Category: random

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child…

I just got back from an exhilarating, week long Automattic company meetup in San Diego. We’ve now done 9 full company meetups over the last 6 years (plus dozens of smaller team ones), and I wanted to write down some tips on how to run a company meetup while it’s fresh in my mind:

1. Focus on connecting people: We call our get-togethers meetups – instead of off-sites or retreats – because our primary goal is to get everyone on the team to meet and to get to know each other better (not to get away or retreat from our office). We’re distributed (mostly working from home), so in-person meetups are especially important for us, but I think it would be beneficial to any company to get everyone together once or twice a year to spend time with each other to deepen personal connections and get to know the “people…

The updates just keep on rolling in—Custom CSS has just landed in Jetpack! You now have the ability to add to or replace your theme’s CSS right from your blog dashboard, no child theme required.

To use the CSS editor, first make sure the Custom CSS panel is activated on your main Jetpack page and go to Appearance → Edit CSS. You’ll find the editing interface is fueled up with features like syntax coloring, auto-indentation, and immediate feedback on the validity of the CSS you’re writing. Revisions are saved in case you make a mistake, and invalid CSS is removed on save.

In addition, we’re always working to improve the existing features in Jetpack.  Jetpack Comments got a nice UI improvement in this release: when you submit a comment, there’s no more annoying fullpage load on jetpack.wordpress.com.  Everything stays on your site 🙂  Also, if you’re using the pretty…

Since launching WordAds earlier this year we are proud to have launched advertising on thousands of WordPress.com sites. Our goal has been to free bloggers from the weight of managing the complex and fast moving online advertising arena. Thanks to our negotiation leverage with advertisers and technical resources, WordAds is delivering returns that bloggers would not see on their own.

There is much that we want to accomplish in the remainder of the year. Here’s our road-map as well as common requests that are not on the road-map:

• Transition more sites to Optimized Ads. Many sites don’t want to have more ads and they can stay with Basic Ads. Others want to earn more per page. We are working to get more approvals from advertisers for those sites.
• Ads layout choices. We plan to roll-out an easy, self-service way for WordAds users to switch between Basic Ads and Optimized Ads.