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.
