About two months ago, a story started circulating that caught my attention. Pipdig, a commercial theme shop with templates for WordPress and Blogger, was accused of including obfuscated (hidden) code inside their Pipdig Power Pack (P3) plugin. This plugin was installed alongside every theme bought by a customer, and so was presumably active on
Jared Sulzdorf
Jared is a maker of things at LexBlog. He likes pretty things, functional things, funny things, food, and WordPress. Not necessarily in that order.
Creating A New Donut With the Illinois State Bar Association
People love donuts, especially LexBloggers. Many of our products or large bodies of work have a corresponding donut that acts as a code-name in product and internal meetings. While this began as a bit of a joke at first, it’s been a delightful way to keep the conversation playful and lower stress when working on some complex component or running up against the trough of sorrow.
That’s why when we decided to take the work we’d done on LexBlog.com and position it as a publishing solution for distributed organizations and entities, I tried to put my stamp on it with a donut name. My many attempts culminated in a best effort of donut hole, which is why I am not responsible for code-naming products at LexBlog. Fortunately, this was a product that needed no clever name or introduction. When the need for it is so compelling, who cares about what it’s called? The product, ultimately coined Syndication Portals is unique in this space, but fills a void that is growing at the same rate as the internet itself. Continue Reading Creating A New Donut With the Illinois State Bar Association
A Snapshot of Mobile Device Traffic on the LexBlog Platform
At LexBlog we manage over 1,000 sites across nearly 30 multisite installations of WordPress. Some of these sites have been publishing unique content for over a decade while some are in their first days of writing, slowly building an audience with each post. These sites share something in common, however, regardless of the subject matter…
WordPress 5.0 (and Gutenberg) Launches; Internet Remains Intact
On December 6th, the largest content management system on the internet, WordPress, released one of the largest user-facing updates in recent memory. WordPress 5.0, or “Bebo” as it was named, represents a major shift for the open source project and the community that supports it and so was introduced with a combination of fanfare, disarray…
The Million Dollar Question: When Will Gutenberg Land in WordPress Core?
This is not a new question. Not for me personally, not for the team at LexBlog, and certainly not for hundreds of thousands of site managers, theme and plugin developers, and generally interested members of the WordPress community.
Generally, as the WordPress core team prepares a new release, the question of when a new version…
Gutenberg Dominates WordCamp Seattle 2018
WordCamp Seattle was this past weekend at the Washington State Convention Center, just a few short blocks away from LexBlog’s offices. This was my third WordCamp in four years and was a return to form (in my opinion) to the first WordCamp Seattle that I went to in 2014 (held at the University of Washington). …
My Love Hate Relationship With Third-Party Code
There is a long-running discussion at LexBlog about the benefits and perils of third-party solutions. This discussion has been going on for so long that if you look closely enough, you can find evidence of it in this A List Apart post from 2014 by our own Scott Fennell. This post, is also the subject…
LexBlog Prepares for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg
Unlike recent point releases, WordPress 5.0 represents a major shift both in the underlying technology and user experience. Some other releases stand out in my mind – 3.4 brought the theme customizer which is now the foundation for all the theme work done at LexBlog, 3.8 changed the look and feel of the WordPress administrative…
Products as a Process
The longer LexBlog has maintained a product discipline, the more disciplined I’ve tried to become in evaluating new ideas and business. This often puts me in the place of saying “No”, which, contrary to some popular beliefs, is not a word that I personally enjoy saying. I find it unlikely that anyone enjoys telling someone…
The Future of LexBlog.com is Here to Stay
We’ve relaunched LexBlog.com!
These are words that I’ve (and others) have said at LexBlog probably a hair over a half-dozen times in the past two years; a point that Conner alluded to when he took a look at the history of LexBlog’s many and various websites. This time, however, things feel very different.…