Chris Lema writes on how WordPress gives you tools to change lives.
You can now count on a “Snowden Sunday” every few weeks: some jaw-dropping revelation that if you had suggested it a few years ago people would have dismissed you as a tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid. Now the hardest part is not becoming numb. Here’s the latest from The Washington Post: In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are. Bonus: CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career.’
Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 1 is now up, and it’s a great reminder of the huge diversity and incredible quality of what people are publishing on WP across the web, on both .com and .org WordPresses. Great for picking up a few meatier reads for this holiday weekend.
Scoop and Scale
NY Times did a neat article on their CMS Scoop, one cool piece of which is their ICE editor we worked on with them a few years ago. Their cropping stuff is also cool, though it’s dizzying how many sizes they need to produce. They included some numbers on the volume of content published through Scoop, “700 articles, 600 images, 14 slide shows and 50 videos per day,” and folks were asking about the latest from WordPress. Of course many people run WP on their own cloud or infrastructure, so these numbers aren’t comprehensive, but at least for WP.com and Jetpack blogs we now see every day 1,300,000 posts, 780,000 uploads (images and videos), and close to half of all posts have some sort of external content embedded in them, like a Youtube, Vimeo, or Tweet. I’m very proud that many members of the fourth estate from the Times to FiveThirtyEight are using WordPress.
The big daddy of WordCamps is open about another week for speaker submissions, if you have something interesting you’d like to say to the WordPress world send in your application to speak at WordCamp SF here.
Extended Interview with Forbes
J. J. Colao, who covered Automattic for Forbes Magazine in 2012 and has a long history and experience with WordPress and Automattic, sat down with me for close to three hours in March and somehow managed to distill it down to just a few thousand words of interview. (“13,500 words down to 2,800.”) I’m sheepish to link it because there are a lot of “I” statements and some nuance lost in the distillation, but JJ asks great questions and we cover a lot of ground that anyone who follows Automattic or the WordPress ecosystem I think will find interesting. You can check it out here.
iOS 8 WebKit changes finally allow all apps to have the same performance as Safari. I was just asked about the future of the mobile web at last night’s WP talk in Singapore. (Which had about 300 people there, great turnout!) There are still a lot of issues for the open web in a closed mobile world, but things like this are a great step in the right direction. Another reason I can’t wait for iOS 8. Hat tip: Matt Bumgardner.