Matt Mullenweg

Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Post author By Matt
Post date April 7, 2021
33 Comments on Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session. 🤔

I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that’s like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you’re in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom.

Wix is a for-profit company with a valuation that peaked at around 20 billion dollars, and whose business model is getting customers to pay more and more every year and making it difficult to leave or get a refund. (Don’t take my word for it, look at their investor presentations.) They are so insecure that they are also the only website creator I’m aware of that doesn’t allow you to export your content, so they’re like a roach motel where you can check in but never check out. Once you buy into their proprietary stack you’re locked in, which even their support documentation admits:

So if we’re comparing website builders to abusive relationships, Wix is one that locks you in the basement and doesn’t let you leave. I’m surprised consumer protection agencies haven’t gone after them.

Philosophically, I believe in open source, and if WordPress isn’t a good fit for you there are other great open source communities like Drupal, Joomla, Jekyll, and Typo3. We also have a great relationship with some of our proprietary competitors, and I have huge respect for the teams at Shopify and Squarespace, and even though we compete I’ve always seen them operate with integrity and I’d recommend them without hesitation.

I have to believe that users will care about that in the long run, and maybe that’s why Squarespace just passed up Wix in market share. They natively support exporting into WordPress’ format and don’t have to resort to dirty tricks to be successful. I expect Squarespace’s upcoming IPO will be a great one.

Wix, though, continues to show their true colors. Regardless of their product, I hope people consider the behavior of companies in the world they support with their dollars. Wix really wants you to see their new campaign though, so let’s take the bait and watch the creepy, misleading way they are trying to represent themselves.

Asides

Doctorow on IP

It’s not every day you see noted writer Cory Doctorow refer to a column as “the piece I’m most proud of,” and his essay in Locus Magazine on IP doesn’t disappoint, connecting the free software movement and the evolution of the term “author’s monopolies” to “intellectual property.”

The essay on DRM and Apple, available on his WP-powered blog, or Twitter, is also worth reading.

Asides

Invest Like the Best and Building Worlds

Post author By Matt
Post date February 22, 2021
3 Comments on Invest Like the Best and Building Worlds

On a Founder’s Field Guide episode with Patrick O’Shaughnessy we had an interesting conversation that covered a lot new ground, including an idea I’ve been playing around with on, as Patrick put it:

The idea from @photomatt that the best companies are those that build intricate worlds (in the same way that J. R. R. Tolkien came up with the elvish language) will always stick with me.

We also covered the pendulum of centralization and decentralization, current challenges facing the internet, and being a connoisseur of things overlooked. You can check out the episode on Apple, Google, Spotify, Overcast, and Pocket Casts.

I’ve been impressed by the audience of this podcast, a lot of people I admire reached out after this episode.

Asides

Parse.ly & Automattic

Post author By Matt
Post date February 8, 2021

Excited to welcome Parse.ly to the Automattic family, in an acquisition that’s closing today. They’ll be joining our enterprise group, WPVIP. The deal has been nicely covered in the Wall Street Journal and Axios. As a bonus, here’s Parse.ly co-founder Andrew Montalenti’s first comment on this blog, in 2012.

Great article, Matt. I wrote about this on my blog — Fully Distributed Teams: Are They Viable?
http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/05/14/distributed-teams
In it, I drew the distinction between “horizontally scaled” teams, in which physical offices are connected to remote workers via satellite (home or commercial) offices, and “fully distributed” teams where, as you said, “the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.”
At Parse.ly, we’re only a couple years old but have been operating on the distributed team model, with ~13 fully distributed employees, and it’s working well. Always glad to hear stories about how Automattic has scaled it to 10X our size.
And, likewise, we blow some of our office space savings on camaraderie-building retreats; our most recent one was in New York, see [here] and [here.]

Asides

Compounding Ice

Post author By Matt
Post date February 2, 2021

I learned something novel about how the ice age happened from this Freakishly Strong Base post by Morgan Housel:

The prevailing idea before [Wladimir] Köppen was that ice ages occur when the earth’s tilt supercharges the wrath of cold winters. Köppen showed that wasn’t the case. Instead, moderately cool summers are the culprit.
It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on.
You start with a thin layer of snow left over from a cool summer that no one pays much attention to, and after a few tens of thousands of years the entire earth is covered in miles-thick ice.

