#The WordPress.com Blog

[wordpressdotcom]

Some folks know him as Bob Dunn, BobWP, or the host of the podcast Do the Woo. To others, he’s just Bob; the man with the kind eyes, helpful spirit, and iconic hat.

Learn more about Bob’s origin story—and superpowers— with WordPress, Woo, and WordPress.com.

[stonerskeletor]

i hate everything about web 3.0 and how few options we have for any form of social platform nowadays but i especially hate how awful the blogging scene is now.

wordpress is filled with robo-"art" and you can't do any sort of customization without paying money.

blogger is boring and also has like no customization.

bear and mataroa are great but have no comment systems.

medium and substack are filled with people who blog to make money. tbh, so is wordpress.

neocities/nekoweb have zonelets but tbh i don't want to fuck around w code every time i wanna make a blog post.

i love tumblr, of course, but it definitely feels like the microblogging site that it is. and that's okay!! but sometimes you just want longer form blogging and a site that isn't so demographically skewed to one country.

but. i dunno. maybe i'm just yapping into the void, but i miss the old blogging days and the old internet.

[carlocarrasco]

COMELEC to launch massive voter education campaign for 2025 elections this December

Starting December 2, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) will launch a massive voter education campaign related to the 2025 National and Local Elections and the use of automated counting machines (ACMs), according to a GMA Network news report. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the GMA news report. Some parts in boldface… The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is set…

[munaeem]

What is a pingback comment in wordpress.com ? what are its benefits and harm?

A pingback in WordPress.com is a type of comment notification that occurs when one blog links to another blog. It is an automated feature that allows blogs to communicate with each other. When you publish a post that includes a link to another WordPress blog, WordPress automatically sends a pingback to that blog. If the other blog accepts pingbacks, it will display a comment (or notification) on…

[jeidai]

We can run Tumblr on the rock-solid infrastructure behind WordPress.com.

Hah! I say, hah!

automattic's made a ton of blunders recently but i hope they're not gonna try something like convert tumblr to run on wordpress, a project that both tumblr and wordpress engineers agreed would be a lot of work for no gain (most likely worse performance). that would be a silly thing to do.

[realityfragments]

Kill The Social Networks.

There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in. The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their…

[bj88gacuadao]

Bj88 là trang đá gà độc quyền được yêu thích nhất tại Việt Nam. Bj88 hiện đang là nhà cái độc quyền Đá gà Thomo số 1 Việt Nam. Truy cập trang chủ nhà cái https://bj88.win/để tham gia đặt cược các giải đá gà thomo lớn nhất và nhận thưởng 388k.

[startblogpro]

How to Install Jetpack on Your WordPress Website?

Hey there, WordPress enthusiasts! If you're looking to supercharge your website with awesome features and enhanced functionality, it's time to talk about Jetpack. Jetpack is like a superhero plugin for your WordPress website, offering a wide range of tools and capabilities to take your site to the next level. So, grab your web cape, because I'm about to show you how to install Jetpack and unlock its powers!

Step 1: Prepare for Launch

Before we can install Jetpack, let's make sure you're all set for a smooth takeoff. Here's what you need:

A Self-Hosted WordPress Website: Jetpack requires a self-hosted WordPress website, not the WordPress.com platform. If you're not sure whether your website is self-hosted or hosted on WordPress.com, reach out to your hosting provider for clarification.

A WordPress.com Account: To use Jetpack, you'll need a WordPress.com account. If you don't have one yet, don't worry—it's free and easy to create. Just head over to WordPress.com and follow the sign-up process.

Step 2: Activate Jetpack

Now that you're all set up, it's time to activate Jetpack and let the magic unfold. Here's how:

Install the Jetpack Plugin: In your WordPress dashboard, go to "Plugins" and click on "Add New." Search for "Jetpack" in the plugin directory. Once you find it, click "Install Now" and then "Activate."

Connect Jetpack to WordPress.com: After activating Jetpack, you'll be prompted to connect it to your WordPress.com account. Click on the "Connect to WordPress.com" button and follow the on-screen instructions to link your website with your account.

