automattic

Paul Maiorana Joins Automattic

I’m really excited that Paul Maiorana, formerly CTO of Mansueto Ventures (FastCompany & Inc Magazine), is starting his first day today at Automattic as Director of Platform Services. He’ll be working to help expand and support the fast growing WordPress.com VIP services program.

For those who are wondering, as part of the VIP program, we support and (for about half of them) host WordPress sites for amazing organizations such as CBS, Time Warner, Conde Nast, Linkedin, New York Times, National Post, NFL, NBC Sports, Yahoo News, Dow Jones, Red Hat, and many others who are using WordPress for all their blogs and vertical sites, and increasingly to run their entire sites, as CBS is doing.

Some of these VIPs are hosted with us on the WordPress.com grid, and others run their own WordPress in-house or at a 3rd party providers such as Rackspace or Amazon.

Paul is based in NY, and as a current Drupal user promises to launch his own WordPress site soon 😉

And yes, to answer the obvious question, I will be relaunching this blog on WordPress (but only because I want to, not because I have to!)

SMS Two-Step Authentication Now Live on WordPress.com

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how Google and PayPal support two-step authentication on their services, allowing you to use your mobile phone to add an extra layer of security to your username/password login.

Today, some exciting news — we’ve announced on WordPress.com that we are adding SMS two-step authentication to our offering, as well as other text messaging features including comment moderation, theme change notifications, and post publishing notification.

Check out all the details on the announcement post on the WP.com news blog.

Windows Live Spaces Migrating to WordPress.com

Big news – at TechCrunch Disrupt we announced today that Live Spaces will be migrating millions of blogs to WordPress.com, and that new blogs will be created automatically on WordPress.com.

In addition, we’ve added support for Messenger Connect as a Publicize option, which enables you to automatically share new posts on your WordPress.com blog with your buddies on Windows Live Messenger. This new Publicize option joins our built-in support for Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo!.

WP.com today has nearly 14M blogs, reaches over 260M uniques, and is growing at a nice clip. With the addition of all the MSN Spaces blogs it will add to the great community of bloggers and amazing content being produced each day on WP.com.

As Matt posted a few minutes ago:

I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s regard for their users in providing a solid upgrade and migration path with a really smooth experience

Ditto — too many services today provide very weak or super manual tools for migrating over. Big props to Microsoft to working on making it as smooth as possible and easy for their users — really impressive. On our end, we make sure to preserve all the content with original post dates and the like — and we redirect all the old URLs over, so nothing gets lost or drops out of the search indexes.

For Spaces bloggers looking to make the move, check out the MSN announcement post, and our welcome post on WP.com.

The Making of WordPress for iPad

Back in late February I met up with Raven Zachary and his team from Small Society as well as our own Matt Mullenweg, to figure out if we could get an iPad app for WordPress ready in less than 30 days.

We sketched out a rough plan that I captured from my iPhone:

Whiteboard sketch from initial meeting re: WordPress iPad app

We were committed to getting the app out for the iPad launch, and leveraged much of what was already in the popular WordPress for iPhone app functionality wise, but completely redid the UI and interactions for the iPad version. Matt Thomas who did a ton of great work on this app and redesigned iphone.wordpress.org, described the goals of the initial app like this:

“So what’s new for the iPad? In order to ensure that using WordPress on your iPad would be a great experience from day one, we decided not to add any new features. Nada. This release is all about taking advantage of a huge 9.7″ touchscreen. Writing and editing posts is far easier than before. Skimming through your comments and moderating them is far faster than before. And using the app is simply more beautiful than before. “

And thankfully, after hundreds of trac tickets and around the clock testing, our universal iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch WordPress app is now available via iTunes:

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On a personal note, I’m excited to get my iPad tomorrow and ditch the simulator for a while 🙂 I’m eager to see what my usage patterns will be with a device that clearly falls in between my iPhone and MacBook Pro. I’m already seeing positive anticipation from top bloggers as well, such as Om Malik — and my hunch is that for content consumption and drafting of new content, this will be a killer device. And no question that for managing your WordPress site — managing comments, editing posts, and even writing some long form posts — this will be an experience unlike any other.

Interviewed in Folio Magazine

Was interviewed for an article in Folio Magazine this month — Can Publishers Attract (And Retain) The Best Digital Talent?:

Companies should encourage their engineers, designers and digital executives to blog, speak at events and generally reach out and participate with various development communities, especially open source ones, such as WordPress. “It’s a great way for traditional companies to connect with top talent, and ultimately is a benefit when they are trying to attract the good ones,” says Bar-Cohen.

[ Read the whole article on foliomag.com ]

peHUB Interview: Behind the Screens

I was interviewed by Connie Loizos of peHUB last week for their ongoing series, “Behind the Screens”:

Beginning a couple of weeks ago, we began shining a light on some of the unknown stars who are adding much of the value to some of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies. Raanan Bar-Cohen easily meets that bar.

You can read the full q&a on pehub.com .

Relaunch: WordPress.com VIP Site

Many of the largest WordPress-powered sites in the world such as ones for CNN, GigaOM, and the NFL are hosted on WordPress.com VIP and/or supported by our team through our VIP Support program.

The informational site for the VIP program was getting a bit stale, so we did a refresh and relaunched it just a few hours ago. You can see it at vip.wordpress.com, and be sure to check out the short video where Barry and I chat about all things VIP: