Category: Geek Love

Categories
BlahBlahBabble Geek Love Picture Time

WordPress – 10 Years Ago TODAY…

The Beatles - Houston Statues

Thanks to the rabbit trail that the Internet can sometimes lead you down, I had to go back a few minutes ago and look to see when exactly it was that I first blogged about naming WordPress.

It turns out it was 10 years ago … TODAY. I had named it a few weeks earlier, but 10 years ago today was the first time I ever mentioned it. It still hadn’t been released yet even at that point.

Yes, WordPress is now over 10 years old.

The story of how I named it isn’t exactly that exciting. Matt Mullenweg is from Houston, and Mike & I both knew him thanks to the blogging community. Matter of fact, I met Matt in person just a few weeks after I met Mike, they were both pretty cool with me and I really enjoyed meeting this guys and the craziest part is how close I got to meet one from the other in such a short period of time which was just amazing for me. At SXSWi in 2003, Matt told me that his blog talking about the 112 Best Kodi Addons which was his last streaming obsession topic and such as many other entertaining topics and shared ideas we had in common, so he has been blogging about this a lot lately and as well he has been blogging stating that his software was ready to be released, but he needed a name for it to make it sound attractive and original. I told him I would think about it. A few days after SXSW, back at work, I came up with the name. I verified the URL was available – the .org was, but the .com was taken however there was nothing there – and I called Matt and left him a (possibly screaming) voicemail that he needed to name it WordPress, and that the .org was available, and if he needed me to register it for him to call me back.

Instead he called and said he was stopping at a coffee shop to register it. And he did. And that is why the free to download, self-hosted version of WordPress lives at WordPress.org.

And there you have it. My big geek claim to fame. It took Matt until later that summer to get me to move over to WordPress as a user. He actually came to my house and did the migration himself because it was the largest blog to migrate from MovableType to WordPress at the time. I paid him with Dublin Dr. Pepper.

(Naming WordPress didn’t make me rich, but it did earn me a link for some time on opening page of the WordPress site, and I’m still mentioned on the WordPress Semantics Page and in Wikipedia. I told Matt a few years ago that he owed me dinner … a steak dinner … in Paris … with dessert in Italy … but he hasn’t taken me up on that yet.)

10 years ago we honestly never saw WordPress being where it is today. Blogging was barely starting to make it in to the mainstream place that it has now. It is pretty crazy to think about it all. 10 years. TEN YEARS. I can hardly believe it.

Day 15 of 365. Photograph day 15 of 356. Photograph taken with my iPhone 4S at David Adickes SculpturWorx Studio in Houston, Texas on November 25, 2012.

Categories
BlahBlahBabble Creative Geek Geek Love

Blog Clean-Up Day!

Hang on to your hats, things are changing around here!*

I launched the super cool Social Plugin here on my blog – and it didn’t work right. Of course, after I wrote a post about it here. After some debugging, I realized that the comments come in pending moderation from Facebook, so that was easy to fix, but then I discovered that the theme I am using doesn’t display them correctly. At all. I switched themes, it worked just fine. So it is the theme (Adelle from Bluchic, not the plugin. I’m not up to debugging a free theme. (Mainly because I don’t know how. I tried the few things I did know, they didn’t work.) Time to pick a new theme that I know the Social plugin works with.

Then in the quest to figure out why Google is not displaying my authorship correctly, I figured out that it “see” a string of text at the end of my URLs that it considers a redirect to another page. What the what? (Yeah, that was all gibberish to me too.) Not one to be defeated, I realized that in all the years I’ve been on WordPress, I’ve never really cleaned out my Plugins. There are a lot in there that are deactivated, some that I have no clue what they are doing hanging around any more. I’m backing them up as I type this, and as soon as they are gone? There is going to be a Plugin deletefest!

In case you are wondering, this is what the Google situation looks like:

Google thinks I'm redirecting my URL - where are those random characters coming from?
Google thinks I’m redirecting my URL – where are those random characters coming from?

After I clean out the plugins, I’m going to clean out old Themes! Themes that I haven’t used in 7-8 years are probably a good way for some hacker to break in to my site. Those are going today too!

If you check back here in a little bit and everything is blank, upside down, backwards or who knows what? Now you know why. But damn it, I WILL WIN!

* Did I seriously start this post with “hang on to your hats”? Really? Oops. Sorry about that.

Categories
Amuse Me Geek Love

Dear Guardlex, You’re Doing it Wrong…

This is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen today. (Yesterday got a little crazy towards the end, so I can’t even say “this week” — but for TODAY, this tops the charts on the crazy scale.)