Fascinating! The blog goes on to apply the idea to that strong base, accumulating a bit at a time, to investing and business. The power of compounding seems appropriate to share on the day Jeff Bezos announced his retirement.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Munger, which is also how the article ends:

‘The first rule of compounding: never interrupt it unnecessarily.’
Charlie Munger

The iceberg photo is one I took near Svalbard in 2011.

Automattic

Revue Joins Twitter

Very excited to share the news that Revue is joining Twitter. I’m a huge fan of the idea of better newsletters and Automattic was the largest investor in Revue. I’m looking forward to seeing what the very talented team will do as part of the Twitter network. Also many thanks to Kevin Kelly and Om for introducing me to Revue early on.

WordPress

New WhiteHouse.gov

After you’ve watched the amazing poem from Amanda Gorman, check out the new WhiteHouse.gov that re-launched today using WordPress & Gutenberg with a number of cool features including dark mode, text zoom, a totally responsive layout, and a Spanish version of the site. The site is clean, fast, and accessible. It’s exciting and an honor that the online home for the Executive branch is on Open Source software, and I’m proud WordPress can carry the torch that Drupal lit in 2009.

Besides Gutenberg, poking around I noticed a HTTP header and HTML comment encouraging people to join USDS, and this great #46 easter egg in the theme file:

Anyone notice any other plugins? I haven’t spoken to him directly but I’d be shocked if Nacin wasn’t involved with this one. I’m also curious if any of the WP agencies were involved, it has touches of 10up but I don’t see any mention of it on their site or Twitter. Hoefler&Co credits Wide Eye Creative with the design.

I noticed a few people happy that some previous pages and files on the old site were returning 404 errors, like the controversial 1776 report, but on this I think the webmasters of the United States of America should demand better, since Cool URIs Don’t Change. Previous websites are all saved by the National Archives, but there doesn’t appear to be any sort of norm for automatically redirecting links that went to any subdirectories or addresses under WhiteHouse.gov.

There are WP plugins that could help, like Redirection, but also perhaps the root domain itself could always redirect to a subdomain, like 46.whitehouse.gov, so we’d have a consistent domain and permalinks for everything, and then each new administration would get a new subdomain.

More coverage on WP Tavern.

Asides

Iceland Film

I wanted to share with you all a short film I made with the help of Stephen Bollinger, with videos I made a few years ago on a photography trip to Iceland with Om and Mark. I hope it provides five minutes of serenity in your day.

Birthday

Thirty-seven

I turn 37 today. I look around and I feel incredibly lucky to be writing this after a topsy-turvy year. I have health. I have friends whom I love. These are all good reasons to feel optimistic about the future. A few unconnected thoughts today:

My father had me when he was exactly 13,300 days old, and this year I passed that number of rotations of the Earth.

It’s hard to plan when so much is changing, so resolutions this year haven’t felt the same. But in times like these it’s even more important to plan for the long-term. A look back, once a year, is enough to remind of what remains.

I’m so thankful for the internet. It’s where I learned and practiced my trade. It’s where I connect every day with the most interesting and eclectic group of people I could imagine, a modern day Florence during the Renaissance. I hope to make a lot more internet and enable others to do the same.

Many years ago I said “Technology is best when it brings people together.” This quote has taken on a life of its own on motivational posters and images. When I first said it I think I had in mind WordCamps and meetups and other physical gatherings; this year it transformed for me seeing how technology brought together those separated by the pandemic. This year has appeared divisive, so it’s easy to overlook how many times people came together. It’s like the old saying, it’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get up. Fall thirty-six times, get up thirty-seven.

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

Asides

Autonomous and Beautiful Home Devices

Post author By Matt
Post date January 8, 2021
5 Comments on Autonomous and Beautiful Home Devices

Of all the smart home upgrades I’ve made, replacing all my regular smoke detectors with Nest Protects (Google’s smoke detector) has been the one that I regret the most.

