Pressed Words » Industry

WordPress Use Declines Among Top 100 Bloggers

Austin Matzko — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:32:16 +0000

…but just barely. Last year, 34 of the top 100 bloggers used some version of WordPress. This year it’s 32. Movable Type / TypePad use has increased—again, barely—from 23 to 28 of the top blogs.

Most of the changes seem to be a result of blogs coming and going from the ranks of the top 100. Glancing at a diff of the two lists, it appears the only blog to have actually changed its CMS is Crooks and Liars, which switched away from WordPress to Drupal.

Although I wish I could share Matt Mullenweg’s optimistic hope that next year WordPress will be used by “between 40-50%” of the top 100 bloggers, the little amount of change from last year suggests that things will remain mostly the same. That makes sense, given that most of these blogs are big business, and big businesses tend to act conservatively.

Happy Halloween

Austin Matzko — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:38:56 +0000

Does Google Discourage the use of WordPress Permalinks?

Austin Matzko — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:06:09 +0000

A recent blog entry by Google’s Search Quality Team members Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski somewhat confusingly gives the impression that Google does not like WordPress-style permalinks.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases.

A number of bloggers, including Sophia Lucero at WordPress Philippines, draw the conclusion that WordPress permalinks are harmful to PageRank. However, the specific concerns mentioned by Stiller and Szymanski suggest they are not actually criticizing the standard use of WordPress permalinks.

Instead, the authors’ overriding concern seems to be static URLs that “could cause [Google] to crawl the same piece of content needlessly via many different URLs,” and the examples they give are mainly of search queries.

That’s not at all like a WordPress permalink for a blog post. A WordPress post has a one-to-one relationship with its permalink, meaning that only that content will be found at that permalink and that post will not appear at any other permalink. Or at least that’s the way things should be on a WordPress blog: for a while SEO experts have recommended that the complete content for each blog post appear only at an individual post’s permalink. In practice that means making sure that category archives, monthly archives, and the like should show only excerpts of a post, not the complete text. Most modern WordPress themes do this, but some, especially older themes, do not.

The Google article gives a number of bad examples of “dynamic” URLs written as “static” URLs, including this one:
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/URL
The problem with this, say the authors, is that when crawling that link it is “difficult for us to understand that URL and 98971298178906 have nothing to do with the actual content which is returned via this URL.” (Here “98971298178906” is a session id). The authors don’t even recommend simplifying the URL to something like www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3:

Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL

Again, the concern seems to be that the bad “permalink” example does not have a one-to-one relationship with the content. “98971298178906” is particular to the site visitor, not the site’s content, and even “answer.foo/en/3″ could change when that answer is no longer the third one.

So the main lesson a WordPress blogger should take from this is the old lesson of SEO: avoid duplicate content. WordPress permalinks that are one-to-one with their content and have relevant keywords are good for SEO. They combine the benefits of static URLs mentioned by the authors, such as higher click-through rate, without the deficits.

Matt Mullenweg on PHP 5, WordPress Versions at Greek Blogger Camp

Austin Matzko — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:29:56 +0000

At the end of May, Matt Mullenweg spoke at the 2008 Greek Blogger Camp. Mullenweg posted some of his pictures from the camp, and you can view a video of his talk here.

I thought he mentioned a number of points of special interest to WordPress users and developers:

PHP 5: The PHP developers are discontinuing support of PHP 4 in August, and there is a movement of sorts to get PHP-based applications to force users to upgrade to PHP 5. In what Mullenweg described in the Greek talk as his most controversial blog post of the past year, he basically said that WordPress would not require PHP 5 as a minimum version for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop numerous discussions from spawning on the WordPress mailing lists about requiring the use of PHP version 5 instead of the current minimum requirement of PHP 4.3.

But here’s what new: in this talk, Mullenweg lays out the criterion for when WordPress will require PHP 5 as a minimum. Automattic monitors the PHP version of WordPress sites checking for plugin updates and using Akismet, and when the number of those using PHP 4.x drops below 10%, then WordPress will up the minimum requirement to PHP 5.
WordPress version numbers: Mullenweg offered his thoughts on the WordPress version numbering. He admitted that because of the extensive changes introduced in WordPress 2.5, it would have better been called “3.0” using the typical software version increments. But Mullenweg then complained about applications that have “version ~~infliction~~ inflation,” or excessive version increases, and said that from now on WordPress would do releases on a point-by-point basis, not according to the amount of feature change.

