WordPress.com News
The official news blog of WordPress.com, announcing product features, security changes like HTTPS, payment options, and publishing tools.
What HN says
HN commenters link it for specifics: reblogging and feed features, early Bitcoin acceptance for countries PayPal doesn't serve, and Automattic's stand against censorship.
Stats for nerds
76HN people shared it
59linked in comments
988story points
Jan 2019last shared
Top posts on HN
- 1WordPress.com accepts Bitcoin3 people · 288 points · first shared 2012 · 117 comments on HN
- 2Open Sans, how do we love thee?1 person · 132 points · first shared 2013 · 75 comments on HN
- 3New Default WordPress Theme: Twenty Twelve1 person · 109 points · first shared 2012 · 29 comments on HN
- 4WordPress Launches Google Adsense Alternative, WordAds3 people · 106 points · first shared 2011 · 28 comments on HN
- 5Security Incident1 person · 65 points · first shared 2011 · 12 comments on HN
- 6Coming Soon: New .Blog Domains for Websites1 person · 48 points · first shared 2016 · 34 comments on HN
- 7WP.com downtime summary2 people · 28 points · first shared 2010 · 7 comments on HN
- 8Newspack by WordPress.com – A New Publishing Solution for News Organizations3 people · 27 points · first shared 2019 · 4 comments on HN
- 9How is WordPress.com made?1 person · 27 points · first shared 2011 · 14 comments on HN
- 10Wordpress.com implements Twitter API (for posting and reading)1 person · 25 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
- photomattSep 2009
Wow no reason to be so angry -- it's just some pings going back and forth. There's no need to make it personal. Besides, I've had way worse ideas.
We've always planned to have a variety of update notifications available -- the first we did was Jabber/XMPP, now RSS Cloud, after this we'll do some others. I mentioned this in my post on the subject, which you can check out here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/
We've supported other things before, like Atom Publishing, that to this day get almost no use (literally less than but we support them anyway because it can't hurt and might help. In general I would consider myself API- and format-agnostic.
- mquinlanApr 2012
Things may have changed in the last few years as blogspam is still pretty lucrative and has continued to advance, but I remember reading a study a few years ago (found here: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/04/09/why-wordpresscom-is-virtually-spam-free/) that made the conclusion that by barring Wordpress.com bloggers from using AdSense and other advertising services, they significantly cut down on the amount of spam Blogger and other services had to deal with. Wordpress.com does have WordAds (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/).
Otherwise, if you don't qualify for WordAds, self-hosting may be your best option.
- detaroJun 2016
> Do you have any idea how TLS actually works? If this worked out of the box for custom domains, then GitHub would need to be able to impersonate those domains.
If you redirect your domain to my webserver, I can get a certificate for it. E.g. from Let's Encrypt.
Wordpress.com uses that and offers SSL certificates to "million-plus"[0] blogs with custom domains. It's certainly doable at scale, although I totally understand it not having priority for GitHub (esp if it doesn't fit their current technical setup).
[0] https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/https-everywhere-encryption-for-all-wordpress-com-sites/
- lukiferDec 2013
WordPress got on board with accepting BitCoin early, primarily as a way to accept payments from countries not supported by PayPal: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/
Promotional purposes notwithstanding, the best legitimate use cases for accepting BTC so far seem to be online services (web hosting, domains), where the transaction delay and risk of double-spend isn't a big deal; and charities, who risk little and potentially gain much by publishing an address for a donation wallet.
- gibrownJan 2016
It's not dominant, it's apparently perceived that way within tech circles because they focus on tech.
There's not a good apples to apples comparison of public data, but for instance...
Medium 20k authors per week: http://recode.net/2015/09/28/ev-williams-medium-raises-57-million-for-the-best-stories-and-ideas-on-the-internet/
WordPress.com average 12.7m posts per week: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/the-2015-wordpress-com-year-in-review/
- grecyDec 2011
I asked the question on the linked blog [1]
The official reply was
"
For now, we are starting with WordPress.com users but look forward to working with folks like yourself who are self-hosted.
"Sweet!
1 - http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/#comment-143819 (that # href doesn't seem to work too well, do a seach for 'grecy' and you'll jump to my comment and the reply)