrementally. I’ve learned do this quite instinctually – in fact, I’ve done something fairly dramatic this past weekend with my iPhone that […]

As you’ve seen, I’m somewhat obsessed with new technologies that may allow a deeper and more comprehensive way to collaborate with others at the blog publishing and posting layer. Even this tool that we covered last week provides a way to collaborate on stories and news. But what about at the actual post layer itself? Some of the new features in 3.6 will have some of these but there’s nothing quite like real-time, is there? The ability for a team of people to knock out critical pieces of work on given timeframes is a must in today’s fast paced world. If WordPress […]

We had the pleasure of having Jen Mylo visit us and speak at the WordCamp Atlanta event a few months ago and her talk is finally up for your viewing pleasure. We’d love to showcase all of the videos from the event (and you can browse them here although please note that new ones are being added every few days as we complete the uploading process) but this one’s great for everyone because she covers some of the core essentials like what the WordPress Foundation is and how it’s different than WordPress.com and other such things that are easy to get […]

Something that fascinates me is the lifecycle of WordPress theme shops, plugins, and the individuals behind them. You see, WordPress has been around long enough now that we’ve seen the rise and fall (or simply closing up shop) of more than a handful of WordPress-centric businesses. We’ve also seen some long-time users, developers, and designers also “move on” to greener pastures, or so they say. Part of this is simply based on the individuals personal preference and part of this might actually have to do with the changing ecosystem and climate. Perhaps it’s a combination of it all. There are […]

What a week. What a week. With a number of tragedies being reported all over the world it’s hard not to get pessimistic about the continuation of the human race. Actually, it’s hard to find motivation at times if you think about it too long. But great work is being done and there is more good out there than what’s being reported. So let’s keep it up folks! Stay positive – this too shall pass!

It was shared this morning that you now have the opportunity to try the new admin design that’s planning to hit shelves in the next update early, if you want, by just enabling the Experimental Admin Design (MP6) via your Users –> Personal Settings in your profile. It’s been talked about for quite some time, especially in the .org side of things, but most of the WordPress.com users have probably been casually unaware that there’s a new design coming down the pipe.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock there’s been some serious attention recently to the power of social news coming to all of us via Twitter, Reddit, and other such networks and how the news is actually breaking on these sites before it’s even getting covered on the major news outlets. We’ve all known for quite some time that this was happening – and the major networks have scrambled to somehow keep the pace but it’s relatively impossible to do so unless something significant changes within the editorial and publishing space. For example, with the recent bombings of the Boston […]

I’ll admit it – I’m not super-fans of any other commenting system other than the one that comes with WordPress – in other words, I’m somewhat partial to just going out-of-the-box. That isn’t to say that the other systems, like the very popular Disqus or the somewhat mediocre IntenseDebate aren’t bad – it’s just that I don’t like using them because I really want to limit the amount of data that heads off into other distant lands beyond my own installation. But many users use them and they have done quite fine with them. Another quite popular commenting system is Facebooks’ […]