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In late September 2024, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, started a public dispute with hosting provider WP Engine, calling the company “a cancer to WordPress.” He accused WP Engine of not contributing enough to the WordPress ecosystem and profiting off of trademark confusion. The story only got stranger from there…

As part of Matt’s increasing irresponsible and irrational behaviour, WordPress took over the extremely popular plugin, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), renaming it “Secure Custom Fields” (SCF). With it, they stole years of reputation, good reviews and most importantly, trust from ACF.

Every time Matt Mullenweg has lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner.

Here’s the kicker: Any fork, especially if WP Engine backs it, will be a win for Matt. It means they’re finally contributing. Since it’s GPL their modifications are available to everyone else, including Automattic.

Someday I have to reboot Bingeworthy, it's the software snack I miss the most. It broke when Twitter broke their identity system.

BTW, why doesn't Netflix buy Metacritic and integrate their ratings aggregator in their user interface. I predict I'd watch far more stuff on Netflix than I do now. Or Apple TV, Max, Hulu, Disney, etc. The idea that such a valuable resource is not part of the user experience is crazy imho. What a waste. What reminded me of this is Plex has integrated the equivalent of Bingeworthy in their service, which is also a good idea and will glue communities of users to you. The idea is to systematize recommendations. If I know a specific friend liked a movie or a show is valuable information for me, not just advertisers.

Textcasting shows up as a slight blip or less on Google Trends.

I am totally having a blast with my hybrid blog, built by textcasting WordPress and Mastodon. Just wrote a post about the day the NYT signs off, finally realizing how fcuked we are if Trump is elected or manages to steal the election next month. Their final headline in this story is GOOD LUCK AMERICA.

Jamie Zawinski on the 30-year anniversary of the Netscape 0.9 release:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar.

Tuned in to the SpaceX livestream in time to see the Starship splashdown. Watched the recap of catching the booster too. Incredible. Looks like something that might be an AI-generated video, but it’s real. 🚀

You're afraid that looking like being a small company means you'll lose sales. It's actually the opposite -- you're alienating your best customers.

Just when the community thought things couldn’t get more disruptive – because they’re already mighty disruptive – they have.

So while I always try to keep things from getting personal, I'll break practice to make this plea: Matt, don't turn into a mad king.

Over the last few weeks, the web has watched in horror as Matt Mullenweg has "gone nuclear" after starting his own personal crusade against WP Engine. At this point, it doesn't really matter whether Matt had a valid point or not, because in the process he's executed a supply chain attack, thrown WordPress users under a bus and then proceeded to lock core contributors out.

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard. On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company … Continue reading Everyone’s An Owner →

I would switch to any podcatcher that let me edit my subscription list outside their app, because I use that list in different contexts, also because I’d like to share my list with others, and would like that to be a dynamic connection, so I could add feeds as I learn about them, or remove feeds that have stopped updating. Also because there are lots of others, aka influencers who’d like to too. You’d own the market if you did this.

The common denominator between journalism, business and politics is that none of them have any respect for people. To rise in influence, money or power you have to give up imagination, and be ruled by cynicism. If you don’t believe this, show me a journalist who listens, a business that makes products for thinkers, or a politician who lets individual people lead them.

Bennu Coffee might be too serious about their wi-fi passwords. ☕️

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, host Lillian Cunningham created the “Presidential” podcast, with one episode dedicated to each of the (at the time) 44 U.S. presidents. Now, in the thick of the 2024 election, Lillian is back. This is the first of two special...

It’s time for another update in my Honda Element blog post series. After my last road trip, I decided to scrap the rooftop box. Even though the extra storage was great, I was suspicious it was dragging too much on the highway and killing my gas milage. In its place I’ve moun...