Joseph Scott’s Blog

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.

On January 5th, 2006 I turned on the Akismet WordPress plugin for filtering comments and trackbacks. It wasn’t perfect (one month review showed ~ 0.1875% false positives) and went down a couple of times, but after one year I’d say it is good enough. After a couple of months the volume of spam was so high that I stopped going through the spam queue, hoping that anyone with a comment that never showed up would contact me to tell me about it.

Any comments marked as spam by Akismet are deleted after 15 days. That doesn’t seem like a very long time, but on this blog that queue is over 10,000 comments lately. I can’t imagine having to review more than 20,000 comments every month. Ug.

After one year my WordPress dashboard indicates that Akismet has blocked more than 112,000 comments and trackbacks as spam.

UPDATE Sat 6 Jan 2006 @ 7:30am : Wouldn’t you know it, the next morning after writing this Akismet let some 50 or so obvious comment spam get through. Looks like they were having problems around 3am, all of these comments came in at about that time. So it isn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t even think of turning it off.

It has been about six weeks since I wrote my review of Akismet. Things had been going fine, but the last week or so has seen a large increase in the number of comment spam items that are not being caught, especially yesterday and today. I’ve asked about this via their contact form to see if this is something unique to me or if there is something going on at Akismet.

UPDATE Fri 24 Mar 2006 @ 4:30pm: I suspect the problems I’ve been having are related to Akismet database problem that was just reported. Interesting that the problem seems to involve taking too long to get a response back for free users.

Although I haven’t used it yet, I’ve been watching Akismet with interest. Their goal is to fight comment and trackback spam, free for personal use and a fee for commercial use. When Matt first announced this service I downloaded the WordPress Plugin just to look through the code to see what the API looked like.

My interest was rekindled with the announcement of API docs for Akismet. The API is pretty simple (good) and called via REST. Then I wandered over to their Spam Stopper email list to see what sort items were being discussed. One of the first emails I came across had a reasonable question:

The API documentation says of the comment-check function :

“This call returns either “true” or “false” as the body content.”

I have been assuming that “false” means the comment *is* spam – is this correct ?

I thought this was kind of odd, so I went back and checked the docs again. Sure enough that was all the docs said about return values for comment-check. Matt provided a quick reply though:

That would be the problem. :)

True = this is spam
False = this is not spam

So the lesson learned here is to remember to document everything when it comes to your API. This reminds me a something I read somewhere: don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be missunderstood.

None of this is meant as a strike against Matt, anything that helps reduce the amount spam going around is a good thing. The docs were also listed as a first draft, so I’m sure they will get additional refinement as time goes on.