Automattic Inc. 's Coolest People

Automattic Inc. is a startup from a handful of people passionate about making the web a better place. So far we’re best known for our work on WordPress and other projects but we have a lot of other interesting things in the pipeline as well. We are strong believers in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under licenses like the GPL. We work from places all around the world.

Automattic first got started around August of 2005, and has since grown to include the fine people you see here.

Barry Abrahamson Systems Wrangler

 

Blog: Barry on WordPress
Born and raised on the banks of the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, Barry is a relative newcomer to the Bay Area and the world of blogging. During the day, he makes sure the servers are zipping along while trying not to get too much BBQ sauce on his keyboard and at night… ok, well, he’s doing the same :) When he’s not on AIM, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, or reading about the latest and greatest in MySQL optimization, Barry enjoys traveling and playing a little lacrosse.

Michael Adams Quantum Bug Creator

 

Blog: Blogwaffe
After escaping Moscow (Idaho), Mike has been hiding in academia for 20 or so years. We stole him from a PhD in Quantum Information at Caltech to join the real world, or as close as we get to the real world around here. In between carnitas tacos, because apparently there is no good BBQ in Southern California, Mike hacks on bbPress and the javascripty bits of WordPress.

Nikolay Bachiyski Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër

 

Blogs: Аз, света и сметачите
Younger than even Matt, Nikolay is blogging from small but beautiful Bulgaria. He makes sure the eskimo teens can blog in their native language. When not in front of the computer, Nikolay is either in Sofia University, torturing freshmen, or wandering around Bulgaria. Being like House, M.D. is his secret dream, although quite unattainable, having in mind his lovable nature.

Sam Bauers Coderoo

 

Blog: The Unlettered Gentleman
Rather than using his Commodore 64 to invent the internet, Sam used it to play games. This wasted youth was followed by several more wasted years pretending to be a graphic designer, before he worked out that he was actually a web developer. Seven years after that realization he joined Automattic. Along the way he open-sourced some software and meddled in a little project called bbPress, which he now calls home.

Ryan Boren Head Janitor

Blogs: Boren.nu, Ryan on WP
Ryan is a Texas boy currently living in Northern California where he likes to hike, ride his bikes, and read. Ryan is a telecom industry veteran who decided to leave the server closet to create things that people would actually see and use directly. If the rest of the company sat on a bench, Ryan could “press it.” He’s the one we send when people are late with payments.

Lloyd Budd Digital Entomologist

 

Blog: A Fool’s Wisdom
Lloyd is Canadian. We forgive him for this. We’re trying to guilt him into sending in a bio. Let’s see how long it takes him to notice. It’s been a few years so we’re not optimistic.

Raanan Bar-Cohen Media Engineer

 

Blog: Raanan.com
After using Gopher to impress the ladies in the 80s, and starting a web agency specializing in serving publishers and musicians in the 90s, Raanan decided to go to the dark side. Between Time Inc. and Dow Jones, Raanan worked on social media initiatives including RSS, search, podcasts, and the launch of AllThingsD.com. Now that we’ve nabbed him Raanan works on media services, partnerships, and oversees QA for the secret company BBQ sauce. (No Kool‑Aid here.)

Maya Desai Anti-chaos Engineer

 

Blog: MayaDesai.wordpress.com
Maya lives in Redwood City with her 2 daughters and husband. After teaching English in Tokyo for 3 years, she worked for Bank of America for 7 years in various cities, then joined Automattic in 2006. She still knits scarves for everyone she knows in between changing diapers and making sure everything is running smoothly at Automattic.

Demitrious “Meech” Kelly Code Hound

 

Blog: Apokalyptik
Demitrious is a self portrayed jester (certainly not jack) of all trades and master of none. Leaving the heat of central California behind him he set out to make a difference in this new age of instant information. And what better place to make a difference than here with us at Automattic, where instant information isn’t just a goal but a way of life?

Marianne Masculino Happiness Engineer

 

Blogs: MarianneMasculino.com
Marianne was born in Germany, yet grew up in exotic locales like Elizabethtown, KY and Houston, TX. She now happily resides in San Francisco. A designer at heart and by trade, she’s joined the team to sprinkle happiness among the WordPress community. Marianne has an affinity for useless celebrity facts and makes a mean white chocolate bread pudding.