Choose a Jetpack Plan: Jetpack offers various plans with different features. You can choose the free plan or explore the paid options for additional functionality. Select the plan that suits your needs and budget.

Fun Fact: Jetpack Takes Your Website to New Heights

Did you know that Jetpack is created by Automattic, the same folks behind WordPress.com? They designed Jetpack to bring some of the powerful features from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress websites. It's like giving your website a rocket boost!

Step 3: Configure Jetpack Settings

Once Jetpack is activated, it's time to configure its settings and unleash its full potential. Here are a few key settings to consider:

Security and Performance: Jetpack offers security features like brute force attack protection, downtime monitoring, and website performance enhancements. Explore these settings and enable the ones that suit your website's needs.

Site Stats and Analytics: Jetpack provides detailed insights into your website's traffic and visitor behavior. Activate the Site Stats module to keep an eye on your website's performance and audience engagement.

Social Sharing: Enable the social sharing buttons offered by Jetpack to make it easy for your visitors to share your content on social media. It's like giving them a one-click ticket to spread the word about your awesome website.

Step 4: Explore Jetpack's Modules and Features

Jetpack is not just a one-trick pony—it's a whole box of tricks! Take some time to explore its modules and features, and activate the ones that align with your website goals. From enhanced site search to contact forms, related posts, and even automated social media posting, Jetpack has something for everyone.

Fun Fact: Jetpack's Sidekick—WordPress.com

Jetpack works hand in hand with WordPress.com. By connecting your WordPress website to your WordPress.com account, you not only unlock Jetpack's features but also gain access to a community of WordPress users and resources. It's like joining a superhero team!

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[carlocarrasco]

Donkey Kong Country at 30

Donkey Kong Country: RARE’s Gorilla Turns 30 When Donkey Kong Country (DKC) was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1994, a lot of gamers were blown away by the visuals and its enjoyable game design. The game also made the character Donkey Kong – who was originally a villain in the 1981 arcade game – very popular. Donkey Kong Country was developed by the European game…

[wip]

Tumblr now disables custom pages by default and no longer allows users to turn off promotional banners from displaying on them. From a user perspective, it feels like the use of custom pages is being discouraged. It also feels like Tumblr prioritizes the social media aspects of the platform over the blogging aspects. Interest in the web revival is growing, and with that in mind, it would be awesome to see Tumblr embrace it with a renewed focus on custom pages and improvements for bloggers. :-)

Answer: Hi there, @unicornwishes!

We also love the blogging side of Tumblr, but unfortunately we haven’t had as much time to focus on it with our recent work on Communities. But blogging on Tumblr isn't going anywhere! We’re just not sure yet when we'll work on features like custom pages.

If you're interested in custom pages or other blogging features, we also have a wonderful sister platform called WordPress.com specifically for blogging, so feel free to check that out too!

Thanks for your question. Keep ’em coming, folks.

This post has been edited for clarity.

[macmanx]

Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today.

Running Tumblr’s back end on WordPress would allow for greater efficiencies, while not changing the interface and experience that Tumblr’s user base has grown to love.

[goodjohnjr]

Renaming Christian YouTube Video Names On My Blog

File:YouTube video player history.png (in portuguese).png This dream involved me looking at my WordPress.com blog. I noticed something about many of the YouTube videos about Christianity by Christians. Their videos that were linked / embedded on some of my blog posts that were about those videos. I noticed that it seemed that they would change the names of their videos every so often. It…

[allthegeopolitics]

Tumblr is making the move to WordPress. After its 2019 acquisition by WordPress.com parent company Automattic in a $3 million fire sale, the new owner has focused on improving Tumblr’s platform and growing its revenue. Now Automattic will shift Tumblr’s back end over to WordPress, Automattic said in a blog post published on Wednesday. The company clarified that it will not change Tumblr into WordPress; it will just run on WordPress. “We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted. [...]

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Tagging: @vague-humanoid