2026-10-17 20:20:33
How employment is changing at Anthropic is a fascinating read.
2026-10-16 08:40:30
We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, promoting more functionality in the browser has been a life mission.
It’s a little nerdy, but we wanted to do client-side media processing (use all that amazing Apple and Google silicon instead of burdening the poor servers) so we used something amazing Google created called Document Isolation Policy. When WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped these features only worked in Chromium-based browsers and Mozilla and Webkit/Apple weren’t keen to support it, but since then Mozilla has expressed support and WebKit has withdrawn their initial concerns. WordPresser Adam Silverstein has been driving much of this work and opened a WICG issue to help move the standard forward and formally requested that WebKit add support.
Hat tip: Anne McCarthy for helping with this post.
(If you want to see other crazy stuff we’re doing in browsers, check out WordPress Playground, I think it’s actually the perfect web development environment for agents, which can then publish to Spacefast.)
2026-10-14 14:53:33
For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic:
add_header X-Remembering "Eric Binnion <https://friendsofericbinnion.wordpress.com/>" always;
Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days.
Automattic.com will have a mourning band for 30 days.
Eric was the 21st recipient of the Distinguished Janitor Award, Automattic’s highest honor, and in our hangs the last few months we’ve been talking about how to redefine and evolve it, which will happen internally at Automattic. One of the ideas was for the award to come with a physical memento, an etched tungsten cube. I don’t have many words so I’ll share something I wrote to Eric a few months ago when I gave him my cube when he was going through chemo.
Two Totems To Take With You
The first is a tungsten cube I keep on my desk. Its weight will surprise you, but tungsten is singular in having the highest melting point of any metal. That represents one of the things I admire most about you.
Tungsten has an atomic number of 74, its symbol is W, and it’s also known as wolfram.
My next post I’ve had in drafts for a while so please try to imagine me happy and promotional when reading it, but otherwise, I’m wrecked. Just going to soldier through because that’s what Eric always did.
Other Automattician posts:
2026-10-13 23:53:19
Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in!
Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this:
<link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11">GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group, “an experiment in Metamemetics.” Inspired, of course, by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group that owned the virtual real estate in Snow Crash’s metaverse.
Eric, Tantek, and I were reacting to the idea that there should be a separate heavily-marked-up RDF or XML web, and that HTML couldn’t be extended or enriched with metadata in a way that was beautiful to both humans and machines. It was really an aesthetic war. (It later got more built out in Microformats.)
We should revisit some of those principles because the web could use more distribution right now.
2026-10-13 17:10:59
Automattic is always 5–15 years ahead of other companies, but things happen faster now. I predict other companies will start scrambling to add great writers to their boards, because, well, look at the headlines in AI. United’s board already has Walter Isaacson. Authors are awesome, akin to founders in the startup/tech ecosystem.
Public offer to all the great sci-fi/etc writers out there who I’m a huge fan of (Ken Liu, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang, Andy Weir, Ramez Naam, Kim Stanley Robinson…) but not as close to as Hugh (I was part of him meeting his wife, officiated one of their weddings), I offer my services as your Board Agent to negotiate compensation and contracts for you! 1% fee, donated to the WordPress Foundation or Locus Magazine. I’ve become a bit of an expert in board protections, dynamics, compensation, and such. 
Aside: If you haven’t seen the Robert Caro / Robert Gottlieb documentary Turn Every Page, run, don’t walk to your nearest streaming service!
