WordPress Hosting: WP Engine and Page.ly
July 29, 2010
WordPress hosting: does the world need more options? Perhaps it does.
WP Engine seeks to serve what they believe is a large market: businesses that need more customizability than WordPress.com hosted accounts offer at low-end prices but more ease of use and scalability support than the millions of WordPress.org users get running open source installs on their own or rented servers.
For $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. Scalability durring traffic spikes is one of the company’s biggest sales propositions.
I think that the WP Engine folks are on to something. Follow the above link, or see Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post at RWW, if you want to see who these folks are. As I write this, the comments on Marshall’s post are an amicable exchange between the WPE folks and their counterparts at Page.ly, who offer a similar service.
Page.ly seems to be a little further along than WPE, particularly with respect to partnerships. Page.ly has an affiliate program in place (yes, that is an affiliate link in the previous paragraph) and explicitly encourages resellers. But, without turning this post into an over-optimistic echo chamber, I think that there is room for multiple strong competitors in the premium WordPress hosting space, so all the best to WPE as it launches and invites.
Appreciating Electricity
July 28, 2010
Like a couple of thousand other people in Montgomery County, Maryland, we lost power on Sunday afternoon, following thunderstorms with winds exceeding 60 miles-per-hour (to quote Pepco, the power company). Our power came back at about midnight Tuesday/Wednesday.
For most of those 50-plus hours, we didn’t have dialtone on our landline. On Monday morning, I was getting no cellphone signal from T-Mobile, and no web access on my Android.
In fact, we had no web access at all during the power outage, even for a laptop running on battery power. We have FiOS, but only when we have electricity.
I think I missed the web more than I missed air conditioning, and that’s saying something in July in Maryland. It’s good to be back online.
WordPress Theme Thesis Now GPL’d
July 23, 2010
Thesis is now under the GPL. That is, the PHP code that forms the bulk of the WordPress theme Thesis is now under the GPL, the same free software license as WordPress itself.
A week ago, I posted on the Thesis licensing controversy, closing with the wish that it wouldn’t go to court. Well, that wish was granted. I am “glad that Pearson saw fit to respect the GPL and that no blood was shed in the process” (to quote Jolie O’Dell, who has moved to Mashable from RWW).
Why should WordPress themes (not just Thesis) be GPL’d? WordPress core developer Mark Jaquith made a thorough argument that: Theme code necessarily derives from WordPress and thus must be licensed under the GPL if it is distributed. There’s lively discussion at Mark’s blog and at Reddit.
Restaurant Presence on the Web
July 22, 2010
Every restaurant has a presence on the web. It’s up to the restaurant to manage that presence. In fact, that’s true of every organization, but this post is about restaurants.
The restaurant may be represented on the web by review at sites like Yelp, and by mentions on blogs and at other social media sites. It makes sense for the restaurant to add its own web site. I jotted down some thoughts on restaurant web sites earlier this year.
- A simple front page is key, especially since potential customers may be mobile, hungry, and impatient.
- Current content is good. Customers want to know that the restaurant is still good and is doing interesting things. Search engines like current content too.
While rich and extensive content may be good, especially for upmarket restaurants, I don’t think it deserves a place on the above high-priority list.
With these thoughts on the back burner, I was interested to read about Chompstack in a RWW article by John Paul Titlow. Chompstack is a tool to build mobile sites for restaurants.
First thought: great idea, given the importance of mobile for restaurants. Second thought: is it necessary to focus specifically on mobile? The restaurant also needs a site that works well on laptops, desktops, etc., as well.
Like most people, I think of the hammer with which I’m most familiar. I could use WordPress to build a restaurant site that works well for the mobile customer and for the not mobile right now, but still impatient, customer. Such a site would of course have a built-in blog for current content such as reviews, specials, etc.
Restaurant web presence seems like a huge opportunity. I don’t see many restaurants with really good web sites. I see many without a web site, or with site with more bloat than good information.
What do you think? Can you provide examples of restaurants with good web presence?
Books About WordPress (3.0)
July 19, 2010
Why books about WordPress? There is so much free stuff online about WordPress: the Codex, for example.
An advantage for online is that much of the material there is kept up to date. Books, in contrast, may suffer from bibliolescence: a term I coined to describe a book’s contents becoming obsolete. This risk is particularly acute for books about things that change rapidly or frequently, as WordPress does.
And yet, there’s something about a book: you can read it without having to boot anything up, you can flip through it, etc.
If you’re thinking about getting a book about WordPress, but are concerned about it becoming stale, now is as good a time as any to get one. WordPress 3.0 has just been released, so another major (i.e. deserving of a .0 version number) release is probably a while away.
So how many books are out now, or soon, covering WordPress 3.0? Searching Amazon shows that there are few.
One of them is the forthcoming edition of WordPress For Dummies. As author Lisa Sabin-Wilson posted recently, the 3rd edition, which includes WP 3.0, will soon be shipping. As I wrote in a previous post, the 2nd edition covers a fair amount of ground, despite its title and gentle pace. So I’m inclined to recommend the 3rd edition to those starting from scratch, or don’t mind a book that starts from scratch.
I’d be interested in news and previews and reviews of other WordPress books including the new features that came with 3.0…
It’s Always Kafka Day Somewhere
July 19, 2010
Three of the articles I saw today seem to fit together rather well. One, about unpublished manuscripts by Franz Kafka, is by Mark Tran, writing for the Guardian. I’m being particularly careful to identify authors, lest anyone think that the other stories are from the Kafka archives.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post leads with an investigation of Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arkin. I was relieved to find that it’s not behind the same login wall as a lot of WashPost content.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work…
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
Last comes a Kafkaesque story by Curt Hopkins at RWW. Blogetry, a WordPress platform, has been closed down by its host, BurstNET, “at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.” We know that about 70,000 blogs have been shut down. We don’t know:
- How many of these blogs did a bad thing.
