I hadn’t checked my notifications on X.com in a while. When I did yesterday, I found Pradx had tagged me in a blog post called “a challenge of blog questions” in March. The point is to answer a short list of questions about my blogging history, then tag other bloggers to carry the enterprise forward. With thanks to Pradx, here goes.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I started blogging for two reasons in 2008. I started writing itself when I realised it helps me clarify my thoughts, then I started publishing my writing on the web so I could share those thoughts with my friends in different parts of the world. My blog soon gave me a kind of third space on the internet, a separate world I could escape to as I laboured through four years of engineering school, which I didn’t like at the time.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I’ve blogged on Xanga, Blogspot, Typed, Movable Type, various static site generators, Svbtle, Geocities, Grav, October, Mataroa, Ghost, and WordPress. And I’ve always found myself returning to WordPress, which — despite its flaws — allows me to have just the kind of blog I’d like to in terms of look, feel, spirit, and community. The last two are particularly important. Ghost comes a close second to WordPress but it’s too magaziney. The options to host Ghost are also (relatively) more expensive.

Earlier this year, Matt Mullenweg of Automattic tested my support for WordPress.com with his words and actions vis-à-vis his vendetta against WP Engine but the sentiments and conversations in the wider WordPress community encouraged me to keep going.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I used to love WordPress’s Calypso interface and its WYSIWYG editor both on desktop and mobile and used to use that to compose posts. But then WordPress ‘upgraded’ to the blocks-based Gutenberg interface, which made composing a jerky, clunky, glitchy process. At that point I tried a combination of different local editors, including Visual Studio Code, iA Writer, and Obsidian.md. Each editor provided an idiosyncratic environment: e.g. VS Code seemed like a good environment in which to compose technical posts, Obsidian (with its dark UI) for angry/moody ones, and iA writer for opinionated ones with long sentences and complex thoughts.

Then about three years ago I discovered MarsEdit and have been using it for all kinds of posts since. I particularly appreciate its old-school-like interface, that it’s built to work with WordPress, and the fact that it maintains an offline archive of all the posts on the blog.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I’ve answered this question before in conversations with friends and every time my answer has prompted them to wonder if I’m lying or mocking them.

When I feel most inspired to write is not in my control. I’ve been writing for so long that it’s become a part of the way I think. If I have a thought and I’m not able to articulate it clearly in writing, it’s a sign for me that the thought is still inchoate. In this paradigm, whenever I have a fully formed thought that I think could help someone else think about or through something, I enter a half-trance-like state, where my entire brain is seized of the need to write and I’m only conscious enough to open MarsEdit and start typing.

In these circumstance my ability to multi-task even minor activities, like typing with one hand while sipping from a mug of tea in the other, vanishes.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

That depends on what I’m writing about. When I draft posts in the ‘Op-eds’ or ‘Science’ categories, I’m usually more clear-headed and confident about my post’s contents, and publish as soon as the post is ready. For ‘Analysis’ and ‘Scicomm’ posts, however, I distract myself for about 30 minutes after finishing a draft and read it again to make sure there aren’t any holes in my arguments.

I also have a few friends who peer-review my posts if I’m not sure I’ve articulated myself well or if I’m not able to think through the soundness of my own arguments by myself (usually because I suspect there’s something I don’t know). Four of the most frequent reviewers are Thomas Manuel, Srividya Tadepalli, Mahima Jain, and Chitralekha Manohar.

In all these cases, however, I do read the post a couple times more after it’s finished to fix grammar and clumsy sentence constructions.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

No such thing.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I’m not keen on major redesigns. There are too many WordPress themes available off the shelf and for free these days. I change my blog’s theme depending on my mood. I don’t think it makes a difference to whether or how people read my posts. I think those that have been reading will continue to read. The text is paramount.

I don’t see myself moving to another platform either. If anything, I might move from WordPress.com to a self-hosted setup in future but it’s not something I’m thinking of right now.

I am currently in the process of removing duplicated posts in the archives — at last count I spotted about 20. Many posts are also missing images I’d added at the time of publishing, mostly because they were associated with a domain that I no longer use. I need to fix that.

A few years ago I lost around 120 posts after someone managed to hack my account when the blog was hosted with a provider of cPanel hosting services. I maintain a long-term backup of all my posts on a Backblaze dump. I’m still in the process of identifying which posts I lost and retrieving them from the archive.

So yeah, focusing on this clean-up right now.

Who’s next?

This is embarrassing: I only know a few other bloggers. I stopped keeping track after many bloggers I’d been following in the early years just stopped at some point. Right now, of those blogs I still follow, Jatan and Pradx have already been nominated for this ‘challenge’. So let me nominate Suvrat Kher and Dhiya Gerber next, both of whom I think will have interesting answers.

Featured image credit: Chris Briggs/Unsplash.

