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Web Publishing

  • WordPress is 20 Years Old

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    2 min read

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    Happy Birthday WordPress! 20 looks good on you!

    For me, it began with Xanga and Myspace. For others, maybe it was LiveJournal or something else. Blogging exploded during this decade like never before. Blogging began as a teenage refuge. An outlet for my younger self to express myself. It gave me incredible relief to share my thoughts, ideas, and interests. It overjoyed me when others would join me in the song and dance of commenting or sharing my posts. To no one’s surprise, millions of others felt the same way.

    At university, that interest remained strong and grew even further as I delved deeper into a design career. As my design education went on, it became clear that university could only go so far in terms of teaching web development. To scratch my itch for building for the web, I got involved in as many web-related projects as possible. We built websites for parties, school projects, web forms, magazines, and stores. I desperately wanted to build websites as a career and express myself even further as a design-orientated web developer.

    When WordPress was introduced to me, I couldn’t believe it. It was like the missing piece of the puzzle. Manually editing HTML files as blog posts instantly became a thing of the past. Everything, just clicked for me with it too. The WordPress Template Hierarchy blew my mind. Understanding the ins-and-outs of how WordPress works, made me instantly hirable basically anywhere for a short while. Hand-building WordPress sites for clients was a complete joy, and later, building site-generators was even more fun.

    Maintaining a legacy WordPress site is like being working on an Audi sometimes. But, WordPress at large has been one of the greatest joys of web publishing since Markdown and I’m so excited for what comes next. I owe the WordPress community so much, so here’s to another year around the sun WordPress!

    Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.

  • Verizon Sells Tumblr to Automattic, the Home of WordPress

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    2 min read

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    The WSJ reports:

    Verizon Communications Inc. has agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to the owner of popular online-publishing tool WordPress, unloading for a nominal amount a site that once fetched a purchase price of more than $1 billion.

    Automattic Inc. will buy Tumblr for an undisclosed sum and take on about 200 staffers, the companies said. Tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music and art, but it has been dwarfed by Facebook, Reddit and other services.

    This is a shocking acquisition. No doubt, this a good move for the preservation of blogs. I firmly believe Automattic will be a better steward of creators than Verizon (or was it called Oath?) would’ve been. I have long awaited the day where Tumblr and WordPress have publication parity. This has to be really excited for everyone at Tumblr. I mean this even has Tumblr veteran Marco Arment pumped:

    Edit: it appears that Marco Arment deleted this tweet:

    This is pretty cool. Can’t think of a better owner today than Automattic for Tumblr’s huge creative publishing community.

    Marco Arment

    Now the hard question — what about the adult content ban? For now, it seems the ban stays in place. But, it’s really unclear if Matt will ever changed the policy. Regardless, the blogs at Tumblr will live on under the safe and profitable umbrella of Automattic.