Tag Archives: Off-Topic

Blogging at WordPress.com

To the best of my recollection, I have been blogging in some form or another since some time in 1999. When I started, I was manually updating a site using a very old version of Dreamweaver. Later, I burned through a series of “platforms,” if you could call them that at the time. I started by rolling my own using some rudimentary ASP knowledge. I built one by harvesting posts and replies from an installation of Snitz Forums. I used LiveJournal for a while. I played with WordPress in its original release and then decided to go Movable Type instead—then ended up going back to WordPress when MT changed their licensing.

I’ve been on WordPress ever since, except for a three-month stint with Drupal that is best left in the past.

In that time, I’ve blogged, made themes, blogged some more, learned how to make basic plugins, and watched WordPress grow into what it is today. Thought I’ve had a WordPress.com account since back in the golden ticket days of the service, I was always primarily a user of self-hosted WordPress until a little less than a year ago.

Not long after I began working at Automattic and on WordPress.com full-time as a Happiness Engineer, I was looking at my personal sites and trying to determine the best thing to do with them. Shared hosting can be slow, and I was running more than one site off it. I had a very custom theme that I was pretty unhappy with because I’d rushed it and didn’t have the time to fix what I didn’t like about it.

I eventually made the decision to move both of my personal sites to WordPress.com, for a few reasons:

  • It’s better and more reliable hosting than any host within my cost reach.
  • I wanted to work with the same tools and within the same restrictions as the rest of our users.
  • It allowed me to test new features using my own content and site so I can relate them more easily in support.

When thinking about topics to write on for the Post a Day challenge, the experience of having my sites on WordPress.com kept popping into my head. It’s a great place to host a site, but there are things you sometimes need to work around because of our code or embed restrictions, and sometimes I miss certain aspects of self-hosting my sites.

On the other hand, there are plenty of advantages to hosting at WordPress.com. There are features here that are unique and either can’t be found (yet) or can’t be done easily on a self-hosted site without some serious systems mojo. I don’t have to worry about making sure everything is updated. I don’t have to worry about my host’s security track record (or lack thereof). I’ve had only a fraction of the downtime I experienced when I was self-hosting on a shared host.

So as part of my Post a Day ramblings, I want to talk about the experience of blogging on WordPress.com. What’s awesome about it? What’s frustrating about it or needs some working around? I think I’ve got some neat tricks up my sleeve for working with WordPress.com, and I’m willing to bet you do, too. You can find this post and my others regarding WordPress.com by clicking on the link in my navigation menu at the top of this page.

I encourage you to write about this as part of your trek through posting once per day this year! Let’s get the discussion going by rocking some comments! What is:

  • One thing you love about WordPress.com, or maybe the one feature that sold you on moving or starting your site here?
  • One thing that you don’t like so much about WordPress.com, and maybe wish was a bit different?

The Limits of Anonymity on WordPress.com

Not long after I began working here at Automattic, I transferred the vast majority of my personal sites over to WordPress.com. (I keep a couple of sites for testing core stuff on an external host.) I did this because there are tremendous advantages to the WordPress.com platform, including what is amazing reliability, faster sites—especially compared to shared hosts, and some features that are unique to WordPress.com and don’t exist currently for core WordPress installations.

(My favorite of those features is Post by Email, and I actually have planned a series of posts talking about the nifty things you get by having your site at WordPress.com. That’s another post or three, though.)

When I was using self-hosted WordPress to design and manage my sites, I was in complete control—or at least in full knowledge—of all of the data, including logs and database information. This meant that I had a pretty good understanding of what of my personal information was being kept, stored, or made available to my host and other parties.

When you’re on WordPress.com, you don’t have access to that information. We’re asked occasionally what information we keep or what personal information is available to someone if we are asked. This week, we published a support page that can be found here that spells out exactly what information we keep and how it can be divulged to third parties. I think this is a great thing to publish for the benefit of our users and to be up-front with them regarding their personal and identifying information.

To quote the support page, here’s the personally identifying information we keep:

We keep the following private data about WordPress.com sites and users:

  • The email address used to create a blog
  • The IP address from which the blog was created
  • The date and time when a blog was created
  • The IP addresses from which blog posts have been published
  • The email and IP addresses of anyone who has left a comment on a blog

Note that, as the article mentions, all of this data is bound by Automattic’s stated privacy policy. This is good.

