WordPress.com announced an intriguing new premium search option for its Cloud Hosting customers today, dubbed VIP Search. It uses elasticsearch software that’s “hosted, managed, and supported by the WordPress.com VIP team.” Enabling VIP Search will make your search results more relevant from the start, with the ability to filter results by type of content, category, tag, author, date ranges, and more. VIP Search also allows for developer customization to seriously customize results.

Ok. Let’s have a competition, shall we? I’ve been messing with Chrome’s new Experimental Game called Maze and I’ve spent far too much of my valuable Monday morning trying to navigate some of the more popular websites out there in a game of classic Marble Madness and it occurred to me how fun it would be to have a little competition of sorts. So, after you get your bearings and experience the awesomeness of this Google Chrome experiment, let’s see who can win in our Community Game Challenge:

A little while ago (which seems like a lifetime ago) we reported on how the WP Tavern had apparently closed up shop with Jeffro leaving his role there after much introspection. Well, this morning we saw something quite fascinating – a real live blog post authored by Jeffro himself, sharing his experience at a recent WordCamp North Canton! Although the blog post was simply highlighting his experience I had to ask if the real Jeffro was coming back (and if WP Tavern) is re-opening for business. This was his response:

If you thought that starting up a WordPress company was easy then guess again – it’s just like what you thought it should be, a business. Even if you experience such out-of-this-world profit margins like $100k a month it still costs something to maintain the business, with services, processes, operations, and all. WPZoom pulled the proverbial curtain a bit and shared with us their costs of maintaining their startup venture. Although some may argue that they are definitely not just a “startup” (they’ve been around for quite some time, April, 2008) they still are on a startup-like budget, saving and scrimping […]

This incredible presentation at our recent WordCamp Atlanta 2013 was a must-see. In fact, Joe was running late and was unable to attend and thus present on Friday and many of our attendees were crushed that he wouldn’t be able to present. Well, we shifted a few things around and slotted him in on Saturday instead! He presented a compelling argument for how WordPress is literally saving journalism and how they’ve customized their installation into an incredibly-powerful publishing tool and system. For those interested, this is definitely worth your time. Turn up your speakers as the volume is a bit […]

The WordPress.com VIP Team is looking to hire a few VIP wranglers to help support their growing business. If you’re interested in working for Automattic and specifically the VIP team for .com, then this is definitely worth taking a look at. VIP Wranglers are the people that make stuff happen for WordPress VIP. This means building the products and supporting them for their customers. They also go race car driving at some of their team powwows, which is one incentive I would definitely take advantage of!

Jekyll is an interesting blogging solution and one we’ve covered just one time previously where Cristi Burca had actually moved from WordPress to this alternate system for a number of reasons. It classifies itself as the following: “Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby.” I’m not exactly sure what all of that means but many people have started using it as a blogging system, where it has features such as permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts for your content. Well, it’s been a while since the last update – February of this year in fact, so this is […]

Aaron Holbrook graciously shares his experience with WordPress and version control in this oldie but goodie WordCamp presentation via WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012: Version Control lets you track your files over time. Why should you care? So when you mess up you can easily get back to a previous working version! I will take you through what version control is, why it’s important and how to start using it today on projects you’re already working on. The reason that we’re reposting it is the fact that it was finally uploaded and wasn’t previously available before! Although now with the new […]

A small mid-day update on just some of what I call the “Andrea” updates that will impact us as a community. The first is that @andreamiddleton is looking to mentor some “WordCamp Overseers” as trainees to help manage organizer applications. Jen Mylo shared this in a small update via events.make. If you’ve got a few hours a week to help then they would love for you to toss your hat into the ring. Andrea M. will choose 4 to help and then move from there!

With the recent announcement of Ghost becoming much less ghost-like we’ve been inundated with more and more CMS apps to check out. The honest truth is that Ghost is going to be one of 10’s of thousands of CMS / publishing systems out there, each unique in their own way and each having a different community behind them. One size does not fit all, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to pin that clause via some marketing, like what this new player is attempting to do: