Open Source in Brazil is a new free eBook from O’Reilly Media that offers an inside look into the growth of Brazil’s free software community despite the country’s unique barriers. Brazil has a vibrant IT and startup culture and hosts the largest open source conference in Latin America, Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL). The conference…
WeFoster, co-founded by Marion Gooding and Bowe Frankema, is a new managed hosting platform fine-tuned specifically for online communities. The duo came up with the idea for WeFoster two years ago at WordCamp London 2015. “Bowe and I sat down and thought of ideas on how we could contribute to the open source community,” Gooding…
Stack Overflow published its analysis of 2017 hiring trends based on the targeting options employers selected when posting to Stack Overflow Jobs. The report, which compares data from 200 companies since 2015, ranks ReactJS, Docker, and Ansible at the top of the fastest growing skills in demand. When comparing the percentage change from 2015 to…
Three years ago Google introduced its new reCAPTCHA v2 API, replacing distorted text challenges with a simple “I’m not a robot” checkbox for validating users. This was a welcome improvement over the fuzzy text in a box that frustrated and infuriated real humans. reCAPTCHA v1 is no longer supported as of May 2016 and most…
Google announced that it is retiring its official Adsense plugin, previously known as the Google Publisher plugin. For the past three years it has allowed WordPress users to easily add Adsense ads to their sites, enable mobile-specific ad layouts, and manage ads with a point-and-click interface. “After reviewing the AdSense Plugin for WordPress, we’ve decided…
Clef, a two-factor authentication service founded in 2013 has announced that it is discontinuing its product. Clef is most well known for removing the burden of remembering usernames and passwords by replacing them with a 300 character key using mobile cryptography. The service’s WordPress plugin is active on more than 1M sites and has been removed from the directory.…
WordPress.com released its new Chrome Add-on for Google Docs today. The free add-on allows users to edit documents collaboratively in Google Docs and then send the document directly to any WordPress.com site as a draft post. The add-on can also connect to Jetpack-enabled sites, offering the same functionality for self-hosted WordPress users. After installing the…
WordPress 4.7.3 is now available with patches for six security vulnerabilities that affect version 4.7.2 and all previous versions. WordPress.org is strongly encouraging users to update their sites immediately. The release includes fixes for three XSS vulnerabilities that affect media file metadata, video URLs in YouTube embeds, and taxonomy term names. It also includes patches…
NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, is experimenting with a new way of keeping comments on topic. A new plugin on the WordPress-powered site aims to ensure commenters have read the article by requiring them to complete a short, three-question quiz before opening the comment form. Visitors who get the questions wrong…
In January 2017, WordPress core design contributors posted a survey titled What are you using the Customizer for? The link was published on the Make WordPress Design blog and wasn’t widely shared, so it only received 50 replies. Responses were anonymous, but most seem to have come from the WordPress developer community. Despite the small…
Web annotations became a W3C standard last week but the world hardly noticed. For years, most conversations on the web have happened in the form of comments. Annotations are different in that they usually reference specific parts of a document and add context. They are often critical or explanatory in nature. One of the key…
When Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the WordPress project, delivers his annual State of The Word presentation, he always gives props to meetup organizers and attendees. In 2016, there were 3,193 meetup events in 58 countries attended by 62,566 people. Meetups are one of the cornerstones of the community and for many are the gateway to discovering…
Medium started 2017 on uncertain footing, laying off a third of its staff in January after admitting that its ad-based business model was not working. “We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming…
HackerOne, the vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform, has launched a new Community Edition for open source projects. The company is built around the notion that, “given enough eyeballs, all vulnerabilities are shallow.” HackerOne announced a $40 million round of funding earlier this month, which allows the company to expand its market and add new…
Freemius Insights has announced that its analytics service that was previously only available to WordPress plugins is now available for themes. The company was founded in 2015 by Vova Feldman and his team after discovering how much information is not available to developers who host plugins and themes on the official WordPress directories and marketplaces.…