If 75 percent of my day is spent writing, the remaining 25 percent is probably going over TechCrunch stats. I’m obsessed with it. That’s why I do so many posts about things like Chrome getting ready to overtake Firefox as the dominant browser among TechCrunch readers (less than 1 percent away now). So I was obviously happy when WordPress.com (which hosts us) overhauled their Stats area earlier this year. But it was always missing just one thing.
WordPress.com’s Stats area gives you a solid overview for how your blog is doing overall. And unlike Google Analytics, the data is up-to-the-minute fresh. You can see your top posts, top referrers, top search engine terms, top clicked links, and a few other things. One thing it doesn’t have though is the ability to see how each author is doing in terms of traffic to their posts. In other words, it’s lacking in the vanity department. But that’s coming shortly. → Read More
Back in May, Twitter unveiled a small tool called Blackbird Pie. Essentially, it was a way to the process of using a Tweet in a blog post easier. Rather than having to take a screenshot of the Tweet, you could just copy the URL into Blackbird Pie and out would pop some dynamically generated code for embedding the Tweet in your post, complete with working links. It was an interesting idea, sadly, no one uses it. But a key WordPress integration today should change that.
As they note on their own blog, WordPress has just enabled Blackbird Pie for all WordPress.com blogs. It works in posts and in comments too. All you have to do to bing a Tweet in is copy the URL for it and put it somewhere in your post on its own line. Says the company: → Read More
Today at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, PageLines will announce the release of Platform, a drag & drop design framework for WordPress. The product features some nifty CMS design options, a drag-and-drop layout editor, and a fully configurable template builder for creating custom websites.
In addition, Platform comes fully integrated with bbPress forum and BuddyPress community software right out of the box, and additional support for SEO, social media, ad campaigns, and more. If you’re into WordPress, you want to check this out. → Read More
Joe Wilcox at BetaNews has posted a must-read article in the wake of the announcement – made at TechCrunch Disrupt SF – that the Redmond software giant would be transitioning all its Windows Live Spaces users to Automattic‘s WordPress.com platform.
You may recall Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, stating that there were roughly 30 million active Windows Live Spaces accounts.
Wilcox, however, has managed to obtain internal e-mail messages exchanged between (yet unnamed) Microsoft employees that suggest far lower numbers. → Read More
Back in 2006, we covered the launch of Windows Live Spaces, a blogging service for Windows Live users. Today the service is headed in a new direction: Microsoft has teamed with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to transition its users over to the popular hosted blogging platform. The news was just announced at TechCrunch Disrupt by Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic.
Microsoft says that it decided that instead of building its own competing blogging service, it should go with WordPress’s fleshed-out feature set, which has 26 million users and powers over 8.5% of sites across the web. Users will be migrated through a process that preserves all of their content, and will automatically redirect visitors who head to their existing Microsoft Live Spaces sites. → Read More
“It’s not often you see a for-profit company donate one of their most valuable core assets and give up control,” Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg writes today in a post announcing that the WordPress trademark has been transfered from his company to the WordPress Foundation. “This is a really big deal,” he continues.
What this means is that the key ingredient behind Automattic is now in the hands of the organization in charge of “promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity.” So why do this? Mullenweg says it has been his goal since the beginning to blend a non-profit business, a for-profit one, and not-just-for-profit one under one banner. Now that he feels each of those aspects is stable enough, he wants that main banner, WordPress, to be “protected” as a “beacon for open source freedom.” → Read More
Created by Jason Baptiste, PadPressed is a Wordpress plugin that makes any Wordpress blog look like a native iPad app when accessed from iPad. Bestowing upon your humble blog the iPad features we’ve come to know and love such as “swipe to advance” articles, touch navigation, accelerometer positioning and home screen icon support when you’re really jonseing for that authentic app feeling.
While Baptiste started with WordPress because 8.5% of all websites (including our own) are Wordpress but has grander aspirations, “We did Wordpress first because it’s the largest thing there is next we’re doing Tumblr, Posterous, Moveable Type, and then custom CMSs.” Exciting! → Read More
WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging software, has just released WordPress 3.0, codenamed Thelonious — the software’s thirteenth release in its history. Beta releases have been available for the last few months, but now it’s official. To give an idea of how popular WordPress is, version 2.9 was downloaded 10.3 million times.
Among the features listed in the official blog post: a default theme called Twenty Ten (the old default was looking quite dated), a lighter interface, and 1,217 bug fixes. Theming has gotten quite a bit of attention, with APIs that make it easier for theme designers to allow for customized menus, post types, headings, backgrounds, and more). → Read More
Well, that was fun. If you tried to access TechCrunch any time in the last hour or so, you probably noticed that it wasn’t working at all. Instead, you were greeted by the overly cheery notice “WordPress.com will be back in a minute!” Had we written that message ourselves, there would have been significantly more profanity.
The cause of the downtime is still being determined; we’re waiting for more details from WordPress.com, the hosted blogging platform that is home to over 10 million blogs. We’re hosted under their VIP program, as are other large sites like GigaOm and some of CNN’s blogs. As far as we can tell, all 10+ million blogs hosted by WordPress were affected by the downtime.
