Monthly Archives: March 2005

Matt, WordPress, and Search Engine Gaming

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Update:
Every­one, Please under­stand that this not about WordPress the soft­ware, or WordPress developers, or even WordPress Inc. It is about Matt Mul­len­weg allow­ing someone else to game Google’s search engine on the WordPress.org site.

I feel I have to com­ment on the cur­rent WordPress story build­ing over the ‘dis­cov­ery’ that Matt has been using the wordpress.org domain to host thou­sands of specially-written art­icles designed to attract high pay­ing Google Adsense adverts, and their out­go­ing links gain­ing high page rank from WordPress.org’s own page rank.
Dou­gal Camp­bell has writ­ten a reasoned response to the story break­ing. It is most unfor­tu­nate that Matt is cur­rently on vaca­tion in Europe, but Jonas has replied quite reas­on­able. Jonas is also say­ing he will answer anyone’s ques­tions 24×7 which is most gen­er­ous of him.
I will also quote Andrew’s open­ing disclaimer:

Dis­claimer. I’m hes­it­ant to even write about this, know­ing the web’s fond­ness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it’s an import­ant issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. WordPress is a great pro­ject, and Matt is a good guy. Think before pil­ing on the hate­m­ail and flames.

I sus­pect that Matt is now aware of the situ­ation as the pages seemed to have dis­ap­peared, or else someone trus­ted has taken them down.

It’s worth not­ing that Matt already respon­ded to a query on the sup­port for­ums about this in Feb­ru­ary saying:

The con­tent in /articles is essen­tially advert­ising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I’m not sure if we’re going to con­tinue it much longer, but we’re com­mit­ted to this month at least, it was basic­ally an exper­i­ment. How­ever around the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary dona­tions were going down as expenses were ramp­ing up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The Adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like dona­tions but more spe­cific­ally it’s been going to the business/trademark expenses so it’s not entirely out of my pocket anymore.

My opin­ion? I say, let’s not make a moun­tain out of a mole hill till we have all the facts. It sounds very much like Matt has made dubi­ous decision for all the right reas­ons. But I believe the only thing one can con­sider Matt may have done wrong here is host­ing these art­icles on wordpress.org. Host­ing them at all I don’t have a prob­lem with: It is one way that could be used to help pay for the enorm­ous host­ing costs he must have. There are art­icles out there explain­ing exactly how to do this on your own site.

Matt has my sup­port, he has done a huge amount for this pro­ject. Far, far more than I have. I hope he can sort this one without to much fal­lout. The fact that he has already been open about it stands in his favour.

update:As Dr Dave poin­ted out in the com­ments, Matt didn’t respond to the forum post until Andy said he was going pub­lic with the story. I will still sup­port Matt, but I think he really has been very silly to get involved in this and to tie it in to wordpress.org

UPA North 2

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The second meet­ing of UPA North took place last night at Cafe Muse in the Manchester Museum. It wasn’t as well atten­ded as the first meet­ing in Janu­ary, but there were some famil­iar faces as well as some new; Hi Roy!.

I arrived early and grabbed myself a sand­wich and cof­fee before wan­der­ing around to shake a few famil­iar hands and say ‘Hi’ to some new faces. People con­tin­ued to drift in for the next half an hour or so.

Dave Hawdale kicked of the meet­ing giv­ing us some inter­est­ing and occa­sion­ally amus­ing ‘inter­net’ related facts from recent news, before intro­du­cing the nights guest speaker: Louise Fer­guson.

Louise intro­duced her­self and her sub­ject ‘Eth­no­graphy’. Her talk was very inter­est­ing, if a little rushed. It was clear she had a lot more to say on the sub­ject than time allowed. I felt she could have got some of her points across more eas­ily with con­crete examples, but she seemed determ­ined to skirt around job spe­cif­ics and cli­ent details. Louise fin­ished with a brief ques­tion and answer session.

After another ‘shame­less self-promotion’ ses­sion (which I bottled again!), Dave gave a round-up and men­tioned some ideas for the next couple of meet­ings. He is try­ing to arrange a couple of speak­ers on Access­ib­il­ity which should be very interesting.

After­wards a small group of us retired to Kro Bar where we all chat­ted about all kinds of stuff; from music and record col­lec­tions, to the Semantic Web and social soft­ware, to museum exhib­its, cat­egor­iz­a­tion, folk­so­nom­ies, and more. Talk­ing to Louise, it sounds like there are some inter­est­ing things afoot, UK-centered for a change.

I think every­one gained some­thing pos­it­ive from the night. Some use­ful con­tacts were made and even some tent­at­ive agree­ments made for the future.