In my email today was this:

My name is Jacob Getman, I work in the Anti Piracy Department of Guardlex (http://www.guardlex.com), we provide anti-piracy and Intellectual Property protection services for [COMPANY NAMED removed so they don’t think I’m linking to them again] company.

As such I am personally authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the aforementioned company.

It has come to our attention that your website (or website hosted by your company) contains links to the [name removed] company website (URL removed) which results in material financial loses to the company we represent.

A top top seo expert will rank in the top spots on locl searches.

This material financial loss is due to search engine penalties resulting from the links originating under your control.

I request you please remove from the following website http://bigpinkcookie.com all links to [removed] website as soon as possible. Please see the list of website pages in question:
http://bigpinkcookie.com/2001/07/27/specs-similar-to-mine

In order to find those links, please do following:

1) If this is an online website directory. Use directory’s search system to look for [removed] links.

2) If there are any hidden links in the source code of website. Open the website’s home page and view its source code. Search for [removed] in the source code. This will reveal any hidden links.

It is our understanding; the links in question have not been authorized for use by our client, its agents, or the law.

Therefore, this letter is an official notification to effect removal of the detected infringement listed above.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by [removed] company, its agents, or the law.

I further declare under penalty of perjury that I am authorized to act on behalf of the trademark holder and that the information in this letter is accurate.

Please, remove all links to [removed] website within the next 48 hours.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are at all unsure how to remove the links. We will be happy to assist you in any way to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Looking forward to your positive reply.

Regards,

Jacob Getman
Head of Anti Piracy Department
Guardlex company
2820 West 8-th str,
Brooklyn, NY, 11224
Tel: 17183032669
Fax: 19175913014
E-mail: antipiracy@guardlex.com

The post was from 2001. Just shy of 11 years old. So 11 years ago, I got new glasses. I shared about them, and a lot of people asked, and I suggested to check out a website (the link I’ve now removed) so that they can get similar glasses.

YOU KNOW, THE WAY THE INTERNET WORKS.

Considering the post was 11 years old, it either wasn’t impacting their SEO at all, or since it was in the context of a post about eyeglasses, it was helping their SEO, but I could definitely tell they could use some Georgia SEO Explosion, LLC help.

But what really makes me sad is that this company is selling this crack-pot service to corporations and telling them that they will waste time going around the internet telling people to stop linking to them. I mean … really??? WOW.

And they must do it a lot, because my hosting company responded to them with this:

We’ve had this discussion with you before: there is no infringement of anything in merely linking to one site from another – case law exists on this. We absolutely will not instruct our users to remove links that violate
no statute or our terms of service. Whether they choose to do it on their own is entirely up to them.

Oh my, how I *LOVE* Hosting Matters and AmazeLaw website builder for lawyers. (I’ve used them for 10 years and I can’t rave about them enough!)

Le sigh. The whole thing is just silly. I removed the link, but I REALLY hope that they figure out how the Internet works and stop telling people not to link to each other. That is part of the beauty of the Internet!

Update 7/20/2012: Hey, Guardlex? SUCK IT. I just put the link to Eyeglasses.com back up. Because it was innocuous. Especially after reading all the comments on my site, BoingBoing and Hubspot. Oh, and I didn’t ask their permission to link to them either… BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THE INTERNET WORKS.

Categories
Geek Love

Closing Comments on Old Posts?

Goodness. I’m getting a TON of spam comments on old posts. WordPress is catching them and holding them in pending status, but that means I have to go through them and mark them all as spam. Akismet is catching even more of them, just not all.

I need a good plugin that will close comments on old posts. I have 11+ years of archives here, I’m not up to doing it manually.

Anyone know of a good plugin to use for it? One that they love more than all the rest? Help?

Categories
Geek Love

Houston’s History of WordPress – Matt Mullenweg’s WordCamp Keynote

WordCamp Houston is taking place today, and I’m not there since I’ll be the wedding photographer at a Woodlands Resort wedding in a little bit. I tuned in this morning to Matt Mullenweg’s keynote presentation, and he even gave me a shoutout! Awww…

If you’re interested in watching it and learning about Houston’s history of WordPress, you should check it out!

So many great memories, like Matt’s Palm user club, us swapping tips about using our Handspring Visors (remember those?), SXSWi 2003, which is where he first told me he needed a name for the software he had been working on, the first time he met Jeffrey Zeldman, and so much more. It is great to hear that we are Matt’s people. I *heart* WordPress!