The Blog

A peek into the thoughts of the man behind Milk Carton Designs

The Wordpress Scandal

Posted: April 11, 2005 @ 03:22 PM EST | Filed Under: WordPress

In mid to late 2003, I volunteered for a web design job for a SourceForge.net project. Part of the job was to implement a Content Management System (CMS) so the project manager could post news about the developement of the project. They had previously used Xoops, and Xoops is just disgustingly overweight. So, I looked for another. If I recall correctly, I looked at Geeklog and Nucleus at first. Both Geeklog and Nucleus took a crippling long time to upload and install, especially with me on a 56k, so I ditched them, basically saying to myself, “Screw that, screw you, and screw the horse you rode in on.”

Then, b2 came and slapped me with a big ol’ frozen trout, and said “behold the light weight that is b2.” I wasn’t sure at the time if it was exactly what I wanted, but looking back, it was the perfect solution. From then on, I always used b2 for any project that required a CMS.

When I started Milk Carton Designs, it ran on b2. Unfortunately, it bugged out; I never really found out why. So, with b2 bugging out, I had to pick a new CMS. Fortunately, I knew about b2’s descendant: Wordpress. My impressions of it were extremely positive. To quote my review of Wordpress 1.5: “Wordpress 1.5 is amazing. It’s beautiful, light-weight, easy to manage, and by goodness it’s got so many features I feel like a spoiled rich kid with 20 Ferraris, 10 Lambos, 5 Lotus Elises, and a spit-shined Bentley.” Needless to say, I was sold. My trust and loyalty in the b2-Wordpress line runs deep.

This brings me to explaining why I’m posting this. Recently, Matt Mullenweg (co-creator and main developer of Wordpress) allowed Hot Nacho, Inc. to rent some space on Wordpress.org for a flat fee as an experiment to raise money for Wordpress. This failed miserably. The people running the rented space apparently used hidden words (not viewable by a browser, but by a search bot) and the such to spam search engines so they could get higher rankings and therefore make more money on their ads. People found out what was going on and the word spread like wildfire: Matt Mullenweg, an anti-spam pioneer in blogging software, had allowed the use of search engine spam on his site. However, Matt didn’t know that this was going on. Of course, People judged before they knew all the facts, before Matt even had time to speak for himself. Matt, at the time, was enjoying time offline and was on vacation in Italy. The poor guy found out on a call to his sister whom read him headlines off of Google News upon finding out herself.

Basically, I want to add my voice to the thousands that came to his defense and say, lay off, especially you Andrew Orlowski. The man made a mistake, just like the rest of us humans. He didn’t know what was going on, he was busy developing Wordpress 1.5, a highly-anticipated and highly-loved released. If you can’t be sympathetic enough to appreciate that people make mistakes, then just jump off a cliff— and that’s being nice.