More significantly, he said that WordPress will no longer make releases with major changes. From now on the latest stable WordPress version will be backwards-compatible with the prior release.
Google Gears: WordPress 2.6 will have support for Gears, with the ultimate goal of allowing all data to be backed-up via Gears.

In talking about Gears, Mullenweg observed that the Flash uploader introduced in WordPress 2.5 creates numerous compatibility issues with various users’ browsers and operating systems. I thought this was particularly interesting, because Flash is usually touted as being a reliable way to make web experiences uniform. It’s good to know that sometimes proprietary software isn’t better.
Mullenweg’s blog: I thought it was interesting that Mullenweg manages his email account through a web interface he’s created that integrates with the WordPress backend. He also has expanded the WordPress taxonomy system beyond tags and categories to classify, for example, people. The latter has some possibilities for social networking development.

Matt Mullenweg on Mashable

Austin Matzko — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:36:03 +0000

Recently Mark Hopkins of Mashable interviewed WordPress founder and Automattic president Matt Mullenweg for a Mashable Conversations podcast. Most interviews of Mullenweg seem to cover the same ground, and Hopkins was even apologetic about it. However, I thought it was interesting that this time Mullenweg mentioned Mark Pilgrim’s post about switching to WordPress as being one of the events that boosted WordPress into prominence (the seminal event is the subject of Pilgrim’s entry: Movable Type’s starting a fee structure).

WordPress Job

Austin Matzko — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:46:56 +0000

Ozh announced a brand-new site aggregating WordPress freelance jobs: WordPressJob.com. It includes a search feature and can be followed on Twitter and via (as of now not working) RSS feed.

Venture Capital and Automattic

Austin Matzko — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:23:23 +0000

Xconomy has an article about the birth of Automattic, the company started by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. The author has interviewed Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris Venture, Automattic’s main investor.

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

Austin Matzko — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:51:26 +0000

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 unclear about what it would stand to gain from the investment.

Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the publishing technology at the foundation of WordPress and harness the platform’s ability to aggregate blog posts.

First, the “publishing platform” is WordPress, the open-source software—not Automattic, the company. Is the Times confusing the two? (I mentioned earlier that the Crunchies seem to make the same mistake, and even core WordPress developer Mark Jaquith complains about it today.)

Second, WordPress does have some ability to aggregate blog posts by using the MagpieRSS PHP class, but it’s not been considered an essential part of WordPress before. Not to mention that MagpieRSS itself has been abandoned for about two years and has trouble parsing some Atom feeds. So aggregation seems like an odd reason to invest in WordPress.

So what does Automattic plan to do with the extra money? The same Times article cites CEO Toni Schneider as saying that it plans to invest in “other services, including an antispam filter and an online-identity product.” It’s probably a safe guess that he means Akismet, Automattic’s cornerstone, and OpenID. TechCrunch also mentions Gravatar and BBPress. Those are all worthy projects, so I look forward to seeing how the $29.5 million gives them a boost.

Crunchies: Did WordPress.org or Automattic Win?

Austin Matzko — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:44:21 +0000

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 as “WordPress.org” to differentiate it from “WordPress.com,” which is a commercial site running WordPress Multi-User (MU) and owned by Automattic, the company headed by the lead WordPress developers. Because a number of the key people overlap between WordPress.org and Automattic, it’s understandable that people would confuse the two. However, Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic, often seems at pains to distinguish them.

But the folks behind the Crunchies don’t seem as aware of the distinction. On the one hand, WordPress.org put up a banner encouraging people to vote for it in the Crunchies. And Mullenweg seems to think that congratulations should go “to the entire WordPress community for this win. Just wait until they see 2.5,” that “2.5” referring to the version of WordPress.org to be released some time in the Spring. (WordPress MU, used by Automattic on WordPress.com is currently at version 1.3.)

But on the other hand, TechCrunch lists Automattic, and Giga Omni, WordPress.com, as the winner of the “most likely to succeed” category.

Clearly, though, congratulations should go to Automattic’s Toni Schneider for “best startup CEO,” which everyone agrees he won.