automattic

Subscribe to raanan.com via Email

Tonight, on WordPress.com, we launched Email Subscriptions.

You can now subscribe to this blog via email and get nicely formatted posts delivered in your inbox whenever I publish something new. Just put in your email address into the sidebar widget on the right, titled “Email Subscription”. If you are logged in to WordPress.com it’s just 1-click, but anyone can subscribe, you don’t need a WordPress.com account to use this.

With various options like RSS readers, Twitter, and Facebook — I’m still impressed by the usefulness of receiving certain updates by email. Maybe out of habit from my NY subway days, but I still read paidContent.org daily summaries via email every morning.

Like paidContent, what’s also cool about this new email subscription feature is that you can elect to receive digests:

When a user subscribes to a blog they will receive an email containing recent blog posts. The subscriber can select how often this email is sent (the delivery frequency – immediate, daily, or weekly), as well as when this email is sent (the delivery window – a specific day and hour).

If you’d like to learn more, check out the announcement post.

WordPress.com: The Hero Is In Your Pocket

We had our company off-site last week, and we worked on a ton of really interesting projects that will be launching in the coming weeks.

The first project is now live, and it’s the launch of mobile themes on WordPress.com to specifically format the blogs for smart phones, and also for standard mobile phones. It works automatically to detect mobile visitors, and even pulls in a custom header to make the look & feel unique:

So if you have a mobile device handy, check out raanan.com on your mobile browser to see it in action.

After the Deadline Joins Automattic

After the Deadline, a service that would have saved me countless hours back in the day, is simply an incredible ( and adaptive ) contextual spelling and grammar checker.  The service,  run by Raphael Mudge,  is now part of Automattic and we turned it on live today on WordPress.com.   If you are running self-hosted WordPress, there is a plugin at WordPress.org that you should download.

Best way to describe this service is by watching this video and checking out this example of the NYT.

WordPress for iPhone App Development Update

Lots of activity on the WordPress for iPhone app lately as you can see from the timeline.

A ton of work has gone on behind the scenes to make the app faster and make it work with nearly any WordPress theme, something the current app struggles with when it doesn’t find the required XMLRPC/RSD info. In addition, the app is receiving a pretty big UI update, as you can see from this screenshot below that I took tonight running the latest version in trunk. Keep an eye on http://iphone.wordpress.org for more details soon:
WP-iPhone-8-29-09-v2

DataSF.org

We (Automattic) hosted an event today with Mayor Gavin Newsom for the beta launch of DataSF.org.

Really smart initiative around providing public data to the citizens of San Francisco:

The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency

[more on TechCrunch.com]

The Mayor, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O’Reilly all spoke about the need and benefit of Open Source and Open Data. I’m exited to help and see how this progresses.

Here is a quick pic from a few minutes ago:

Gavin Newsom, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O'Reilly at Automattic Lounge

Gavin Newsom, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O'Reilly at Automattic Lounge

Paul Kim Joining Automattic

Really excited that Paul Kim, formerly of Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc) , will be joining the Automattic team.

He just updated his blog with a post:

I’m extremely proud to have been a part of the Mozilla project, and to have worked side by side with so many of you in our community to accomplish things that seemed at one time audacious and improbable. From the launch of Firefox 1.5, through too many outreach programs to count, and as the number of people exercising a choice in the way they got on the Web climbed past 300 million, I’ve always been struck by the essential human-centeredness that permeates Mozilla.

Can’t wait for him to start 🙂

SocialVibe

Really excited about the launch of SocialVibe as a new widget on WordPress.com. It’s also been great working with the team on SocialVibe, and I’ve been impressed with how quickly they’ve iterated based on the feedback we’ve provided from WordPress.com bloggers.

For those of you who haven’t run across SocialVibe before, essentially it’s a way to have sponsors donate directly to your favorite charities by connecting the sponsor with a cause. I’ve added it to my sidebar on this blog so you can check it out.

For self-hosted WordPress sites you can grab the SocialVibe plugin.

Working Automattic Style

Great piece in this month’s Inc. magazine by Matt: “The Way I Work: Matt Mullenweg”:

I travel a lot, but when I’m in San Francisco, I usually work from home. Everyone else works from home, too. We’re a virtual company. We recently got an office on Pier 38, a five-minute walk from my apartment. I’ll go to there once a week, usually Thursdays, and for board meetings, which happen about once every two months. We leased it so we wouldn’t have to keep borrowing conference rooms from our VC partners. It’s kind of sad; we have this great space right on the water — and six days a week, it’s empty. Of the 40 people working for the company, eight are in the Bay Area, but that’s just a coincidence. They could be anywhere in the world.

We all communicate using P2, something we launched that allows users to publish group blogs in WordPress. It’s a bit like Twitter, but the updates come in real time. With P2, we can share code and ideas instantly. There is a dedicated channel for each part of the company, and when there’s a new message, it shows up in red. It may be someone talking about development or what he or she had for breakfast. I also use Skype for one-on-one and mini group chats.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors — a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I’ll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC. I also have a laptop, which I have with me all the time, whether I’m going overseas or to the doctor’s office. I’m pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year. I keep a server for my home network in the closet. I really enjoy computer networking. I sometimes do tech support for our employees who live in the Bay Area.

I know people I talk to are always fascinated by our organization and how we are setup and completely virtual. This piece provides a few more good insights as to how it all works.