Industry News

In WordPress: How It Came To Be And Where It’s Heading Alex Moss interviews Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the two cofounders of WordPress. The whole interview is interesting, but their approach to technical debt caught my eye in particular:

We rewrite or refactor about 10 to 15% of WordPress in most releases, so that we can keep users getting updates and new features quickly, while doing the “ground up rebuild” incrementally in the background, fixing bugs and getting feedback as we go....

Take care of the people you love, and try to make yourself known and understood. Dial it down, work with your hands, keep it quiet, and share what you know.

— Frank Chimero, This One’s for Me

In 16 days our family will walk out of an empty house in Cape Town and get on a plane to Portland, OR. It will be a one-way journey. I’ve been searching for the words to write about it, but I haven’t quite found the right ones. So I guess these ones will have to do.

I started my first blog...

At SMX West Matt Cutts of Google announced they are actively working on the "next generation" Panda update that will "soften" the algorithm.

Matt specifically said this is aimed at helping small businesses that may be impacted by the Panda algorithm...

At SMX West Matt Cutts gave the attendees a few tidbits, one of those items was that making your site secure, encrypted, i.e. SSL enabled, is an important trend for 2014.

At the end of the session...

Giff Constable makes the case for validation and learning in the product development process before you launch something. From You Are Spending 3x-5x More Than You Should:

Agile/lean has helped people debunk the “big upfront design” phase, but far too many replace it with nothing. I agree that waterfall-style, big-upfront-design is a waste of time and money. I do believe that getting into the market with a designer and an engineer and learning is a critical use of time.

As expected, Google was testing a new design for some time now and now it is officially rolling out to everyone.

Jon Wiley, the Lead Designer for Google Search...

When Google moved to secure search in October 2011, it was a blow to publishers, who began losing data about the search terms used to reach their sites. It also opened Google up to claims of hypocrisy, in that advertisers continued to receive the terms. Now, Google says it’s reexamining the issue and seeking a better solution.

Will clicks on non-paid listings go back to passing along search term data again? Will ad clicks have that withheld? Google didn’t say either way, and there could be...

Last night at SMX West, during the keynote conversation with Google's Amit Singhal, Danny Sullivan brought up the knowledge graph a few times and then Dan Barker's tweet about scraper sites...