- What bad thing was done.
- Which agency issued the shutdown request.
Happy Kafka Day. Maybe we can celebrate it again tomorrow.
WordPress, the GPL, and Thesis
July 16, 2010
WordPress is open source software, licensed under the GPL (as its About page tells us). The question is: does the fact that WordPress is under the GPL mean that WordPress themes must also be under the GPL? This question of WordPress theme licensing has come to a head recently, as what Mitch Canter calls the great Thesis vs. WordPress theme debate.
Thesis is the flagship theme at DIYthemes. It is one of several WordPress themes developed by Chris Pearson. It is not under the GPL, because Chris doesn’t want it to be, and doesn’t think it has to be.
Why should a WordPress theme use the GPL? One way of making the argument is to use the following quote from the GPL FAQ. Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL. A WordPress theme is a module that combines with WordPress core and with plugins to form a single larger program.
That’s the argument advance in a comment on the above-referenced great debate post. The comment is by Dougal Campbell, whose own post on the issue includes a good collection of links. Talking of links, my way in to this discussion was a post by Chris Cameron at RWW. That post focuses rather more on a specific exchange between Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg than on the wider issue.
I lean toward the view that WordPress themes (and plugins) are modules that combine with the core code. So they should be under the GPL, and hence free (as in freedom). If that makes a developer uneasy, well, maybe they should have thought of that before developing modules that combine with GPL’d code.
On the other hand, I think that reasonable people can disagree on this issue. So how to resolve it? Through the courts?
I have a few questions about the legal route. First, who has the best standing to bring suit? Would it be the WordPress Foundation (an organization of and from which I’ve heard little since its founding)?
Second, is this particular case too clouded by issues specific to Thesis to provide a good test of the basic question of theme licensing? (I’m thinking of statements that Thesis includes some code lifted from WordPress core.)
Finally, would a lawsuit be a good use of anyone’s resouces? I strongly suspect not.
Software Patents: Not in New Zealand
July 15, 2010
In New Zealand, a Patents Bill is about to pass into law. Once it does, software will be unpatentable in that fine country. I say it’s a fine country, not because I’ve been there, but because everyone I’ve met who’s been there says so, and there are hobbits (none of whom I’ve met), and… there will be no software patents.
That’s currently the top story on Reddit, in the form of a nicely balanced article by Paul Matthews of the New Zealand Computer Society. By “nicely balanced” I mean that he and I are on the same side, but that he makes a good effort to prevent the opposing case.
Reddit Has Freemium Thrust Upon It
July 13, 2010
Reddit is among the handful of sites I visit most days. It’s always been free. It’s supported by ads. It’s owned by Conde Nast, but that doesn’t mean it’s supported by Conde Nast. As mike [raldi] explained at the end of last week:
We’ve been kinda bummed at reddit these days. It seems like every week something comes up that slows performance to a crawl or even leads to a total site outage. And we almost never get a chance to release new features anymore…
The bottom line is, we need more resources.
Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast… and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit’s revenue isn’t great.
The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds… to about 280 million pageviews per month.
Reddit addressed the resources problem by going freemium, but in a rather unusual way. The usual freemium proposition is: it’s a free service, but you can pay $X to get the following features. The Reddit proposition was a lot less specific:
in exchange for subscribing to reddit, we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage. It’s kind of a lame offer, we know, but if the program is a success, we’ll be able to give subscribers better incentives in the coming months. We invite you to post ideas in the comments section; in the meantime, I suppose it’s more or less a pledge drive.
The Reddit people called this Reddit Gold. Mashable Stan called it going freemium out of necessity. He also called it “a huge success” and an example of how “a very dedicated community can sometimes shape not only your service… but also your business plan.”
Reddit’s Chris [KeyserSosa] also hails the success of Gold, and promises that “there are some cool things coming that would be impossible for us to do for eight million active users, but totally feasible to bring to the 6000 or so who have taken a leap of faith with us so far.”
That figure of 6000 Gold members: it’s 6000 more users paying for Reddit than there were a week ago, but it’s a lot less than the 2% rule of freemium would suggest. That said, we’re a only few days into a rather sudden and unorthodox leap into freemium.
I hope that many more will sign on to Reddit Gold. Some intermittent users of Reddit have probably only just become aware of the Gold program. It’s currently the number five story on Reddit itself, by the way. Others may be waiting to see what the premium features will be. Some of us are prone to procrastinate, and/or are delaying discretionary outlays until we get our tax refund (and yes we did file on time, back in April).
Facebook: It’s not just before breakfast
July 7, 2010
A couple of recent posts on Mashable emphasize the extent of assimilation into the Faceborg. Let’s start with Stan’s statement: “The days of having a separate login and password for each online service we use are behind us. Now, you can log into most sites and services using your social network’s ID.”
Facebook has a 46% identity share: the emphasized term is mine, while the infographic from which I cropped the image, and the research on which it is based, are from Gigya.
From this (data) point start many lines of discussion. I’ve already started the Faceborg line. In an almost opposite direction goes the “calm down, identity is more than just login” line. A line I find interesting starts with Stan’s choice of words; in the above quote, he seems to assume that your ID will come from a social network, rather than from a blog or other service.
But on to the second Mashable post, this one written by Ben. He reports (based on a study by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research) that “as many as one-third of women aged 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up, even before they get to the bathroom.” My first reaction was: whatever happened to laptops and multitasking? I hope that your reaction is more profound.
Feel free to react to any aspect of this post via comments.
