25% of the web, every fourth site, is now powered by WordPress, according to W3Tech. Usability and open source in a nutshell. Nearest competitor is Joomla (under 3%), then Drupal (barely over 2%). Just over 57% of the sites have no obvious CMS at all though. That’s where the growth is, says WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. There’s still a lot to do for open source, and democratic, online publishing.
Tag: web
-
-
Comments for the commenter
Comments just for the commenter, with Echochamber.js:
When a user submits a comment, echochamber.js will save the comment to the user’s LocalStorage, so when they return to the page, they can be confident that their voice is being heard, and feel engaged with your very engaging content. It does not make any HTTP requests. Since LocalStorage is only local, you and your database need not be burdened with other people’s opinions.
Or in layman terms: The comments only live in the commenter’s browser, thus that’s the only place it exists.
-
The end of Minimal Mac
Patrick Rhone, wrapping up Minimal Mac:
This is the final post on Minimal Mac. This project contains what I believe in when it comes to a mindful and intentional approach to technology. After nearly 2,500 posts, I have nothing more to add to what has already been said. As I wrote in my book enough, saying no is actually saying yes to other things. It’s time to say “no” to this project so that I can say “yes” to others (or, in some cases, fully commit to agreements already made).
Good for you, and thanks for all the beautiful words.
-
Medium to offer custom domains
Don’t get your hopes up though, this is only for a select few, and there are no plans for custom domains for profiles on Medium.
Participating publications will be able to choose a domain where they want their stories to live, and we’ll take care of the rest.
My point on the matter from last year still stands.
-
GigaOM halting operations
GigaOM halting operations due to lack of funds. Founder Om Malik, who’s not with the company anymore, published a short statement, where this is from:
There will be time for postmortems, but not today. Today, I want to thank all the people who make (and have helped make) Gigaom. Their role in this journey was what really made it all worth it. They are great people and they will all do great work wherever they go. I want to thank our investors who believed in the business long before it became fashionable. And most importantly, I want to thank you dear readers for coming along on this trip of a lifetime.
I briefly wrote for GigaOm back in the day. Sad to see it decline, and go. It used to be a force in the tech sphere. These days, not so much perhaps.
-
Permalinks are design too
If you’re like most people, your permalinks (the permanent links to individual posts) probably look like this:
yourdomain.com/2015/02/24/title-of-post
We’re all familiar with those URLs. The date of the post is explicit, so you need never wonder when it was written, or how recent it is.
Here’s the thing, though: they’re horrible.
Agreed. To me, the permalink structure is as a part of the design. That said, there are sometimes reasons for dates, or at least numbering, in permalinks. They’re used by services such as Google News. That’s not an excuse though.
-
Ello's ads
Ello, the social network you wanted an invite for, got one, and then promptly forgot, now has a chief marketing officer in the form of Rene Alegria. He’s got this to say about the future of Ello, which is totally ad free:
“We’re currently not playing with the idea of dropping any ads,” Alegria said. “We are absolutely planning on internal campaigns that capture the spirit of our artist community.”
Yeah…
Ello’s due to step out of beta soon, and an app is in the works. I’m on there, just don’t expect any interaction on my part just yet, if ever.
-
Good enough
I, and the kind of people who spend time thinking about these issues, tend to assume that, well, maps and calendars and email and so on are very important, because we use them all day, and that the tight integration of Google services is a good reason to buy an Android phone and their absence would make it unsalable.
But most people do not have that kind of job. One thing that always bothers me about a certain kind of product demo is the moment when the product magically tells you that your flight is late or the gate has changed. But most people don’t fly enough ever to have this problem – that’s not actually a real, mass market use case.
Thoughtful piece, and an astute observation. Thing is, a lot of these feature that we make a big deal of, as, if not tech-savvy so at least tech-interested users, are barely icing on the cake for most people. Take the Apple Maps debacle back on iOS 7. Not only was it completely blown out of proportion in the tech press (if we can call it that), it was also such a small thing in the larger scope of things, and yet we whined about it. Some people are still whining about Apple Maps, despite the fact that it’s been good enough for a (relatively) long time now, so called power-user or not.
Want to blow a tech-head’s mind? Tell them that Gmail isn’t the largest webmail service. It’s not because it’s not better than most, if not all, of the competition. It’s because the other alternatives, no matter if it’s Hotmail-come-Outlook.com, or Yahoo Mail, or Fastmail, or whatever, are all good enough for most people. That’s it, plain and simple.
-
Vox Media vs. Say Media
Vox Media closes $46.5 million investment round. Jim Bankoff had this to say, courtesy of Recode:
Bankoff says the money is a sign investors are buying his pitch: He says Vox represents a new breed of content company, which can take advantage of the tech-inflected turmoil established companies are going through. “Things are starting to unbundle,” he says. “Magazines and newspapers are starting to be disrupted. Cable networks are next. I think a lot of investors look around and say ‘This is a new opportunity.’”