I don’t really need a smart smoke detector. It doesn’t need to talk, connect to wifi, and cost hundreds of dollars. I don’t need it integrated with my Google account which is impossible to share, so I need to be personally involved to replace one.

But other smoke detectors are just so unsightly, and the Nest is light years ahead of the competition from a design standpoint.

There’s such an opportunity for something that looks as good as the Nest, but doesn’t require two-factor authentication to replace. I didn’t want to call it dumb but beautiful, so let’s say “autonomous and beautiful” appliances and home devices. I still want it to be smart, but if you’re going to have the risk profile of a device that connects to the internet, it needs to be worth it, like Brilliant, Sonos, smart TVs, or connected cameras.

I’m becoming more wary of any hardware that requires an app, just because of the natural decay of non-SaaS and non-open source software. Van Moof bikes are beautiful, but will they still connect well when iOS 24 is out and Bluetooth has been removed from iPhones for security reasons?

press

Farnam Street and Postlight

Post author By Matt
Post date January 5, 2021
4 Comments on Farnam Street and Postlight

I recorded two interviews very far apart from each other, but which have surprisingly both come out today. The first is for one of my favorite sites on the web, Farnam Street. I was honored to be episode 100 on their Knowledge Project podcast. Knowledge Project is probably one of the podcasts I’ve listened to the most since it started. Please check out their other guests as well, they really do have the most interesting conversations with the most interesting folks.

Shane and I cover turnarounds, how environment affects performance, pros and cons of distributed work, uncovering your lacuna, mental models, and patterns of decision making.

On a completely different vein, I did a deep geek-out on technology and content management systems with Gina Trapani and Paul Ford, two of my favorite technologists, on the Postlight podcast. We covered a lot of tech history, my thoughts on Chromium and Mozilla’s Gecko engine, structured data, Gutenberg, and a lot more. If you’re a developer or a long-time WordPress community member you’ll enjoy this one, but it might be esoteric or technical if you’re not immersed in this world. Here’s a Spotify embed of the episode:

In both we do touch on my idea that, on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for all proprietary software drops to zero. (Hat tip to Fight Club.) Proprietary software is an evolutionary dead end. You can think of open source packages like genetic alleles that have a higher fitness function, and eventually become the fittest organism. The longer I spend watching mega-trends in technology, the more I see that pattern everywhere, from encyclopedias to cryptocurrencies.

In My Bag

What’s In My Bag, 2020

Instead of sharing what’s in my backpack this year, I want to share the apps and pandemic purchases that were meaningful to me, along with a few words on each. Something I haven’t shared with you yet on this blog is… I went down a #vanlife rabbit hole and ended up camping and working remotely a decent chunk of the year. I learned a ton and feel much more resilient. So this is a phoneful and truckful update of my year.

First I’ll start with apps, these all link to Apple’s app store but almost all have Android equivalents that I also use:

Calm and Waking Up — Very different but both incredibly valuable meditation apps. I had an 82-day streak with Calm this year! I wouldn’t have survived without these.
Fitbod — You tell the app what equipment you have, how much time you have, and it gives you a workout like a trainer would, rotating muscle groups.
Streaks — An app for starting and tracking habits. This is a funny one because I actually stopped using it because it worked. The things I was tracking on Streaks became daily habits and I stopped using the app every day. The same thing happened for me with Zero, my daily fast became part of my routine so I’d only use Zero if I was doing a longer one.
Tumblr — It was so nice to have a social network centered around creativity and humor.
Asana — Getting organized helped lessen anxiety.
Pocket Casts — I switched to this because it syncs between devices, and I used my Android device a lot especially while driving.
AllTrails — I spent more time in nature this year than almost any previous, and AllTrails was an amazing way to find great hikes.
The Economist — The most insightful news, and the weekly cadence helped me avoid the wild variance of the daily news cycle. My favorite news app.
YouTube — Wow, there’s a lot of stuff on here. This was the year I started to “get” why people spend so much time on YouTube. Some favorite finds were Jacob Collier and Mark Rober.
Walmart — Surprisingly good on road trips for curbside pickup orders scheduled a few hours ahead. Yes, I have now joined 95% of the US population.
Blueground and Avantstay — Good for longer stays in places. I found both through Airbnb, which is still the king.
Food apps in order of usage: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Tock, Toast TakeOut.
Camping apps in order of usage: AllTrails, Chimani, Recreation.gov, iOverlander, Boondocking, FreeRoam, Harvest Hosts.
App I deleted and re-added the most: Twitter. I love the things I learn from using it, but hate feeling like I’m wasting time.

