Pre-post disclaimers:
1. I write this out of my heart and can’t be bothered with proofreading. Right now, I’m hurt.
2. In my private and professional entourage I’ve always fought hard for my reputation. And my ethics. People who know me, know my honesty and accept my straightforwardness. But today, today things are different. I’m hurt.
After my entry about Automattic, sponsored themes and ethics last night, Matt Mullenweg himself called me out. And I’m glad he did, even if there might be consequences for me after this post. If there are… I’ll deal with them, no matter what happens, I value my pride.
The attacks sting less when they’re from people with questionable personal practices. [1]…
[1] For example one attack post from “Franky” on a blog called Wisdump (didn’t that used to be run by the awesome Paul Scrivens?) I noticed it was loading a little slow, then I saw pingomatic.com in my address bar. I looked at his source and saw he had embedded a 1×1 pixel iframe loading the ping page for Ping-O-Matic on every one of his pages. I must admit this is clever, it utilizes the distributed network of everyone who visits your site to attack Ping-O-Matic and spam the ping servers, and of course IP blocking is useless because it’s coming from the regular folks on your site. But it is also extremely skeevy. (And I believe a little bit of JS on the ping page should fix that right up.)
I am a blogger here at Wisdump, someone walking a certain path of legacy. Let me explain you the ‘legacy thing’.
I started as a personal cat blogger, trying to keep track of my life and save my biography online, but soon my geek nature took over and I got interested more and more in blogging as a profession. Not a future for me, but an art I wanted to understand. Opinionated as I am, soon I discovered The Blog Herald, in those days still run by Duncan Riley, soon followed by other opinionated people such as Matt Craven, David Krug and Martin Neumann. Via The Blog Herald I discovered two of my favorite bloggers, Mike Rundle and Paul Scrivs, both of 9rules fame. The reason why I mention these bloggers is because they are honest… and aren’t afraid to be upfront, straightforward, blunt even at times- exactly how I tick.
Time went on as I continued enjoying those bloggers. Until one day, I criticized the former Bloggy Network Ltd., nowadays Splashpress. Before I knew it, I had landed myself a gig as author at Jack Of All Blogs. I learnt a lot about blogging for a popular blog, but sadly my real life job sucked up my energy and I had no time anymore to blog for JOAB or SP. As time passed by, Splashpress and I developed a rather erratic, but healthy relationship. I would love to be able to invest more time in Splashpress and be more reliable, but I still haven’t been able to find the guts to opt for the online life above my real life job, a very exciting one. Nevertheless, today I have the opportunity to blog on the former sites of some of my favored bloggers and for Splashpress, such as Wisdump.
Flash forward to today. Or last night, rather.
More than once I have written about Matt in the past, whether at JOAB, my former blog- Am I Famous Now- or here at Wisdump. I just am opinionated and certainly not scared of some controversy. But I think [and hope] that my opinions offer some food for thought. And when working for someone, or blogging for someone, I do believe in their honesty and ethics.
Last night, when I published the entry here at Wisdump, I thought I had a valid point. And I still think that I do. I believe in open source, I believe in WordPress as a platform… and I believe in creating a Foundation for WordPress and releasing the trademark to that foundation. But Matt called me out.
And that sucks. Not because he called me out, but rather because I can’t help my wrong and also the fact that he called ME out proves that my entry wasn’t the stupidest anti-post on that topic.
This is where I have to admit failure. Before I wrote the entry, I checked the source code of the Wisdump homepage. But only the code of the homepage. Although I had noticed an increase in trackbacks at Technorati, especially trackbacks from Wisdump itself, I didn’t investigate any further when I saw nothing suspicious in the homepage source code.
I was wrong. Some spammy practices are happening at this blog and sadly I couldn’t prevent them. They hurt me. They hurt my pride. And just as I appealed to Automattic, Inc yesterday to release the trademark to the community, today I am consequent. I can only guess what happened, but the person responsible for the 1×1 link to Ping-o-matic, please stand up and reveal yourself.
Applying such strategies on a co-authored blog are a no-do’er. Maybe not from your own perspective, but they might be for all the other people trying to keep the honor of the Paul Scrivens legacy up. I will make my decisions based on your call, even if it means I’ll have to return to my own little, irregularly updated blog with an average of 11 unique visitors daily, but I hope you will be as consequent and honest as I am.
To you, Matt, I sincerely appreciate your call out and hope you’ll accept this entry as a rectification. Our views might differ in certain areas, but I will always respect what you have created and more even that you’ve called me out. Especially since you did it without linking.
I’m sure the future will bring more topics we disagree on, but today… today, I am humble.
You can make money online by using different search engine techniques on your site, you can use some seo software too for your site or content advertising from which email advertising is growing quite well. There are lots of companies in the world which provide you window web hosting, they also assist you for cold fusion and ecommerce web design of your site. These companies also provide wireless broadband services for faster internet usage and if you are worried about your certifications then 000-799 and 350-001 is best assistance for your certifications.
Originally posted on July 14, 2007 @ 5:42 pm