However, it also means that WordPress.com is not a truly anonymous service. You should keep that in mind when you are signing up for the service and as you are using it. This information is enough to positively identify people in a lot of cases.

This is a lot less information than most service providers collect. For myself, on my self-hosted site on a shared host, I know that at least the following is collected on my activities:

  • My name, billing address, and credit card number
  • The access logs whenever I would FTP or SSH into the site, and likely most actions performed there as well
  • Access logs, including IP addresses, from all users who visited my site
  • My personal information required for WHOIS (and purchasing private registration is not a shield, but without it this information is even publicly available)

Remember that to a court, this information is fair game. It can be subpoenaed or ordered to be turned over by a judge if someone has good cause to request it—and in a lot of cases, providers of the services you use may not tell you the full extent of what they collect or the details behind this information. This is why I’m personally quite happy that we published this support page, to put the information in your hands and help you make an informed decision when choosing whether to use our services at WordPress.com.

(As I mentioned above, I’ll try to give you some more really awesome reasons why you should join us in future posts.)

31

Today was my 31st birthday, and by any reckoning it’s been an amazing year.

  • I left my job of four years at Concordia Publishing House.
  • I started working for Automattic, the best company in the world filled with fine people I now call friends and colleagues.
  • My kids turned 7, 6, 5, and 3. They are getting too big for my good.
  • I made my first trip out of the country (not counting a quick jaunt to Canada when I was a child) – to Lisbon, Portugal and had an amazing time. I really must go back someday.
  • I bought my first digital SLR camera.
  • I submitted my first accepted patch to the core WordPress project.
  • I landed in the hospital with heart trouble and re-affirmed a commitment to better health.
  • I curled for the first time (and definitely not the last).
  • I went to my first WordCamp (in San Francisco, also my first visit to that city).

I’m sure there are many things I’ve done in the past year that I am forgetting here, but it’s been a good one with lots of great experiences shared with lots of people.

Thanks to all of you for making it the best yet. (Especially to my wife, who continues to put up with me for reasons I sometimes cannot fathom.)

This Evening's Twitter Error Message

As opposed to:

  • Literally wrong?
  • Figuratively wrong?
  • Hypothetically wrong?

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

One of my Christmas gifts was a copy of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a movie of which the following are true:

  1. I heard a lot of good things about it.
  2. I wanted to see it but didn’t because I don’t get out much.
  3. A lot of people I know who are similar to me really enjoyed it.
  4. I am a nerd.

All right, so the fourth one is really true about me, but I think you can see where this is going. Having not read the books on which the movie is based, and currently being stuck on the fifth stage of the game that is not really based on the movie but is actually based on the books, I can say that I really, really enjoyed it.

Watching it was a bit of a “birthday eve” treat, and Amanda and I grabbed some dinner and sat down to watch it. She was a bit confused, and I will be the first person to admit that it moves really quickly and can be a bit hard to follow in some places. I would say not to let that prevent you from watching it. If you are remotely close to my age (which will be 31 tomorrow), you really should watch this movie—especially if you grew up with the second wave of video games like I did (meaning the NES and what followed).

The premise is simple. Scott Pilgrim is in love with Ramona Flowers. But first, he has to defeat her seven evil exes. (He does not know this right away.)

The execution of the movie elevates it to a certain level of awesome. It has a certain style that is part action film, part comic book, and part video game all rolled into one. It jump cuts from scene to scene, sometimes in mid-conversation. The narrative plays with your expectations: are these real events? Are they fantasy? Is Scott Pilgrim supposed to be a “real” person, or a character in a video game? Scenes move from reality to fantasy with reckless abandon.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter in any way more than that it’s entertaining and tells a fun and enjoyable story that doesn’t need reality to work. If you like video games or even have a passing familiarity with them, it relies on their various idioms and tropes to get its point across and delight you. The setpieces are what they need to be, the action is surprisingly well done, the soundtrack is right on the money, and the actors pull everything off just the way you need them to.

I know that it’s a self-contained story, won’t have a sequel, and was a gamble for Universal to back. Unfortunately, it seems not too many people went out to see a movie about life in Toronto (but who can blame them, really).

But it is worthy of your attention, and in my opinion is one of my Movies You Should See.