When on road trips I found Android Auto running off the Pixel 5 much more reliable than CarPlay, which would frequently freeze up on me. Things have improved with iOS 14, but I still always use the Pixel when I’m on a longer drive.

I also have been living with my Mom since July, including her two cats and new Coton du Tulear puppy. Pets are humbling! It’s been great to learn how to support them best, as I last lived with animals when I was in high school and wasn’t that conscious of the responsibility then.

Amazon says I made over 850 orders this year, more than double from any previous year. Here are the non-tech purchases that ended up having a big impact on me:

SmartMouth mouthwash — Available in travel packs as well, this is magical for having great breath, which you’ll notice more now that you’re wearing a mask all the time.
Marvis Royal Toothpaste — Delicious! SLS-free! I switch between this and the SmartMouth toothpaste which works better but isn’t as luxuriously tasty.
Theragun — Because you can’t get a massage.
Hurtle vibration platform — Really weird but seems to shake the stress out of you, especially if you stretch on it for 5-10 minutes.
Bowflex Adjustable Dumbbells — I was lucky enough to get these before they sold out and became crazy expensive.
Buckwheat meditation cushion — So much more comfortable to have a cushion, especially for longer meditation sessions. Here’s a smaller version I use on the road.
Tons of Philips Hue lights — Got a ton of joy from playing with the colors on these.
Cloth napkins — Felt so luxurious, easy to wash and re-use.
Heated cat bed — My Mom’s cats are obsessed with this now.
Sharonds hair cutting scissors — 10x better than the scissors I had lying around the house.
Babyliss clippers — They’re gold and have a “Lamborghini” motor which is ostentatious but works great.
Hair Apron Cape — You feel like a dog with one of those cones, but mostly works.
Yeti Lowlands picnic blanket — Expensive but sturdy.
Cliq camping chair — Super small and great design, but ended up using these less than I thought because we mostly just stayed on the ground on the Yeti blanket.
Isdin foot care cream — Really softens your feet.
Silicone tip cooking chopsticks or the ones with the spoon on the end.
Roll-up drying rack — Goes great over the sink.
Joseph Joseph nesting kitchen tools, nesting bowls — They’re so pretty as well.
Hanging solar mason jar lights — Like fireflies in a jar.
Matador Freerain32 waterproof packable backpack — My new favorite for hiking.
Matador Transit30 packable duffle bag — I ended up using this way more than I expected.
This bamboo table — Just the right size for eating or working on the ground.
Ikea Frakta bag — Just a few dollars each and can hold so much, and available on Amazon.

Clothing and wearables, like much of the world I trended toward comfort and away from normal shoes and socks:

Bumpers flip flops — Weird but you get used to them.
Oofos slide sandals — Ridiculously comfortable, and this model looks like it has the Automattic logo on it.
Glerups wool slippers — Like wool clogs, I wear the rubber-soled ones out if just stepping out for a bit.
Patagonia Capilene Air baselayers — So warm! Addictive.
Faherty Brand — I just love their whole look and feel, and have met the brothers before.
Alo Yoga — Pricey but looks great and fun to workout in. I’ve had some quality issues with their items though.
Lululemon — Especially their new tech canvas pants.
Unbound Merino — My go-to shirt, also decent socks.
Uniqlo — Great value, and no logos!

