WordPress

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.

Podcast: Legal Professionals using WordPress

I was on a podcast last week with Adrian Dayton speaking with his audience about how lawyers are adopting WordPress, best practices around securing your WordPress, integrating Twitter, using mobile apps, and a bit about our VideoPress.com service.

Thanks Adrian and your guests for a great discussion and the podcast mp3 is now available on adriandayton.com.

Podcast: WordPress and Commercial Services

This past weekend I participated in a panel discussion on the WPTavern WordPress Weekly podcast – where we chatted about WordPress and commercial services.

Thanks to Jeff Chandler for inviting me on the show, it was definitely a lively and fun discussion.

You can listen to the MP3 here: WordPress Weekly Episode 96 or feed it into iTunes here.

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 ]

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:

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.