Needless to say, we’re pretty upset. WordPress has a fairly reliable track record overall, but it was only a few months ago that WordPress suffered their worst downtime in four years, when all hosted blogs were down for around 110 minutes. → Read More
If you run a website that accepts Salesforce leads directly, chances are it’s running on WordPress. Chances are also that you’re getting emailed each of those leads, which you then have to copy-and-paste back into Salesforce, to put them into your system. Not anymore.
Salesforce has just launched a WordPress-to-Lead plug-in that allows you to place a sign-up form on any WordPress post or page, which then automatically puts that data into your Salesforce account. No more email required. It’s the first “Consumerprise” play that Salesforce has attempted. → Read More
Over the past few months, Automattic’s popular blog platform WordPress.com has taken an in-depth look at their blogging ecosystem, and realized that one of the major pain points for the 12.1 million users who self-host their WordPress blogs is security and restoration. WordPress.com backs up all of the blogs that it hosts, but those users who self-host their WordPress-powered blogs need to download outside plugins, such as this one, or use backup services like Mozy or Backupify to protect their data and content. Today Automattic is changing that with the launch of its own blog protection and restoration service for self-hosted blogs, called VaultPress.
Currently in private beta, VaultPress is a plugin users can download that acts as a backup service for your blog. Not only will the software help keep your blog up and running, but it will also soon monitor your site to alert you if their is suspicious activity or a hacking. Alternatively, VaultPress will eventually update your blog with security hot-fixes automatically. VaultPress will be a paid service and will probably be in the ballpark range of $15 to 20 per month, according to Automattic VP of User Growth Paul Kim. At first VaultPress will be extended on an invitation only basis and will eventually be open to the public in the near future. → Read More
Does the world need more than one Twitter? How about 10,000 of them? That is how many sites are running on the hosted version of StatusNet, which went into private beta at our Realtime CrunchUp last November. Today, StatusNet is opening up its hosted service to all comers in a public beta.
You can think about StatusNet as the WordPress of microblogging. StatusNet is open-source software which can either be downloaded and run on your own enterprise servers or now on StatusNet’s hosted servers. Basic service is free, with plans to charge for premium levels down the line. The premium versions will be ad-free, support unlimited users, larger file sizes, your own domain and design, Facebook and Twitter integration, and XMPP feeds. → Read More
All 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, including TechCrunch, just got more realtime. Any blog hosted on WordPress is now PuSH-enabled, meaning that new posts get pushed out to feed readers such as Google Reader the second they are published.
PuSH stands for Pubsubhubbub, a realtime protocol designed to speed up RSS which launched at our first Realtime CrunchUp last year. Instead of waiting for your RSS reader to ping the servers for each blog and news site you subscribe to, which can cause a noticeable delay before it actually shows up in your feed reader, it will now be pushed out immediately. → Read More
Media search and discovery site MeFeedia this morning released its first State of the Vlogosphere report since 2007. The main take-away: video blogs have exploded since the last update, but most vloggers stick to the best known video hosting sites for distribution and promotion purposes.
No surprises there, but since MeFeedia’s video search engine self-reportedly tracks over 30,000 video sources across the Web, the company slapped some interesting numbers on the most apparent trends. → Read More
This morning, a blogging platform and a microblogging platform have become more symbiotic. WordPress has enabled posting and reading the blogs the platform powers via the Twitter API.
This means any Twitter app that supports a custom API URL can be used to either post updates to your WordPress.com blog, or to read updates from blogs you’ve subscribed to. Tweetie 2, an iPhone and desktop Twitter client, will be one of the first third party apps to implement this. → Read More
You would think that, almost exactly 4 years after opening up to the public, WordPress.com would have a way for people to subscribe to blogs by e-mail, right? You’d be wrong, at least until today.
While there has always been the possibility to subscribe to blogs by e-mail using FeedBurner or other RSS facilitators, WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic has now added an email subscription feature to the popular free blogging service. → Read More
Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as “paragraphs.”
Today, blogs are doing fine, while Twitter is struggling with flattening growth, at least to its Website Twitter.com (clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck have seen no slowdown). The weakness Twitter has been experiencing in the U.S. → Read More
I’m a big fan of WordPress, be it their free blogging service (WordPress.com) or their free blogging platform (WordPress.org). Heck, the entire TechCrunch Network and my personal blog run on the stuff. → Read More
RSSCloud is a new format specification for feeds that solves polling and notification issues. It works by adding a cloud element to a feed which describes the path to a cloud server that should be notified when a feed is updated. The cloud server, in-turn, will send the updated feed content to all subscribers and aggregators. There is a description of this process on the RSSCloud website.
The protocol was designed by Dave Winer, who also drafted the original RSS specification and pioneered the use of feeds as a way to aggregate content. RSSCloud allows feeds to be more responsive and real-time. Rather than a polling model (‘are we there yet, are we there yet’), it pushes updates and update notifications down to subscribers via a cloud server and API. → Read More
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