Electronics:

Everything in the streaming post — I ended up doing a ton of press and talks this year as the world became more distributed. I also personally helped many others get similar setups.
Everything Unifi — It’s a year I really appreciated solid internet.
Retractable 50′ ethernet cord — I actually daisy-chained two of these to do an internal company town hall presentation.
25′ retractable power extension cord — I also carry two of these.
Macbook 13″ M1 — It really is the fastest computer you’ve ever used. This replaced a maxed out 16″.
Hyppr 100w USB-C charger — Smaller and better than Apple’s charger.
Airpods Max — I didn’t want to like them but they’re slick.
Airpods Pro Dekoni Tips — Great upgrade for normal Airpods.
iPhone 12 Pro Max — It’s like a mini iPad. Camera with RAW support is fantastic.
Apple Pro Display XDR — Wow.
Pixel 5 — Pretty great that they got the fingerprint reader back in as FaceID with a mask is terrible, so this has become my primary device if I’m out for a walk.
Pixelbook Go — For my Mom.
Chromecast with Google TV — Bad name but great product. Truly. Really well designed.
Kindle Oasis with the new warm light — Even though I read less this year, this made what I did read a pleasure.
Sinjimou charging stand for iPhone and USB-C — Works great, really cheap.
Megaboom 3 — Two of these paired together in stereo is the best sound, weight, and battery life combo I’ve found on the road and in parks.
Garmin 945 watch — I’ve talked about this watch previously, but this year I discovered the GPS maps feature when in hiking mode, which can literally be a lifesaver. Amazing for going off-trail.

There you have it. As always, if you’ve tried something here and found an alternative that’s better, let me know in the comments!

Podcast

Jack Dorsey and Running Two Companies

Post author By Matt
Post date December 30, 2020
1 Comment on Jack Dorsey and Running Two Companies

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jack Dorsey for the Distributed podcast, a conversation that ended up going a bit deeper and longer than previous episodes.

In preparation for the interview I kept coming across people critical about the fact that Jack is the CEO of two companies simultaneously, Twitter and Square, each having over 5,000 employees.

I think what people miss is that at that scale, running a company is not that different from running a large division of a company. No one asks Jeff Bezos how he’s CEO of both a retail company and a cloud computing one (AWS), or Tim Cook how he’s CEO of a hardware business and a services business, and of course with both of those examples the breadth of what the companies cover is much wider. Also as an added benefit, shareholders can choose to invest in Square and Twitter together or not.

All of that said, I think having a CEO-level seat at two of the most influential technology companies today does allow for accelerated learning, as organizational experiments will naturally happen at each company and then the best practice can be shared to the other. Jack wasn’t aware how much peer executives at each company meet with each other to share learnings, but that seems like an obvious win.

Readers of this blog will especially appreciate how much we talked about open source and cryptocurrencies, and his view on the three things he’s responsible for as CEO. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

WordPress

State of the Word 2020

This tumultuous year, two things really helped me get through it: my colleagues at Automattic and the community of WordPress.

At the end of the year I usually deliver a speech to the WP community we call the State of the Word, that celebrates what we accomplished the previous year and shines a light on what we could focus on in the coming year. There’s always a great energy in the room and I love mixing with the audience before and after the talk. This year we did it online, which meant we could produce the talk a little more, and we made extra time for the Q&A afterward with answers not just from me but folks across the community.

One thing I’ll call out WordPress 5.6 had an all women and non-binary release squad of over 50 people, a first for WordPress and probably any large open source project. Also the market share of WordPress grew more in 2020 than it has in any year since it started being tracked!

If you’re curious about what’s next for WordPress, check it out:

Asides

Second-Order Effects

Derek Thompson’s writing for the Atlantic has been some of the most interesting this year. His latest, The Workforce Is About to Change Dramatically, is worth a close read. He gives good arguments for and against how remote working will change real estate, entrepreneurship, and something I’ve been meaning to write about but he did a much better job, how the great migration happening away from superstar cities could reshape politics.

I sincerely hope that all the people moving to new places are registering to vote in their new home, as I did when I moved from San Francisco back to Houston in 2011. The following year was 2012 and in Harris County (Houston) with 4.263 million people, Obama won by 585 votes. I was one of those votes.