Nick Momrik Happiness Engineer

 

Blogs: MtDewVirus
Nick grew up in northern lower Michigan and currently lives in Saginaw, population 57,523. He was undercover at the Help Desk and Microlabs at Saginaw Valley State University for 8 years before joining Automattic. Nick has been using WordPress since version 0.72 and vaguely remembers life before plugins and themes. When there isn’t snow on the ground, he can usually be found on a golf course trying to get his first hole-in-one.

Matt Mullenweg CBBQTT

 

Blogs: Photo Matt, Matt on WordPress
As the Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic, Matt travels the world sampling cuisine and comparing it to the gold standard of Texas BBQ. Although he originally aspired to be a jazz saxophonist, Matt somehow wound up studying economics which took him to Washington D.C. where he began taking pictures and blogging. The rest, as they say, is mystery. He lives in San Francisco and has a crush on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Donncha O Caoimh Murphy’s Quality Control

 

Blogs: Holy Shmoly!, In Photos, Donncha’s Blog
Donncha hails from Cork City, Ireland and is currently living in the picturesque Blarney village with his wife Jacinta. He’s a slightly obsessive photographer, dragging around a camera everywhere and posting photos every day to Inphotos.org. He loves getting out and about whenever he can and enjoys relaxing walks by the sea. (Murphy’s is the stout prefered by the fine people in the real capital of Ireland, the People’s Republic of Cork.)

Mark Riley Support Maven

 

Blog: 69105
Mark has been living and breathing WordPress support since January 2004 and really has answered more questions than anyone has had hot BBQ. He can’t code, he doesn’t know much about the command line and his chosen OS would be Windows XP. But in his favour if your blog is broken he can probably fix it. His wife and 2 daughters put up with him in the UK.

Andy Peatling Social Engineer

 

Blogs: Blaze Blog, Andy in Life
Originally from the UK, Andy had no trouble adapting to the rain soaked life of Vancouver, BC where he now resides. Andy likes to hop between coding and designing, sometimes mixing the two together and making his code look “pretty.” He has been tinkering with WordPress for a number of years both in theme design and plugin development. When away from his screen, Andy loves to watch and play all kinds of sports. Being in Canada, hockey holds a special place in his heart.

Warwick Poole Systemologist

 

Blog: Linux Internet
Warwick (Rick) was born and raised in South Africa and has lived on a few continents looking for its equal. He currently hangs his toothbrush in New York with infinitely patient wife, Michelle. A mid 90s tryst with Mosaic, FreeBSD, Usenet, and IRC sparked an interest in Open Source software. If the Internet didn’t exist he would have been a wildlife photographer or a small plane pilot. Preferably both. Somehow his colleagues haven’t yet detected he’s a vegetarian. Don’t tell the CBBQTT…

Toni Schneider Band Manager

 

Blog: Toni’s Garage
Toni grew up on Lake Zurich in Switzerland and moved to the fabled Silicon Valley to study computer science at Stanford. He started in the tech world in the realm of 3D sound and virtual reality, then came back to the real world and was the CEO of a great little company called Oddpost, which was AJAX before it was cool (or had a name). Oddpost was acquired by Yahoo (it became the new Yahoo Mail) and Toni was a VP at Yahoo where he created their developer network. As CEO of Automattic he hopes to introduce fondue as a light and healthy companion snack to blogging.

Joseph Scott Bug Exorcist

 

Blog: Random Networks
Joseph is a California native, moving to Utah with his wife and two daughters. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything.

Alex Shiels Code Bloke

 

Blogs: Threshold State, Flight Path
A former Textpattern developer, ultra-low-speed communications engineer, corporate code monkey, and Python programmer, Alex has been writing software since before he even had a computer. He enjoys taking photographs and finding old risque music. Briefly a Sydneysider, he recently moved back to Melbourne with his wife and son. He doesn’t eat shrimp or own a BBQ.

Andy Skelton Code Wrangler

 

Blogs: Skeltoac, Andy on WordPress
Originally a Vermont maple syrup gargler, Andy was called by high adventure to build the Automattic Ranch in Austin where he is kept warm by the socks someone knitted him for helping her move from Blogger to WordPress. It is rumored that he has an Internet Explorer voodoo doll that he sticks pins in while muttering “box model this.” His publicist was not available for comment.

Matt Thomas The Detailer

 

Blog: I am Matt Thomas.
Matt has been a designer since before he knew what that meant. As a child, his parents would frequently return home to find their furniture re-arranged, art re-hung, and tables re-set. Ever since, Matt’s been interested in making things simpler, more beautiful, and more fun to use. Despite a four-year love affair with print design while obtaining his B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Matt’s loving the life of a web designer. He lives on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with his trusty sidekick, Maggie. And most importantly, he doesn’t mind being the “other Matt” at Automattic.

