Tag Archives: wordpress

Your Blog Has Always Loved You

There’s lots of talk going on early this week about Twitter and their intentions towards third-party clients. Will they permit them? Will Tweetbot still be around in six months? How am I going to connect with other people if Twitter goes the Facebook route and makes me use official clients that aren’t as nice as the third-party ones I have now?

I was going to write a bunch of words about this, but in the end it comes down to something very simple.

Your blog has always loved you. Open—or at least agreed-upon and widely used—standards are not going to magically grow walls and keep you or others out.

WordPress. RSS. Comments. Pingbacks.

Digging deeper: PHP. MySQL. Apache/Nginx. Linux.

These things don’t belong to someone else. They don’t belong to a company that needs to please its investors. They don’t have reasons to keep you out or to stop you from doing what you want.

They belong to you. You use them to make great things. You contribute to them and make not only your stuff, but other people’s stuff, better. You use them to read others’ content and to enter the discussion. If your blog hasn’t been the center of your digital presence, why not?

Your blog has always loved you.

Timeline WP

A WordPress theme based on Twenty Eleven and inspired by the Facebook Timeline. See it here.

Impressive-looking.

Lisbon in (iPhone) Pictures

I spent this past weekend in Lisbon visiting colleagues and friends and attending the first-ever WordCamp Lisboa, which was a very nice event. I was able to meet and greet with the Lisbon WordPress community for the second year in a row (familiar faces!) and help a few folks at the Happiness Bar between talks.

I love Lisbon and was delighted to return there. It was amazing to see this community that has grown from a handful of people we invited to a get-together at our Happiness meetup last year to a WordCamp with almost 200 registrants. It’s the power of open-source publishing at work.

I didn’t bring my camera this year, but I did snap more than usual with my iPhone.

The Automattic Creed

Matt shared on his blog the Automattic Creed, which is how my colleagues and I live and breathe on a daily basis:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

Working for with Automattic has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and certainly the best job I’ve ever had. I love what I do and the impact I have in making the experience of WordPress.com users and visitors better each day.

If you’re reading this and think this sounds interesting, maybe you should consider applying.

Your Email Address May Not Be Published

Hey, WordPress theme developers.

There’s something I’d like to ask you not to do anymore. Don’t do this:

Here, too:

And why not?

You are making a promise to people who visit any blog that uses your theme, and it’s one that may or may not be respected and honored by the blog owner or author.

“Your email address will never be published or shared.”

This type of language or a variant thereof is in an awful lot of WordPress themes. (In the first example above, “never” is even in italics to stress how important this is. Needless to say, on the blog where this notice was found (using a commonly-available theme), comments that didn’t agree with the author had their email addresses published in retorts by the blog author.

Because WordPress provides blog moderators with the email address (and the IP) of users who comment on their posts, the very information that many themes say will not be shared is given to the one person (or people) who have the ability to publish it for other readers of the post to see.

So I say think twice before putting this language in your theme.