Future of Work

Corner Office Interview

If you pick up a print edition of the Sunday New York Times today you’ll see the Corner Office interview with David Gelles in the business section.

(Hat tip to Mary Conrad for the picture, I haven’t seen it in person yet.)

A quote that seems to be resonating with people,

This column is called Corner Office, and most people who choose to have offices are usually the bosses. And I’ve been to the offices of billionaire C.E.O.s that have their own private bathroom, beautiful art and couches. But these are all things that you can have in your house. What I love about distributed organizations is every single employee can have a corner office.

Sometimes my corner office has been the corner of an airport floor next to a power outlet! I’ve also heard from colleagues that feel like their office feels like an unsupervised day care center since the quarantine started. The point I want to make is there’s a world of possibility that opens up when you move from the finite space of a shared office, and all the politics of dividing up the scarce resource of desirable space, to the infinite game where people can define their own “office” as the place where they will be most productive, and do so however they like with no penalties or restraints.

If you had the best space in the legacy office, you probably liked it and may even have had motivated reasoning around ineffable things that happened in the office like “culture” that would be impossible without it, but the average experience of an entry-level worker was not as positive. Now there can be a much more even playing field. At Automattic we have a home office allowance people can use to buy equipment they need to make their home work area comfortable and productive, and it’s the same if you’re leading a team of hundreds or if it’s your first job.

If you’d like to hear the entire conversation they’ve posted the original audio and interview that was distilled into the print version.

Asides

Combating Epidemics With Internet

Post author By Matt
Post date June 26, 2020
2 Comments on Combating Epidemics With Internet

In 2006 David Eagleman, who wrote one of my favorite books, Sum, wrote a letter published in Nature:

Kathleen Morrison, in News & Views (“Failure and how to avoid it�? Nature 440, 752–754; 2006), notes that societies have often prevented collapse by adopting new technological strategies. In today’s world, where one of the most-talked about prospects for collapse is an epidemic of infectious disease, it is worth remembering that perhaps we already have the technological strategy to avoid it — the Internet.
Remote working, made possible by the Internet (‘telepresence’), is already a key component of national and business pandemic plans. Telepresence can inhibit viral transmission by reducing human-to-human contact. Prepared organizations can leverage telepresence to allow continued productivity and functioning of supply chains during an outbreak.

He explores these ideas as well in his Long Now talk in April 2010, in which he talked about Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization. Here’s an excerpt from that talk covering telepresence and telemedicine. Both videos have had under a thousand views so far. When you watch this remember that it was April, 2010!

This is the topic of his new book, The Safety Net: Surviving Pandemics and Other Disasters.

Asides

Follow-up Questions from WCEU

Post author By Matt
Post date June 5, 2020
39 Comments on Follow-up Questions from WCEU

Matias and I just finished up the discussion and Q&A for the online WordCamp Europe that is going on right now, which was originally happening in Porto.

There were more good questions than we had time to get to, so at the end I suggested that we continue the conversation here, in the comments section! Comments are the best part of blogging.

So if you have a question we didn’t get to, please drop it below. If you don’t have a Gravatar yet now’s a good time to make one.

Future of Work

Stream Like a CEO

When Bill Gates was on Trevor Noah’s show it was amazing how much better quality his video was. I had experimented with using a Sony camera and capture card for the virtual event we did in February when WordCamp Asia was canceled, but that Trevor Noah video and exchanging some tweets with Garry Tan sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, even after I was on-record with The Information saying a simpler setup is better.

The quality improved, however something was still missing: I felt like I wasn’t connecting with the person on the other side. When I reviewed recordings, especially for major broadcasts, my eyes kept looking at the person on the screen rather than looking at the camera.

Then I came across this article about the Interrotron, a teleprompter-like device Errol Morris would use to make his Oscar-winning documentaries. Now we’re onto something!

For normal video conferencing a setup this nice is a distraction, but if you’re running for political office during a quarantine, a public company CEO talking to colleagues and the press, here’s a cost-is-no-object CEO livestreaming kit you can set up pretty easily at home.

