WordPress

Amazon’s AWS Outage This Morning

The amazon AWS services have been extremely popular with lots of startups and has received very positive reviews. AWS is a way to leverage the Amazon infrastructure to provide lots of scalability for image hosting, CPU tasks, DB and more.

So what happens when an outage hits Amazon as we saw today ?

Impact wise, what struck me this morning, were the vast number of broken images across the web ( from sites that rely heavily on Amazon S3 ) and twitters of people agonizing about their businesses effectively being shut down.

A post on the Amazon forums is a good example:

I have to add a major ME TOO here. My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong. I’ll have to reconsider using the service now.

For us on WordPress.com, we use S3, but only for a small portion of the image serving, and thanks to our architecture, were able to automatically deal with the outage this morning with no impact to our users. Our systems wrangler Barry has a post about it:

Currently we serve about 1500 image requests per second across WordPress.com. About 80-100 per second are served through S3; the rest being served from our local caches. When the outage occurred, our systems detected the errors and automatically sent the requests normally bound for S3 to local image servers that we use for backup and failover purposes.

Read Barry’s full post

He picked WordPress.com

Always nice to run across these kinds of posts.

This one from Kreblog titled “State Of The Blog”

I’ve done it all:

* I’ve been on Blogger (hosted myself and hosted on blogspot.com).
* I’ve been on MovableType (hosted myself… I think twice).
* I’ve been on Community Server (hosted myself).
* I’ve been on .TEXT (hosted myself).
* I’ve been on dasBlog (hosted myself).
* I’ve been on WordPress (hosted myself and hosted on wordpress.com).
* I have Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo 360, Vox, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook accounts… all are unused because blogging there is either confusing and/or subpar.

And my conclusions up to this point:
*WordPress is currently the best blogging server software hands down.
*wordpress.com is the best blogging host.

(emphasis mine)

Read the full analysis

New WordPress.com Feature: Prologue

At our Automattic offsite last week, Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas created a very cool new WordPress theme that we plan to use in-house: Prologue.

Inspired by Twitter, you can see it in action in this live demo.  Prologue is also available as an open source theme to use with your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Full details here on the WordPress.com blog plus an early review on Mashable.

My gut tells me we’ll see some really interesting mods with this theme — can’t wait.

UPDATE: Lots of interest already — the announcement post just made the top of techmeme:
prologue

raanan.com has a new home: WordPress.com

This blog is blazing fast !

Why you ask ?  Because it’s now on the grid platform at WordPress.com 🙂    Up until now I’ve been running it on a server that I’ve had for a number of years.

The process of moving from a self hosted WordPres setup to WordPress.com was super simple.  For those who are interested, here was the proces:
Step 1) Exported the blog content from my old blog by clicking “export” in the WordPress dashboard
Step 2) Imported the XML file and the images from my old blog to WordPress.com with the 1-click importer in the WordPress.com dashboard. (image fetcher feature will be available soon on WordPress.com)
Step 3) Confirmed that everything was in place on the new blog — the importer brings everything in – posts, pages, images, youtube embeds and comments.
Step 4) Added the mapped domain option to my WordPress blog so that instead of raanan.wordpress.com, it becomes raanan.com
Step 5) Selected the blog.txt theme and applied it ( this theme will be released on WordPress.com soon ).
Step 6) Changed the name server settings at my registrar

And that was it.  What’s also nice is that I was able to get rid of the plugins I was using because that functionality is already bundled in with WordPress.com – including Akismet, Stats, and Gravatar.

Automattic news

Some very exciting news tonight – we announced a $29.5M series B round of funding.

Our CEO Toni Schneider summarizes it well:

Late last year we sat down to figure out how we’d like to expand our business in 2008 and beyond. Since things are working well, we didn’t want to make any major changes. However, we did set a couple of new goals. One was to put enough money in the bank to have financial security for years to come. Another was to invest more aggressively into our “other” products and services (other than WordPress) like Akismet, Gravatar, and bbPress. Today’s financing will help us achieve both of those goals.

Lots of coverage including: wsj , GigaOM, new york times, ReadWriteWeb, toni, and matt (sporting his new ma.tt domain !).

You can also track the discussion over on techmeme.

WordPress.com now offering 3 gigs of free space

We just announced a very big upgrade on WordPress.com

… everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

TechCrunch weighs in on the news & feel free to digg it 🙂

The Crunchies – watch it live

WordPress and Toni Schneider are nominated for awards at the Crunchies, which will be held tonight in San Francisco.

Seating opens at 6:45 pm and is first come first serve in the balcony. If you have a copy of our eticket, please bring it with you. If you do not have the eticket, no worries, we can check you in by name. Please arrive before 7:30. The ceremony will start at 7:30 and is expected to last until about 9:00 pm.

You can also watch it live here

Update: List of winners, including WordPress & Toni Schneider

MacWorld 2008 and an interesting stock trading tie-in promotion

Another exciting keynote from Steve Jobs today at MacWorld 2008 – in case you missed it you can catch-up on live.gizmodo.com. Just like the last MacWorld, Gizmodo’s live blog was hosted on WordPress.com as part of our VIP hosting program. ( you can read a “rating the livebloggers” review here)
update: watch the keynote & details on how other sites covering the event faired: Crunchgear, Engadget, and Twitter )

From a Mac product standpoint, I’m not totally convinced about the MacBook Air but definitely will check it out, and the Apple TV “take 2” is a huge improvement.

Shortly after the keynote this curious email offer arrived in my inbox:
trading.png

I definitely give them credit for linking their campaign to the millions of people out there with an urge to buy some new Apple gear !

WordPress and our Toni Schneider nominated for Crunchies

What are the Crunchies you ask ?

The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.

As they say in Hollywood “it’s an honor to be nominated” – and it’s great to see Toni and WordPress in the mix.

Vote for Toni Schneider as the Best Startup CEO.

And for WordPress in the Most likely to succeed category.