Hailin Wu Ping-pong Specialist

 

Blog: hailin.wordpress
When he was a child, Hailin helped his parents plant pumpkins and raise chicken, geese and rabbits. In third grade his older brother imparted this wisdom from graduate school: the “software” thing will be big someday. Next thing Hailin knew he had a PhD in computer science from University of Denver and spent three years at Array Networks. In his spare time, Hailin likes to jog, hike, and will soon resume one of his favorite childhood activities—planting pumpkins in the backyard!

Wordpress themes

If you're blogging on the Wordpress platform,the first thing you'll probably do is to install a new Wordpress theme. Even if you've been blogging for years you may still be a theme "addict", wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.

It's actually easy to see why this single aspect of running a blog demands so much attention. With the correct theme, you can accommodate all the nifty little widgets and codes, and may also mean better search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic every day.

So what are the factors you need to consider to make theme-hunting easier? Here are five important ingredients:

Theme Width and Columns

Typically, Wordpress themes come in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths ranging from 500 pixels to 960 pixels wide. If you're blogging for non-profit purposes, a 2-column theme can look more compact and reader-friendly. Since you have less images of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus exclusively on the content without leading readers away from your site.

On the other hand, if you're blogging for profit, you may want to consider a 3-column Wordpress theme that will be able to accommodate your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link Ads codes comfortably without squeezing everything in the content area. 3-column themes allow room for expansion, but in the event that you've filled up all available space with ads, then it's time you removed the non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for that particular blog.

Use of Images and Icons

A theme with images and icons can look good, but it rarely increases your web traffic or subscriber base. In fact, most "A-list" bloggers have plain vanilla themes with a simple logo on top. Reducing the amount of images also means faster loading time and less stress on your servers. This vital aspect of server load become apparent only if you have tens of thousands of visitors a day, but it's worth designing for the future.

A image-laden theme also distracts readers from the content itself. This is the reason why blogs like Engadget and Tech Crunch use images intensively in the content areas to add value to a post, but the theme itself is simple and rather minimalist.

Ideally, a theme should allow you to use your own header image for stronger branding purposes, yet replace images and icons with links and text, or just not use them at all unless absolutely necessary.

Compatibility with Plugins

Another time-sucking activity is installing plugins that improve the functionality of your site. There's a plugin out there for almost everything you want to do with your blog, but while most of them are free and easily obtainable, it's not always easy to install the plugins and insert the codes into your Wordpress theme.

If your theme is too complicated, it may be a headache to even insert that one line of code you need to make a plugin work. This is often the case with advanced AJAX-based Wordpress themes that have too many files and heavy coding. I've always preferred a simpler themes that stick to the default Wordpress theme as much as possible, so I can cut back on the learning curve and just get on with my life.

Remember that the purpose of your blog is to deliver timely, relevant content to your readers, Any theme that preserves or improves the reader experience is good, any theme that subtracts from the experience is bad.

Search Engine Optimization

A lot can be said about search engine optimization, but at the end of the day if you have content worth reading eventually you'll get the rankings you deserve. That doesn't mean that you don't need SEO; all it means is that what you really need to do is to make sure:
- Your
- All your blog content titles use the H1 tag, with the main keywords used instead of non-descriptive text for better SEO relevance
- Your theme has clean source codes, and if possible all formatting is linked to an external CSS file which you can edit independently

Plug-And-Play Ease of Use

Can the theme be installed easily on an existing blog without having to move things around? Can the same theme be used and customized easily on your other blogs? These are some additional things you may want to consider when theme-shopping, especially if every minute of downtime on your blog may mean lost revenue.

While it's hard to make comparisons due to the sheer amount of free and paid themes out there, it's still a good idea to have a test blog site. Test any theme you plan on using, and make sure your test blog is also fitted with all the plugins and miscellaneous widgets used on your real blog. The last thing you want is for your readers start seeing weird error messages on your blog.

At the end of the day, a theme is just a theme. Instead of spending your time installing them, it may be wiser to outsource the task and focus more on your readers. Alternatively, you may also want to consider buying "plug-and-play" themes for a reasonable price. Dennis De' Bernardy of ProWordpress.com has probably one of the best themes around, but if you're short on cash there are certainly cheaper alternatives.