#intensedebate

4 years on Automattic

On this day, 4 years ago, I started full time with Automattic. This is my 4th Automattiversary.

I had already been on trial for 5 months by that point (since January), and had a good feel for the company and the other Automatticians. I knew it was where I wanted to be. So I accepted the offer, and became a fully-fledged member of a relatively small team (I was employee number 35) that was bringing blogging to the people (amongst other things).

In the four years since then, a lot has happened and changed.

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WordCamp NYC Round Up

This past weekend, WordCamp NYC was held at Baruch College in New York. It was (I believe) the second biggest WordCamp to date, if not the biggest (by number of attendees), right up there with WordCamp San Francisco. WCNYC was an incredibly busy event, with so much great WordPress stuff going on at any one time that it was hard to decide what to attend. I was lucky enough to be able to present/be involved in not just one, but 4 presentations throughout the weekend, and I wanted to get some slides and details up here for reference.

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Updated to WordPress 2.8

I’ve just updated this site to WordPress 2.8, using my favorite method for handling a WordPress install, Subversion. Here’s what I typed at the command line to upgrade:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8/

Once that was complete, I logged into my admin panel and completed the DB upgrade, then I had to check some plugins. I had these problems/changes:

  • TinyMCE Advanced had an update available, so I did that,
  • One Click Plugin Updater seems to clash with the new Plugins page, and I don’t really need it now anyway since its functionality is in core, so I deactivated it and then deleted it
  • IntenseDebate seems to clash with some of the JavaScript now used in the admin, but I work with those guys now, so I’m working on a new version of the plugin to address those issues! My comments are a bit ugly while I deal with this, but I figure that’s a good motivation to get it done ASAP.

Have you upgraded yet?

On Social Customer Support

Through my work with Automattic, I’ve had the privilege of working with the guys over at Intense Debate. I’ve been helping them improve their WordPress plugin and get it ready for some new features. Along the way I made the blunder of releasing a version that had a pretty serious bug in it, and that triggered a lot of customer support issues/cases.

In the “old days” (or in a lot of big corporates today), those support cases would have been handled behind a corporate “veil of secrecy”, tucked in a back end system somewhere, responded to by anonymous “Customer Service Representatives” via a generic email account like “support@intensedebate.com”. While we’re also making use of a generic email address, the similarities between our approach and that of big corporates ends there. End to end, the differences are pretty stark.

Keep Reading about Social Customer Support