Eric Blanchard has always been a techy at heart. In 2007 he was working with the Sinton Police Department. He wanted to create a website for the department but had no idea how. After some research he started learning CSS, HTML, MySQL, and PHP with the help of a friend. Blanchard cut his teeth building…
Markdown has finally made its way to Jetpack after it was added to WordPress.com a couple months ago. The new Markdown module in Jetpack 2.8 gives you the option to write and edit rich text without having to write code or reach for your mouse. If you’re not familiar with Markdown, here’s what it looks…
The Jetpack plugin code is now available on github and the team welcomes your pull requests. With the addition of Jetpack, Automattic now has 106 public repositories on github. That’s a lot of shared code! Jetpack has been downloaded nearly eight million times since its debut on WordPress.org. If you’ve enjoyed using Jetpack and have…
This weeks episode features Chris Cochran, co-organizer of Wordsesh. In this episode, we discussed the inspiration behind the event, Wordsesh 2, what may be coming with Wordsesh 3, and much more. We also talked about the release of WordPress 3.8, covered all of the new features and gave our thoughts on the new default theme,…
Jetpack 2.7 was released today, featuring Google+ support for Publicize, which enables you to shoot posts straight to G+ after you publish them. However, the Jetpack team has packed more into this release than they let on in the announcement. Here’s a quick overview of the major enhancements and bug fixes included in 2.7.
One of the most popular modules used within Jetpack is Stats. This module replaces the stand-alone plugin formerly known as WordPress.com Stats. Unfortunately, the most recent update to Jetpack has temporarily broken the Stats dashboard widget. I’ve routinely seen the error message that is shown in the image above but I thought nothing of it.…
As is tradition on WordPress.com, it’s that time of year where they turn on the snow machine. In order to accomplish the same thing for a self hosted installation of WordPress, you’d need to use a plugin. Great news if you’re already using Jetpack! If you have Jetpack enabled on your site, point your browser…
One of the most common complaints from users of the Jetpack plugin is not being able to easily disable or enable modules. A new plugin called Rocketeer developed by Brady Vercher hopes to solve this problem. Rocketeer creates an interface in the back-end of WordPress similar to the plugin management page. With this interface, users…
Jetpack 2.6 is now available. This release introduces Monitor, a brand new module for monitoring the uptime of your website. Do you flip your lid when you find out that your website has been down? Activating the Monitor module will help you to deal with downtime more expediently, because you’ll be instantly notified when your…
Automattic is making waves today in the fight against censorship, filing two lawsuits against those who are abusing the DMCA by misrepresenting copyright infringement. The company is taking a stand against the fraudulent misuse of copyright law in order to protect WordPress.com users from censorship. Meanwhile, the other dark side of censorship – the one…
A few days ago, we published a list of plugins and services that can be used as alternatives to the modules shipped with Jetpack. While creating that post, it became obvious how much trouble it would be to avoid the convenience that Jetpack offers. Automattic employee Jeremy Herve, who works on the Jetpack team, took…
Jetpack is a plugin developed by Automattic, made up of a bunch of useful modules.. However, some of these modules require a connection to WordPress.com. You also can’t use one or two modules unless Jetpack as a whole is installed. I decided to challenge myself to see how many plugins it would take to mimic…
Akismet is celebrating a huge milestone today. According to its spam counter, it has now blocked over 100,000,000,000 spam messages. Not all of that spam has originated from WordPress powered websites. Thanks to a number of libraries and an API, Akismet can be used on different content management systems as well as services.
ManageWP.org has been live since October 14th and has already accumulated over 1,000 registered users. The site has also been in the top 5 of traffic referrals to WPTavern.com, thanks in large part to the unsolicited submission of articles and upvotes. We extend a huge thank you to all who have shared and voted on…
No guests this week which provided Sarah and I a oppurtunity to go in-depth on some topics such as the new password meter for WordPress 3.7. We also had a great discussion surrounding the question of whether code revisions should be added to the core or not. After the discussion, Sarah and I are both…