GEAR GUIDE

Elgato Cam Link 4K

Micro HDMI Cable

Retractable 3.5mm audio cable

Elgato Key Light Air LED panel

Ikan Elite Generation 2 Universal Large Tablet Teleprompter

ECM-B1M Shotgun Microphone

Sony α7R IV Camera

Sony – FE 16-35mm F2.8 GM Wide-angle Zoom Lens

Ultimate Ears UE 18+ Pro: In-ear monitors

Gonine NP-FZ100 AC Power Adapter

Reticam mini tripod

13″ portable monitor

Basically what you do is put the A7r camera, shotgun mic, and the lens together and switch it to video mode, go to Setup 3, choose HDMI settings, and turn HDMI Info Display off — this gives you a “clean” video output from the camera. You can run off the built-in battery for a few hours, but the Gonine virtual battery above lets you power the camera indefinitely. Plug the HDMI from the camera to the USB Camlink, then plug that into your computer. Now you have the most beautiful webcam you’ve ever seen, and you can use the Camlink as both a video source and an audio source using the shotgun mic. Put the Key Light wherever it looks best. You’re fine to record something now.

If you’d like to have a more two-way conversation Interrotron style, set up the teleprompter on the tripod, put the camera behind it, connect the portable monitor to your computer (I did HMDI to a Mac Mini) and “mirror” your display to it. (You can also use an iPad and Sidecar for that.) Now you’ll have a reversed copy of your screen on the teleprompter mirror. I like to put the video of the person I’m talking to right over the lens, so near the bottom of my screen, and voilà! You now have great eye contact with the person you’re talking to. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how to horizontally flip the screen in MacOS so all the text isn’t backward in the mirror reflection. For audio I usually just use a headset at this point, but if you want to not have a headset in the shot…

Use a discreet earbud. I love in-ear monitors from Ultimate Ears, so you can put one of these in and run the cable down the back of your shirt, and I use a little audio extender cable to easily reach the computer’s 3.5mm audio port. This is “extra” as the kids say and it may be tricky to get an ear molding taken during a pandemic. For the mic I use the audio feed from the Camlink, run through Krisp.ai if there is ambient noise, and it works great (except in the video above where it looks a few frames off and I can’t figure out why. On Zoom it seems totally normal).

Here’s what the setup looks like all put together:

After that photo was taken I got a Mac Mini mount and put the computer under the desk, which is much cleaner and quieter, but used this earlier photo so you could see everything plugged in. When you run this off a laptop its fan can get really loud.

Again, not the most practical for day to day meetings, but if you’re doing prominent remote streaming appearances—or if your child is an aspiring YouTube star—that’s how you can spend ~9k USD going all-out. You could drop about half the cost with only a minor drop in quality switching the camera and lens to a Sony RX100 VII and a small 3.5mm shotgun mic, and that’s probably what I’ll use if I ever start traveling again.

If I were to put together a livestreaming “hierarchy of needs,” it would be:

Solid internet connection (the most important thing, always)
Audio (headset mic or better)
Lighting (we need to see you, naturally)
Webcam (video quality)

We’ve put together a Guide to Distributed Work Tools here, which includes a lot of great equipment recommendations for day-to-day video meetings.

Tags distributed work, livestreaming

WordPress

Celebrate Seventeen

May 27th, 17 years ago, the first release of WordPress was put into the world by Mike Little and myself. It did not have an installer, upgrades, WYSIWYG editor (or hardly any Javascript), comment spam protection, clean permalinks, caching, widgets, themes, plugins, business model, or any funding.

The main feedback we got at the time was that the blogging software market was saturated and there wasn’t room or need for anything new.

WordPress did have a philosophy, an active blog, a license that protected the freedom of its users and developers, a love of typography, a belief that code is poetry, fantastic support forums and mailing lists and IRC, and firm sense that building software is more fun when you do it together as a community.

We have relentlessly iterated across 38 major releases since then, and here we are.

If you’d like to celebrate with me, put on some jazz, eat some BBQ, light a candle for the contributors who have passed on, help a friend or stranger less technical than you build a home online, and remember that technology is at its best when it brings people together.