For my first podcast of the year with the WordPress community, I joined the new Do the Woo podcast! It started with a little technical difficulty but ended up being a great conversation about WooCommerce, WordPress, and AI.

Today we honored the passing of Jesus Ornelas, the father of my friend Rene, whom I’ve known for 28 years now. At the service outpouring of love expressed in words, music, and presence was so powerful. Alongside his biological sons, I said a few words, which are as follows. My memories of Mr. Ornelas begin … Continue reading Remembering Jesus Ornelas →

One of the great WordPress blogs is Quote Investigator. In their investigation into the original source of “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” I came across this great variation from Woodrow Wilson on the amount of time he spent preparing speeches. “That depends on the length of the speech,” … Continue reading Shorter Speech →

It’s that time of the year again for a new version release. Forty-two is a fun number, of course, famous from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m in Miami, where I’m attending a conference by Richard Saul Wurman. I decided that it would be a great way to fill my brain on my birthday. … Continue reading Matt 4.2 →

So my new obsession is a Ukrainian-born musician, Alexander Hrustevich, who plays a type of chromatic Russian accordion called a Bayan. He plays incredible transcriptions of classical pieces, replicating the parts of an entire orchestra with just two hands. If you’re familiar with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, you know the Presto for Summer is one of … Continue reading Classical Accordian →

The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. … Continue reading Mad Ones →

The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites: Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world.  … Continue reading Small Hit →

Pankil Shah writes I replaced WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger with this one app. (It’s Beeper.) And Wirecutter picks the 3 best journaling apps of 2026. (It’s Day One.)

The best part about blogging is the comments, and after I posted “I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room.” Michael Wender and David Artiss jumped in that it’s already there! … Continue reading Find My Update →

I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room. 

Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience. Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up onyour own two feet. Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion. Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back. Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional … Continue reading Jackson Kiddard →

They’re both long reads, but worthwhile.

I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts that ended up with friends. I made a resolution in 2025 to watch more films. It’s an art form I have many friends in and when we have hung out I realized how shallow my understanding of the canon of film was. … Continue reading Happy New Year →

The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or reverse-engineered data. He’s a hacker, artist, and provocateur. … Continue reading Riley Watz →

It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic. I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch. If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far more interesting is his 2019 … Continue reading Wolfram Automattica →

If you haven’t seen it, The Thinking Game documentary is excellent, and available for free on YouTube. You have to buy it, but the Kanye documentary In Whose Name is also pretty fascinating. (I first blogged about Kanye in 2007, discussing PHP’s botched version 4 to 5 upgrade.)

One of Carl Jung’s famous quotes is to “Beware unearned wisdom.” Sometimes it’s brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache: Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our normal capacity. It’s all too easy … Continue reading Beware Unearned Wisdom →

Cloudflare released their Radar report for 2025, one fun stat was they analyzed the top 5,000 domains, and it had some interesting results for website technologies. Open Source tech came in at 47% for WordPress and 4.7% for Drupal, which wins the majority! Then in proprietary there was Adobe at 16%, Contentful at 8%, Shopify … Continue reading Cloudflare CMS Stats →

The Wall Street Journal has a fun article about the Nex Playground, The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. I think this is the first time one of Audrey Capital’s companies (we invested when it was the Homecourt app) is the hot Christmas item. Here’s it … Continue reading Nex Playground →

The new X/Twitter algorithim is hard to predict, but I’ve had one go viral with over a million views now, a quote-tweet of a cool demo video of Apple’s website builder from 2009, with themes and blog support and everything. Interesting to compare its interface to Gutenberg and WordPress today. For the video to play … Continue reading Apple iWeb →

The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an … Continue reading Winter Fun →

Tonight was a lot of threads connecting for me. At Automattic’s Noho Space we hosted an event for Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about Pope Francis, called Aldeas. There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a priest, and I had been inspired by meeting a Franciscan seminary student. I took it … Continue reading Aldeas →

Tumblr has a fun 2025 in review, and if you’re a Pocket Casts user open the app to see all your stats for your listening this year.

A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH’s company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source. Dries Buytaert follows up on my response to … Continue reading Dries OSS →

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source. 37signals/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson’s insistence on calling it open source. “One more thing…  Fizzy is open source and … Continue reading DHH & Open Source →

Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicago, and has taken him to the … Continue reading Happy Birthday Kinsey →

There has been some lovely writing about self-driving this week, first in the New York Times where Jonathan Slotkin makes the medical case for autonomous vehicles. But I was really taken by The Economist’s look at how self-driving cars will transform urban economies. It’s behind a paywall. I enjoyed how they thought about the second-order … Continue reading Self-driving →

James LePage has a great write-up, SOTW 2025:The Year WordPress Became AI-Native.

One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They’re such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they delight in … Continue reading Unifi 5G →

Though the stream didn’t work as we hoped, the recording of this year’s State of the Word, which in many ways was our best one yet, is up now.