HELIOLITH

After a couple of days playing around with my Wordpress blogging system, I’ve forgotten to write! From the forums to the irc channel (#wordpress on freenode.net), to the amazing documentation written by all sorts of people around the world, the Wordpress community is more vibrant today than ever.

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to the poorly titled slashdot thread on wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg’s hosting of advertising content {via hidden links} on the Wordpress website. In short, a third party was deriving extra revenue for spoofed ‘articles’ about highly sought ’spamwords’ by exploiting Wordpress.org’s high pagerank. I was surprised, but my sense was that even if a questionable judgement call had been made, the community was strong and would take it in stride. I felt compelled to dive back into the wp community, see what was going on, and in the process, ended up upgrading my own site.

All is well. Despite all of the bruhaha and somewhat predictable games of conjecture and even slander on the fringes, Matt has given more than many can imagine, and plans to continue doing so. I agree with Ozh’ entry here, who’s started an ‘ilovematt’ tag to show appreciation. If you missed all of what happened, Waxy.org has two entries that were written as the story unfolded, but you should really read Matt’s first and full responses.

This is [a good example of] why I use open-source software. Everyone makes mistakes; who has courage to admit that honestly and move forward? Matt’s entries are undescribably well-written and sincere. Now clearly a mother or a sister are frequently going to say wonderful things about a person, but Matt’s sister Charleen probably knows him best.