Earlier this week my Automattic colleagues and Effigent released WordPress for iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, the source is also available and Trac is set up for reporting bugs and participating in development!
I’ve tried it on my iPod Touch. They’ve done a great job! And are urgently working on fixing the worse bugs.
It’s already in the top 50 free apps.
On Sunday, Mozilla developers reverted a change to cookie handling that was going to make web mashup and widget developers’ lives horrible in Firefox 3 — it would likely have been a disaster for Firefox and Mozilla. Thank you team Mozilla for addressing this in such a timely manner!
Matt, now Ma.tt, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two” and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.
By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.
This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.
The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.
I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.
I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.
The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.
I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.
But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!
But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.