Current status: co-working with a great team of guys in Herzliya, Israel (near Tel-Aviv). Here we are together earlier today:
I’ve been posting a bunch of other photos from the trip on my photo blog as well: http://photos.jkudish.com/.
It’s been a fun week so far with lots of eating, walking around beautiful places, socializing and working on a secret project that some of our coworkers will enjoy.
If this sounds like a good lifestyle, you should consider applying to work with us at Automattic.
At WordPress.com, our mission is making publishing democratic -- accessible and easy for anyone, anywhere. And while anyone can start a free blog here, not everyone can access upgrades (like going ad-free or enabling custom design) because of limits on traditional payment networks.
Today, that changes: you can now buy WordPress.com upgrades with bitcoins.
PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions.
City administrators: Don't spend thousands of dollars on a proprietary system for your city's website. We've launched WordPress.com/cities as the go-to place to start a site for your city or other municipal body, and there's no charge to get started. ("Free" is a price that will get every taxpayer on board, and since WordPress.com has been approved as a hosting site for federal government agencies, you can be sure we take security seriously.)
Jetpack 1.9 is here. That's right, it's time for another big helping of Jetpack awesomeness. This release brings you Toolbar Notifications, Mobile Push Notifications, Custom CSS for mobile themes, a JSON API, and improvements to the Contact Form.
Notifications adds a menu to your toolbar that lets you read, moderate, reply to comments from any page on your blog. Plus, if find yourself on…
I just returned from a week long company meetup with Automattic in San Diego. As a fun thing to do and to keep me alert, my partner Amy gave me a scavenger hunt for while I was there. I had to find and take a picture of the following 11 things. I got all but 1. I even crowdsourced and got some of my coworkers to help me out. It was definitely a fun activity for the trip and I feel like it kept me connected to Amy during the trip 
Here’s the list:
I couldn’t find the coconut, but here are the other 10 photos:
Oh, and if you think that’s the kind of meetup and company you want to be part of, we’re hiring.
There were two articles published today about Automattic and our distributed setup: One in Business Week the other in the Wall Street Journal.
We've released a new plugin for the P2 theme that we're calling P2 Hovercards. Hovercards are like extra bits of information about particular links that show up when you hover the corresponding inline link or object (for example, check out our Gravatar Hovercards).
With this plugin you can add hovercards to your self-hosted P2 sites. A good example of this is core trac tickets.
My office for the afternoon. Lovely day in Vancouver!
I'd like to identify ways in which Automattic can release more code as open source by default.
In the WordPress.com repository, there's a fair amount of code in use that's never seen the light of day. Bits and pieces of this code would probably be useful to other people, and subsequently be improved as more developers read, implemented, and found new uses for it.
I made an intro video for my coworkers at Automattic. This is the video w/out the speech. Shows Vancouver “in my eyes”