A bit of background, for those not steeped in the world of WordPress development: there exists a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) which allows developers to create near-endless customization options for end clients in the standard page and post editor. It is hard to explain in a single paragraph — the WordPress.com guide is a good overview — but its utility is so singular as to be an essential component for many WordPress developers.

ACF was created by Elliot Condon who, in 2021, sold it to Delicious Brains. At this point, it was used on millions of websites, a few of which I built. I consider it near-irreplaceable for some specific and tricky development tasks. A year later, the entire Delicious Brains plugin catalogue was sold to WPEngine.

Matt Mullenweg:

On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we are invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem.

[…]

Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.

This is an awfully casual way of announcing WordPress is hijacking one of the most popular third-party plugins in the directory. Mullenweg cites policy for doing so — WordPress can “make changes to a plugin, without developer consent, in the interest of public safety” — but the latter paragraph I quoted above makes clear the actual motive here. The “security problem” triggering this extraordinary action is a real but modest change to expand a patch from a previous update. But WordPress has removed the ability for WPEngine to make money off its own plugin — and if users have automatic plugin updates turned on, their ACF installation will be overwritten with WordPress’ unauthorized copy.

Iain Poulson, of ACF:

The change to our published distribution, and under our ‘slug’ which uniquely identifies the ACF plugin and code that our users trust in the WordPress.org plugin repository, is inconsistent with open source values and principles. The change made by Mullenweg is maliciously being used to update millions of existing installations of ACF with code that is unapproved and untrusted by the Advanced Custom Fields team.

It is nearly impossible to get me to feel sympathetic for anything touched by private equity, but Mullenweg has done just that. He really is burning all goodwill for reasons I cannot quite understand. I do understand the message he is sending, though: Mullenweg is prepared to use the web’s most popular CMS and any third-party contributions as his personal weapon. Your carefully developed plugin is not safe in the WordPress ecosystem if you dare cross him or Automattic.

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I have been trying to stay informed of the hostile relationship between WordPress, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg, and third-party hosting company WPEngine. Aram Zucker-Scharff put together a helpful and massive set of links to news coverage. Michael Tsai has a good collection of links, too, and Emma Roth and Samantha Cole have published notable articles.

From a distance, it looks like an expensive pissing match between a bunch of increasingly unlikable parties, and I would very much appreciate if it never affects my self-hosted version of WordPress. Maybe it is a little confusing that WPEngine is not affiliated with WordPress, but I only learned this week that WordPress.org is personally owned by Mullenweg and is not actually affiliated with Automattic or WordPress.com. From Mullenweg’s perspective, this confusion is beneficial, but the confusion with WPEngine is not. From my perspective, I would not like to be confused.

Also, if Mullenweg is mad about WPEngine — and Silver Lake, its private equity owner — benefitting from the open source nature of WordPress without what he feels is adequate compensation, I am not sure he has a leg to stand on. It does not sound like WPEngine is doing anything illegal. It is perhaps rude or immoral to build a private business named after and on the back of an open source project without significantly contributing, but surely that is the risk of developing software with that license. I am probably missing something here.

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Kelsey Piper, Vox:

Questions arose immediately [over the resignations of key OpenAI staff]: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void because no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking.

It turns out there’s a very clear reason for that. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

Sam Altman, [sic]:

we have never clawed back anyone’s vested equity, nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement (or don’t agree to a non-disparagement agreement). vested equity is vested equity, full stop.

there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication. this is on me and one of the few times i’ve been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have.

Piper, again, in a Vox follow-up story:

In two cases Vox reviewed, the lengthy, complex termination documents OpenAI sent out expired after seven days. That meant the former employees had a week to decide whether to accept OpenAI’s muzzle or risk forfeiting what could be millions of dollars — a tight timeline for a decision of that magnitude, and one that left little time to find outside counsel.

[…]

Most ex-employees folded under the pressure. For those who persisted, the company pulled out another tool in what one former employee called the “legal retaliation toolbox” he encountered on leaving the company. When he declined to sign the first termination agreement sent to him and sought legal counsel, the company changed tactics. Rather than saying they could cancel his equity if he refused to sign the agreement, they said he could be prevented from selling his equity.

For its part, OpenAI says in a statement quoted by Piper that it is updating its documentation and releasing former employees from the more egregious obligations of their termination agreements.

This next part is totally inside baseball and, unless you care about big media company CMS migrations, it is probably uninteresting. Anyway. I noticed, in reading Piper’s second story, an updated design which launched yesterday. Left unmentioned in that announcement is that it is, as far as I can tell, the first of Vox’s Chorus-powered sites migrated to WordPress. The CMS resides on the platform subdomain which is not important. But it did indicate to me that the Verge may be next — platform.theverge.com resolves to a WordPress login page — and, based on its DNS records, Polygon could follow shortly thereafter.

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