wordpress

WordPress and domains

After my posting on WordPress for Good, this page was brought to my attention. It states that:

For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark, we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use "WordPress" in the domain name. Try using "wp" instead, or another variation. We’re not lawyers, but very good ones tell us we have to do this to preserve our trademark. Also many users have told us they find it confusing.

How utterly lame, and also inconsistent for an open source project. This is one of the few times I feel a bit let down by WordPress.

This reminds me a little of the Firefox logo and name copyright farrago. In my view, you should be open or not. An open source project setting rules on what people can and can’t do with a bunch of letters in a certain order is plain daft, in my view.

I’m leaving WordPress for Good where it is for now.

Akismet now has stats!

Akismet is a plugin for WordPress (and a few other platforms) which helps combat the problem of comment spam. That when ne’erdowells come on your blog and post nonsense comments in the hope pick click the links in them to buy some viagra, or invest in a Nigerian lottery winning syndicate.

Dealing with this stuff can be a pain.

(I have often wondered how people who run blogs or forums about the uses of bedroom-performance enhancing drugs, or genuine Nigerian investments, manage their spam. How do you decide what is and isn’t?)

Akismet makes it easy by checking your comments against a central database, which records what everyone who uses the system has marked as spam, and then removes it from view. So, no alerts telling you that you need to deal with a new comment – if Akismet thinks it’s spam, you don’t need to know about it.

You can still check the quarantined list for false-positives though, if you want. Sometimes the service works a little too well.

Anyhow, I upgraded the Akismet plugin today here on WordPress, and was surprised to see a new tab on my admin panel for ‘Akismet Stats’:

akismet stats

And once you click it, it makes pretty interesting reading! There are graphs and tables of data. Well worth the upgrade just to see what causes spikes in your comment spam.

PollDaddyPress & Automattic reliance

Matt Mullenweg, the irritatingly youthful founder of WordPress, has announced that his company, Automattic, have purchased the internet polling service PollDaddy, and immediately integrated in into WordPress.com and made a plugin available for self-hosted WordPressers.

I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace. By plugging into Automattic’s experience at creating internet-scale services and the distribution of WordPress.com, I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.

It’s certainly interesting that Automattic are acquiring stuff at the moment in what are testing times for any company, let alone relatively young web startups. Especially when the whole WordPress platform is potentially reliant on this company to keep it on the right tracks, and to keep the development moving forward.

WordPress the platform is open source, which means that the code is available to anyone to use, modify and sell on for themselves – as long as they published their version under the same terms. However, much of the organising of the project, and the hosting of the websites, forums, bug trackers etc is done by Automattic, a company whose main motive, one must assume, is profit. Many other open source projects work in similar ways: much of the development of Linux has been done with the help of big companies like IBM and others, for example. But where a platform is so reliant, as I believe WordPress is, on one company to provide direction, does that company have an obligation to the people that use that code?

Now, I doubt very much that the amount of money that PollDaddy will have cost Automattic will have been that big a deal, and I am sure that Matt, Toni and the other Automattic guys would do anything deliberately to jeapordise their company. I’m just thinking hypothetically – do companies involved in open source have to be more risk-averse, because their failure could potentially damage a far wider group of people that just specific clients.

Or for those using open source, is it a case of downloaders beware?

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