This month, Automattic had the privilege of working with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) to migrate their early 2000s blogging platform over to our Pressable infrastructure. (Pressable is a small host Automattic runs to develop our WP.cloud infrastructure, i … | Continue reading
The new NASA.gov website has launched on WordPress powered by WPVIP. (Also their science site.) | Continue reading
Jamie Marsland has this great Youtube video where he rebuilds TechCrunch.com just using core blocks in WordPress 6.3 in 30 minutes. Worth checking out! | Continue reading
Zeynep Tufekci has a great article, One Thing Not to Fear at Burning Man, that covers well what I have experienced as well growing up in Houston through hurricanes and other natural disasters—that in times of need people help each other in ingenious ways. | Continue reading
WordPresss.com just announced its hundred year plan. This was very fun to create and plan for, and I hope it gets people and other companies thinking about the long term. Very inspired by The Long Now Foundation and The Internet Archive. See also: Derek Siver’s Hundred Year Host. | Continue reading
Jon Weeks from the Evening Standard interviewed me for their How to Be a CEO podcast about Tumblr, and as I often do we mostly talked about open source. If you can’t listen Techcrunch’s Sarah Perez posted a really nice summary of the interview. | Continue reading
One of the cooler things the WordPress community started doing in 2006 was putting on these events we called WordCamps. A big one is about to kick off in National Harbor, Maryland. You might be wondering where the name came from: Tim O’Reilly, of the O’Reilly books that so many o … | Continue reading
Version 6.3 is out! Time to fire up your updating engines. This is actually a really big one. (As a reminder, we do three major release of WP per year and each one is a +0.1, 7.0 will just be the next release after 6.9, so big things can happen in random version numbers.) … Cont … | Continue reading
Ottawa reminds me a lot of Houston. A city that is a microcosm of Canada’s diversity and vibrance. When you visit Ottawa, I’d recommend checking out Aiana Restaurant Collective (powered by WordPress, natch!) and Stolen Goods Cocktail Bar to see craftspeople operating at the top o … | Continue reading
Woke up this morning to a lot of people sending me the link to the Axios scoop that Vox Media is moving from its proprietary CMS Chorus to open source WordPress VIP, and doubling down on its premium ad network Concert and commenting platform Coral. This is very exciting because I … | Continue reading
I had a great time at WordCamp Europe in Athens this year, here’s the keynote “Variations on a Theme” with presentations from Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Matías Ventura, and Q&A from all three of us. | Continue reading
Whoop is an excellent biometrics bracelet I’ve been wearing for a few months since my friend Jaime Waydo joined as their CTO. After many years of being very in the Garmin 945 camp, I now do an Apple Ultra for all the smart stuff, and Whoop for all the great sleep, HRV, and recove … | Continue reading
I did an interview with Jamie Marsland where we talked a fair amount about AI. | Continue reading
Apple almost never fails to wow, and they had a lot of cool announcements at WWDC yesterday. Apple’s previously favorite (app of the year!) journaling app was Day One, one of Automattic’s products, but they announced their own Journal app. One nice thing about competing with Appl … | Continue reading
Check out this great article on an exciting discovery of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy playing together. The album comes out July 14th. Hat tip: Aaron Wieczorek. | Continue reading
I think part of what Mike Little showed with his comment on my blog that led to the creation of WordPress, is that it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters. All it take … | Continue reading
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. … | Continue reading
Last week I had the honor of being on stage at the Royal Society of Arts in London with Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, and Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, which is one of the open source projects I have the most respect and admiration for. This is the conversati … | Continue reading
I was on the Design Better podcast hosted by Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery, we talked about jazz, generative AI, distributed work, and my journey as an entrepreneur. | Continue reading
We just launched polls on Tumblr, and it’s been pretty fun. Cool to bring together the Crowdsignal (née Polldaddy) technology into a new world. | Continue reading
The last year of my thirties! WordPress turns twenty this year. Automattic is now ~2,000 people across 98 countries. There’s so much that has happened in the past decade yet it feels very much like we’re on the cusp of something even more exciting. This morning started well; I pu … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, but what feels like a lifetime ago, I was in New York City with a few dozen extra special people from around the WordPress world. Alongside Josepha and the community we presented this review of how WordPress did in 2022, and vision for what’s coming: | Continue reading
This is a big deal. There are a lot of big deals happening right now, it’s honestly a very exciting time to be in tech. I feel like a sailor in a tumultuous sea, and they should have sent a poet. T. S. Eliot was actually the inspiration for WordPress’ tagline “Code is Poetry” and … | Continue reading