It’s interesting given that Say Media just stepped out of the “content and tech” game. Meanwhile, Vox Media is closing in on turning a profit next year. The difference is clearly the editorial products and if not their quality, so at least their profitability.
-
Google Contributor
Launched on Thursday, the service is called Google Contributor, and it asks you to pay $1, $2, or $3 a month to back the websites you particularly like. In exchange for your support, you’ll see “thank you” messages where ads used to be—at least on the websites that participate in the program. At the moment, Google is testing the idea with ten online publishers, including The Onion, ScienceDaily, Urban Dictionary, and Mashable.
The thank-you notes are served up through Google’s existing advertising channels, and Google still takes a cut of each contribution. According to Google, the $1 to $3 users pay essentially covers the cost of that ad space. But all of this is subject to change, she says, as the platform develops. “At this point, what we’ve rolled out is very much an experiment,” a Google spokesperson tells us. “We’re getting the publishers on board today. We’ll see not just how it works but also the public interest level.”
There are several alternatives to advertising today, ranging from member sites to Patreon and donation driven publications. Google Contributor is off the mark in its current form, because it’s based on Google’s ad platform. The purpose of Patreon, Flattr, or even just a donate button, is to get out of the advertisement game. Google is targeting, and monetizing, the same publications that are their (trusted, obviously) customers today. This’ll be dead in the water, unless they’ve got something groundbreaking up their sleeve.
-
Google's mobile friendly search
Google will highlight what they believe to be mobile friendly web pages in mobile search.
Starting today, to make it easier for people to find the information that they’re looking for, we’re adding a “mobile-friendly” label to our mobile search results.
Details here, but just about any responsive site should be fine. This is a good thing for the web, and I hope other search engines will follow.
-
Disqus ads are coming
Disqus, the hosted comment solution that’s the choice of personal blogs and big media properties alike, will get ads soon:
Disqus is working with Xaxis, WPP’s automated ad platform, to let brands buy ads against the Disqus comments, which will be shown at the top of the discussion threads and marked sponsored. It will be up to publishers if they want to show the new ads from Disqus, and they could share in the revenue.
Emphasis by me. I don’t see major properties being interested in this. Disqus ads will either die quickly, or they’ll kill the platform. Either way, this is a bad idea.
-
The things between tweets and essays
We’re a lot of people who seems to enjoy, or at least miss, blogging. I’ve got my own thoughts on blogging as a term, but that’s a different post. For this one, I just wanted to quote Gina Trapani’s new blogging rules:
If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post. Medium-sized content gets short shrift these days. Don’t go long. One or two paragraphs count. Then press publish.
Andy Baio’s on the same track, and I found both of these post via Six Colors, where Steven Snell’s been publishing under the same conditions from the beginning. It’s refreshing to see and read.
I obviously agree. The whole redesign of TDH.me, and the mixture of short quote and comment posts, and the essays, shows that well enough. Thing is, we’re not in this alone, there are others who’ve been blogging like this for years, of recently returned to it. Someone less pressed for time than me can probably put together a pretty exhaustive list. Maybe this also heralds the return of the Webring, or at least the Blogroll, wouldn’t that be great?
-
Verizon's SugarString gagged
Verizon’s tech site SugarString is banning net neutrality and surveillance issues, so long as they pertain to the US. The Daily Dot:
News of Verizon’s publishing venture and its strict rules first came to light to multiple reporters through recruiting emails sent last week by author and reporter Cole Stryker, who is now the editor-in-chief of SugarString. (Stryker has also previously contributed to the Daily Dot.) I was one of the reporters who received that email. The premise and rules behind the site were explained to me in a series of messages throughout the day. I declined the job offer.
Other reporters, who asked not to be named, have confirmed that they have received the same recruiting pitch with the same rules: No articles about surveillance or net neutrality.
This is obviously icky as hell, but come on, you had to see this coming, right? The lesson is to not trust so-called news outlets funded by questionable interests. There’s no way SugarString’s reporting can be trusted, because who knows what other Verizon interests, and partners, it might protect?
-
Remember Rotten.com?
The Daily Dot remembers Rotten.com:
Rotten was the original shock site, a place where you could see images of people hit by trains, self-immolation, the gory aftermath of car crashes, failed suicide attempts, dismemberment, botched executions, orange juice enemas, and perverse pornography. These images—many of them reader-submitted, many fake or doctored—became Internet folklore. Rotten, for better or worse, is one of my first memories of the Internet.
I remember that cesspool too, never my scene, but it’s interesting to think about what it preluded.