Tag Archives: WordPress.com

Craigslist Walmart Missed Connections

It’s neat the kinds of blogs that I can run into in a day of helping WordPress.com users.

So if you ever wanted to see a collection of Missed Connections posts on Craigslist specifically dealing with Walmart, this WordPress.com blog has got you covered because the author is collecting the best of them so you don’t have to.

On reading them I both do and don’t want these to be from real people instead of cleverly-written Craigslist satire. If you read the blog I am pretty sure you will be similarly conflicted.

A Better Kind of Penguin

He’s coming for you. With the spamhammer.

A little while back, Google made a pretty big change to their search algorithms with an update that they call the “Penguin” update.

Penguin was specifically designed to punish backlinkers who are using certain black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing and things like comment and article spinning. What happens is that these spammers are checking Google Webmaster Tools (or receiving email updates) and are receiving messages that their ranking is being negatively affected by spam blogs or comments they have left on WordPress.com blogs.

Then, we at WordPress.com get emails that look like this (my paraphrase):

We need to have our links removed from your website ASAP. Below are a few URLs where we found our links. This may not be all of the links on your site. Please ensure that you remove ALL links to our site.

After this they provide us with the URL of their site (it’s usually something that’s basically pure spam) and then a list of all the links they know of across the WordPress.com network. This leads me to laugh, quite often out loud, because:

  1. They have just alerted us to a spam campaign on WordPress.com and likely elsewhere and given us exactly what we need to investigate,
  2. They have just admitted to us spam comments, entire spam blogs, or even sponsored post content that exists on WordPress.com and that we are looking to get rid of anyway, and
  3. The best part about it is that if it’s not that bad we could just leave it alone, do nothing, and possibly punish the spammers more than if we were to remove everything.

It probably doesn’t sound like much to you, but it’s one of those little things that amuses me and causes me to enjoy what I do.

WordCamp Montreal Presentation

I just finished giving a talk at WordCamp Montreal on the differences between self-hosted WordPress and hosting on WordPress.com.

If you missed the talk, you can find the slides below and I’ll post the video as soon as it’s available. Otherwise, if you have any questions or notes from the presentation that you would like to share, please leave a comment! If you have scans or pictures of handwritten notes you’ve taken, I’d love to see them to understand how people heard what I said.

It was a pleasure to present at WordCamp Montreal—my first visit to the city. Thank you to the local WordPress community for your hospitality and for attending my talk.

Cardinal Nation Blogs on WordPress.com

Two points of which you should be made aware before you read this:

  • I work for Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress.com (so I work “here”), and
  • You should ask me about my love of baseball and the Cardinals sometime.

Through links to my own site, some random searching and perusal of the baseball tag here on WordPress.com, and looking through the tag page for Cardinal Nation (which I suggest you use if you are a blogger who is all about the Cards), I’m trying to compile a list of Cardinals-related blogs on WordPress.com. If you think your blog should be in this list, please leave me a comment and I’ll check it out.

Perhaps this should lead into a meetup or something of the sort, as it’s always awesome when WordPress peoples get together and always awesome when Cardinals fans get together, so getting those things together can only be a winning combination.

The list:

WordPress.com blogs that have moved elsewhere:

Comment if I missed you. 🙂

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?