We are already 12 days into 2024 and I just know 6 months will go by and I’ll think “gee, that was fast” just as last year and the year before that. Maybe this post will serve as a way to ground myself when I inevitably log back in to the site weeks or months from now. It won’t be the next time I use WordPress. No, that’ll be tomorrow, because I use it almost every day. I will log into client sites, either live or in dev, and do that work, hours at a time, spending so much time online, in front of a screen. I like it! In fact, I love doing this, and it’s why I do it. I do miss face-to-face work collabs and physically being in a workspace sometimes. Sometimes. But you simply cannot beat the commute of your average WordPress agency employee. I hope to keep pushing out some videos that might spark someone else’s creativity (‘cuz mine feels limited a lot of the time).
Matt Mullenweg (current head and creator of WordPress) just turned 40 (he’s 7 years older than me) and yeah, I already feel like an imposter mentioning myself and Matt in the same sentence.
Matt posted today instead of gifts to:
Publish a post. About anything! It can be long or short, a photo or a video, maybe a quote or a link to something you found interesting. Don’t sweat it. Just blog. Share something you created, or amplify something you enjoyed. It doesn’t take much. The act of publishing will be a gift for you and me.
Matt Mullenweg, Jan. 12, 2024 (https://ma.tt/2024/01/birthday-gift/)
I’ve mentioned to many people that I love that WordPress’s default editing experience is called “Gutenberg”. Johannes Gutenberg, d. 1468, was the inventor (not of movable type, as many think – no, that was Bi Sheng, from China, almost 500 years before Johannes) – but of the printing press that allowed the mass production and distribution of huge volumes of works & ideas – for humans, by humans – for the first meaningful time in western history.
WordPress is closing in on 50% of all websites as its marketshare continues to make Wix and Squarespace look like small potatoes. This digital revolution over the past 25 years is nothing short of historic. Humans can now collect, search, filter, share, and disseminate ideas, files, photos – whatever – to anyone, anywhere, anytime. To think that WordPress is behind half of that? Matt should be proud of what he and his team have created. The original Gutenberg famously was bankrupted by his first printing press which was expensive and didn’t catch on initially and I trust Matt and the rest of Automaticc have ensured that won’t happen. It simply can’t happen to WordPress. It’s too big to kill and too important to vast amounts of online data. Without being too hyperbolic, WordPress is important to our survival as human – after all, if WordPress is gone, its likely other crucial infrastructure is also gone. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ll check back.
Anyway, this is my post. Happy B-day to the guy who helped make this thing I’m currently typing into and also feeding my family with (my job, that is, we don’t actually EAT WordPress).