100,000

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It seems num­bers are the fla­vour of the week: WordPress recently passed 100,000 down­loads. That’s a huge num­ber! I would like to think that no less than half those people actu­ally got as far as installing it and try­ing it. Cer­tainly judging by the num­ber of hits I get on my site from brand new blogs that ‘s not far off.
Matt and some friends had a little party to cel­eb­rate. Con­grat­u­la­tions guys.

200,000!

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Wow!, I’ve just had my 200,000th vis­itor since stat­ist­ics began (on this blog any­way)! A vis­itor from St Louis search­ing for the Von Trapp Fam­ily Sing­ers. Mean­while, page views are well on there way to 2,500,000.

This and That, Stuff and Nonsense

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It’s been a while again, since I blogged. Quite a lot has happened in vari­ous areas.
Firstly my post­ing of my themes has been incred­ibly pop­u­lar. The first two days after I pos­ted them saw my vis­it­ors peak at over 1200 a day! I’ve got another three based on the same lay­out. I’ll release those too, just as soon as I can pack­age them up.

I can now tell all about the news I men­tioned recently. Jamie has been offered a place at St Bede’s Col­lege and we have accep­ted. Its not going to be easy but the school has such a good repu­ta­tion and such fant­astic res­ults that we decided we couldn’t miss the oppor­tun­ity. We’ve vis­ited sev­eral times now and we all love the place.

I noticed that Alex King has a new ver­sion of his Tasks Task Man­ager soft­ware. I keep mean­ing to look into Tasks for use in my attempts to imple­ment GTD. Per­haps now is an ideal opportunity.

In other news, the second Usab­il­ity Pro­fes­sion­als Asso­ci­ation — North of Eng­land — Manchester Meet­ing is going to take place on Tues 29 March 2005.

The main event on the 29th March is a talk from Louise Fer­guson, who is the Vice Pres­id­ent of the UK chapter of the UPA and an expert in eth­no­graphy and how it can inform design.

I’m look­ing for­ward to it; I enjoyed the last meet­ing. If you are com­ing along, look me up and say Hi.

I’m sure there’s more…

Another 3-Column WordPress Theme

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Whilst I’m in the mood, here is another three-column theme for wordpress. This one is ‘Journ­al­ized Sand’ and is almost the same lay­out as Journ­al­ized Blue.

Click­ing the thumb­nail below will show you a full size screen shot of the theme in action.
screenshot of journalized sand theme
You can down­load the files from here: journalized-sand-theme-1.0.2.tar.gz (tar ball for unix or sim­ilar users) or journalized-sand-theme-1.0.2.zip (zip file for Win­dows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a dir­ect­ory called ‘journalized-sand’. Upload the dir­ect­ory and the files within it to your wp-content/themes folder on your server. Login to your blog’s admin­is­tra­tion pages and go to the Present­a­tion page. The new theme should be lis­ted there ready for you to select. If not check the per­mis­sions on your uploaded files.

You will need to tweak it a little. Not least to change the link cat­egor­ies in the calls to wp_get_links().
Enjoy! The theme is licensed under the GPL. So you may modify it and dis­trib­ute it. Please let me know if you use it, modify it, etc. If you have any ques­tions leave a com­ment on this post with your ques­tion. Com­ments are mod­er­ated so you won’t see your com­ment immediately.

Update: The per­man­ent home of this theme is now http://zed1.com/journalized/themes/journalized-sand

Journalized Theme

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At last, a mere week late, I have released my blog lay­out and col­our scheme as a WordPress theme.
Click­ing the thumb­nail below will show you a full size screen shot of the theme in action.
screenshot of journalized theme
You can down­load the files from here: journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.tar.gz (tar ball for Unix or sim­ilar users) or journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.zip (zip file for Win­dows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a dir­ect­ory called ‘journalized-blue’. Upload the dir­ect­ory and the files within it to your wp-content/themes folder on your server. Login to your blog’s admin­is­tra­tion pages and go to the Present­a­tion page. The new theme will be lis­ted there ready for you to select. If not check the per­mis­sions on your uploaded files.

You will need to tweak it a little. Not least to change the link cat­egor­ies in the calls to wp_get_links().
Enjoy! The theme is licensed under the GPL. So you may modify it and dis­trib­ute it. Please let me know if you use it, modify it, etc. If you have any ques­tions leave a com­ment on this post with your ques­tion. Com­ments are mod­er­ated so you won’t see your com­ment immediately.

Update: I have updated the down­load files to a new ver­sion along the rules and guidelines for the theme com­pet­i­tion

Update: The per­man­ent home of this theme is now http://zed1.com/journalized/themes/journalized-blue