Mary Hodder’s session on Core Values of bloggers is pretty interesting. They’re discussing trust and identity online, also editorial integrity and money. Excellent moderation. People wh… | Continue reading
Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, and since we’ve been tapping away trying to make the best podcast client for people who love listening to podcasts. And! The team has been working really hard to make those clients totally open source and available to the world, and it’ … | Continue reading
Tumblr launched Community Labels yesterday, which allows consistent tagging of addition, violent, and adult content, and for people to hide, blur, or show that content. It’s gone pretty well so far. We’ve still been getting a lot of questions if it’s going to be free-for-all with … | Continue reading
I joined episode 681 of This Week in Google and it was fun with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt: | Continue reading
WordCamp United States was in San Diego this year, a really lovely town. It felt like a throwback because of the venue we had to limit tickets quite a bit, so it felt like a WCUS from a decade ago. I’ll probably do this year’s State of the Word in December again with a livestream … | Continue reading
If I had to pick one reason why I’d suggest every person should attend Burning Man at least once, it would be the art. (Second reason would be seeing the principles in action.) This year I am particularly excited to support two pieces, the first being the Sonic Sphere which has t … | Continue reading
You can now subscribe to updates from this blog in this Telegram channel! Right now it will get updates from Ma.tt and Matt.blog, and hopefully my Tumblr in future once the bot supports that as a content source. If you’d like to set this up for your WordPress site, check out this … | Continue reading
From a nice new Polygon article, Our favorite Neil Gaiman books, comics, and more: Before I elaborate — yes, people still use Tumblr and it’s far more popular than most people think. Neil Gaiman has been an active Tumblr user since 2011, and he still actively uses the microbloggi … | Continue reading
Today is the 19th anniversary since WordPress’ first release, which is especially exciting for a number of reasons: The community put together an awesome site celebrating the occasion at wp19.day. We just had an awesome 6.0 “Arturo” release. Next week June 2-4 WordCamp Europe ret … | Continue reading
I spoke with Guy Raz about the early days of WordPress and Automattic on the latest episode of “How I Built This (listen on Pocket Casts).” We ended up talking for over four hours and the show has skillfully edited this down to just over an hour. We discussed my time at CNET, how … | Continue reading
In a podcast interview they’ve titled How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird (listen on audio here), I spoke with Nilay Patel on economics of abundance vs scarcity, Amitabh Bachchan, the future of Tumblr and adult content, Gutenberg, Promethean app design, web3, … | Continue reading
I usually wouldn’t do a post about this, but I was so surprised I had to share. I picked up a Jabra Evolve2 30 UC wired headset, with USB-C, because my friend Hugo loves the wireless Jabra an… | Continue reading
This is an unusually late birthday post (still backdated to January 11). I woke up on my actual birthday and was not feeling it. I was locked down even more strictly than January 2021 because I was… | Continue reading
My birthday is coming up soon so it’s that time of the year when friends start reaching out and asking where they should fly to and how we’re going to celebrate. After a good run in the… | Continue reading
David Pierce wrote a deep profile, over 4,000 words, for Protocol and asks the question in the headline, Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet? Which brings to mind Betteridge’s law of headlin… | Continue reading
I’m very excited that we’ll be broadcasting the State of the Word “live from New York City” this coming Tuesday, December 14th! There will be a very small “studio audi… | Continue reading
One of my favorite magazines, that I have issues going back to the 40s and 50s, has relaunched and redesigned their site on WordPress and it’s gorgeous. Speaking of great redesigns, the new G… | Continue reading
Since Frontity launched their open source framework, they have been making the integration between React and WordPress easier. Their proven drive and experience with clean technological solutions w… | Continue reading
In February of this year, Automattic closed a new primary funding round of $288M, bringing in some great new partners including BlackRock, Wellington, Schonfeld, and Alta Park. Existing investors I… | Continue reading
One of my big themes is that open source will transform every industry, with key examples being WordPress in web publishing, WooCommerce in online commerce, Wikipedia in reference, and Bitcoin/Ethe… | Continue reading
I’m not sure when I first came across the critically acclaimed Day One product, which is the best private blogging and journaling app out there, but I began seriously using it daily in 2016 w… | Continue reading
I just wrapped up a fun session with Matias and Brian, and though we covered a lot of ground we weren’t able to get to all the questions from the audience. Scroll to 2:58 to see the start: So… | Continue reading
This site is beginning to grow and grow, and forward compatibility has lately been in my mind more. Several days ago this site passed twenty thousand unique visitors, and more than seventy thousand… | Continue reading
Today marks eighteen years since the very first release of WordPress. I consider myself so lucky to have co-founded the project alongside Mike Little. Who could have imagined that our nights and we… | Continue reading