Articles written by Austin Matzko for Pressed Words

Austin Matzko is a web developer living in Boston, Massachusetts. He blogs and helps out with WordPress development as “filosofo.”

You can contact him at austin@pressedwords.com

WordPress 2.5 Dashboard Preview

On a WordPress IRC channel, Michael Adams of Automattic posted this this screenshot of the new design for the new WordPress Dashboard. The Dashboard is the first page you see when you log in to the WordPress administrative area. As you can see, the Dashboard will be divided into blocks, and those blocks are widgets, […]

How Many Bloggers Use Each Version of WordPress

Yesterday I mentioned that WordPress was the most-used content management system among Technorati’s top 100 bloggers, and I wondered what versions of WordPress they were using. As it happens, discovering the WordPress version is fairly simple most of the time, so I wrote a Perl robot to gather that information from the top 100 Technorati […]

WordPress: Most-Used Blogging Application For the Most Popular Blogs

According to Technorati, more of the top one hundred linked-to blogs use WordPress than any other CMS. Specifically, 34% of those most popular blogs use WordPress, compared to Movable Type’s 16%. Most WordPress themes announce their version number in the page’s meta tags. Since I’m sure Technorati has the data, it would be really interesting […]

Protecting WordPress from SQL Injection Attacks

David Kierznowski at BlogSecurity suggests that WordPress is “insecure by design.” What he means is that in general WordPress does not sanitize MySQL queries. He recommends that WordPress provide “a proper set of SQL safe functions (i.e. $wpdb->escape_int and $wpdb->escape_str” and “use mysql_real_escape_string(), and have clearly defined coding standards and security policies” like Drupal does. […]

New York Times Invests a Little Bit in Automattic Without Seeming to Know Why

The big news today is that Automattic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, has landed a whopping $29.5 million investment from several venture capital companies and the New York Times. In announcing the move today, the Times emphasized that its investment was “small” and the “smallest.” It also seemed a little […]

Crunchies: Did WordPress.org or Automattic Win?

The “Crunchies,” which describes itself as an “award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year,” had its award ceremony last night. WordPress of some sort won an award, but it’s not clear which. WordPress is the open-source blogging software hosted on WordPress.org. It’s sometimes referred to […]

WordPress Publisher Blog Launches

Automattic, the company founded by WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, has launched the “WordPress Publisher” blog. We’ll cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress. From the description, it sounds like the WordPress Publisher Blog aims to be Automattic’s in-house version […]

How I’ve Cut WordPress Comment Spam by 45%

For the last couple of months I’ve been keeping the database entries for comment spam caught by Akismet at my personal blog. I have an ongoing search for patterns that I hope to use in a future project. WordPress accepts three types of comments: “regular” comments made by submitting the comment form on-site, “trackbacks,” and […]

User Interface Guide Coming to WordPress

Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, recently announced plans for “a set of interface guidelines similar to Apple’s or Yahoo’s detailing what was found in the research, so core WP devs, plugin authors, and other web devs can make better decisions about interactions in the future.” (The research he’s referring to—commissioned by Automattic—was done by […]

WordPress a Necessity?

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch lists WordPress among his favorite “Web 2.0″ companies. Considering how many well-known bloggers use WordPress and that 3.81 million people downloaded WordPress in 2007, I think he’s not alone.