Photo of 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.

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

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

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

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

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