PC World recently ran an article on The 50 Most Important People on the Web. Coming in at #16: Matt Mullenweg, Developer of the WordPress blogging software. WordPress is the software running this Chappells Weblog. Way back before there was a Chappells Weblog, I spent time closely following the progress of two blogging programs in development, WordPress and TextPattern. I also followed several others before narrowing the field to these two. I ended up choosing WordPress because it seemed a better fit for what I wanted. On the other hand, I really liked the people involved with TextPattern. You can tell a few things about people by following the discussions on their “boards” for a while. Everybody involved with TextPattern was warm and open; whereas the WordPress people were somewhat cliquish. The Chappell Family Website is hosted on TextDrive, by the way, which was founded by the same folks (the same person, actually) behind TextPattern. Anyway, Matt Mullenweg didn’t develop WordPress all by himself. It’s an Open Source program, meaning a whole lot of people contributed to development of the program. And that would include — me! Yes, back before WordPress was a major phenonemon, I discovered a few bugs in the program and even wrote the fixes, which were incorporated in the released program. Okay, okay, they were minor bugs and minor fixes, even though one of the principal developers was not able to find the solution after I reported it. But, that’s still not the end of the story. As a participant in the WordPress forums, I actually got so bold on an occasion to criticize something another person said in the forum. Well, he got a little snotty about that, and the two of us had one of those forum pissing matches until the King of the Hill, Matt, stepped in and closed the topic. So, now, at age 22 Matt’s the 16th most influential person on the internet and, at age 56, I’m a long forgotten nobody who contributed a few bytes along the road that got him there. Which is not really worth mentioning to anybody; but just seemed to strike me in a way that sort of bounced around inside my head a few moments like so many other things in life that seem like they might mean something, but don’t.
Six Degrees or Less
March 8, 2007
General
Comments Off on Six Degrees or Less
John
PC World recently ran an article on The 50 Most Important People on the Web. Coming in at #16: Matt Mullenweg, Developer of the WordPress blogging software. WordPress is the software running this Chappells Weblog. Way back before there was a Chappells Weblog, I spent time closely following the progress of two blogging programs in development, WordPress and TextPattern. I also followed several others before narrowing the field to these two. I ended up choosing WordPress because it seemed a better fit for what I wanted. On the other hand, I really liked the people involved with TextPattern. You can tell a few things about people by following the discussions on their “boards” for a while. Everybody involved with TextPattern was warm and open; whereas the WordPress people were somewhat cliquish. The Chappell Family Website is hosted on TextDrive, by the way, which was founded by the same folks (the same person, actually) behind TextPattern. Anyway, Matt Mullenweg didn’t develop WordPress all by himself. It’s an Open Source program, meaning a whole lot of people contributed to development of the program. And that would include — me! Yes, back before WordPress was a major phenonemon, I discovered a few bugs in the program and even wrote the fixes, which were incorporated in the released program. Okay, okay, they were minor bugs and minor fixes, even though one of the principal developers was not able to find the solution after I reported it. But, that’s still not the end of the story. As a participant in the WordPress forums, I actually got so bold on an occasion to criticize something another person said in the forum. Well, he got a little snotty about that, and the two of us had one of those forum pissing matches until the King of the Hill, Matt, stepped in and closed the topic. So, now, at age 22 Matt’s the 16th most influential person on the internet and, at age 56, I’m a long forgotten nobody who contributed a few bytes along the road that got him there. Which is not really worth mentioning to anybody; but just seemed to strike me in a way that sort of bounced around inside my head a few moments like so many other things in life that seem like they might mean something, but don’t.