Four Years of WordPress, One Year at Automattic

On April 16, 2007 I started working at Automattic, amazing how fast the last year has gone by. As I started gathering up details for what I’ve been doing this past year, I found that in April 2004 was when I started using WordPress to power this blog.

Four Years of WordPress

My first post on this blog was from April 30, 2004, using a beta of WordPress 1.2. First though, a little history.

In mid-2003 I figured it was time for me to get in on this “weblog” thing. Although I’d had various sites on the web since 1995, there was something about the order and structure of a blog that appealed to me. Like many others during this time I took a look at MovableType as one option to power my blog, since all the cool kids were using it (like Jeremy Zawodny, one of the blogs I’d been reading regularly). That didn’t last very long. I went on to try every piece of blog software that I could find, none of them really worked the way that I’d hoped they would.

Feeling that all the available options out there weren’t going to cut it, I started writing my own (another thing that seemly everyone else was doing at the time). I quickly got it up to the point where publicly it was good enough. I used that for months, while continuing to look at other options.

Fast forward to March/April 2004 where I finally found WordPress. It was being actively developed and was easily the best out of all the other options that I tried. And I had installed pretty much everything out there.

Since then I’ve published more than 1,000 posts with over 1,500 comments. I started using Akismet, which has blocked more that 500,000 pieces of spam.

One Year at Automattic

It is amazing that a whole year has gone by since my Friday the 13th post. Fortunately though it’s pretty easy to sum up. This job is freaking awesome!

The people at Automattic are amazing. At one point I had met everyone in the company, which is saying something since we are scattered all across the globe. Since then more people have come aboard, and I look forward to meeting them face to face latter this year.

Before joining Automattic full time in April 2007, I had been doing contract work starting back in January 2007. The result of that work was the new wp.* XML-RPC methods. For the most part I really enjoy working on XML-RPC, though some of the specific APIs that are built on top of it are a bit quirky.

Working on WordPress.com has been absolutely fascinating. The scale and growth are pretty impressive. Check out some of the stats and you’ll see what I’m talking about. We are fast approaching 3 million blogs. Not bad considering we hit 2 million in December 2007, some 4 months ago.

The Future

There are so many ways in which WordPress still has amazing amount of potential. In the social network sphere we are seeing things like BuddyPress and Diso. From the WordPress as a platform department there’s Prologue (which reminds me, I need to get a new version out the door, keep an eye on prologuetheme.org) and WP Contact Manager. Even good old XML-RPC will continue to see improvement as time goes on.

The next year will bring a few more releases of WordPress. What’s really exciting though is seeing how people will continue to take WordPress to new and different places.