Today the Jetpack plugin turns five years old. Who woulda thunk it? It’s one of the most popular plugins in WP history, and sites that include it as part of their WordPress install are more likely to to have engaged and active users — we’ve even seen it reduce churn on major web hosts. While there’s been a lot that’s happened in the Jetpack plugin so far, what’s around the corner has me even more excited. 😀 🚀 P.S. Check out that new domain.
Ben Casnocha is an interesting and innovative character in his own right, and it’s worth reading his essay slash short book on the years he spent as the right hand man of Reid Hoffman.
It’s never a bad time to read and learn about the life, work, and poetry of Gary Snyder.
Jazzy Claire de Lune
I love this version from Kamasi Washington of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune, or “light of the moon.” Here’s the Paul Verlaine poem that inspired the original composition:
Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fanciful disguises.All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.
For small business owners, WordPress is a well-trusted company, Yelp is a brand in trouble, and Facebook is on a downward path. Those are some of the findings out today from a survey of 6,000 small business owners from the second half of 2015 conducted by Alignable.
You can see the whole thing here. WordPress came in with a NPS of 73, Shopify at 29, Godaddy at 26, Squarespace at 11, Wix at -7, Weebly at -13, Web.com at -61, and Yelp at -66. Here’s how a Net Promoter Score works.
One of my favorite movies is Thank You for Smoking, the Jason Reitman’s film that looks at the world through the lens of a tobacco lobbyist. It’s fiction, though. This real-life Rolling Stone look at what is going on with rooftop solar in Florida and the big utilities has quotes that could have easily been in the movie.
Facing an amendment that would open up one of the sunniest states to solar power, the utilities created a competing amendment called “Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice,” which, as you might imagine, is extraordinarily unfriendly to anyone who wants solar panels on their home. Why the confusing title?
Bascom insisted there was no intention to mislead. “It would defy all logic,” she tells Rolling Stone. “Why would we confuse ours with one that does not have public support?”