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This week in WordPress
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Matt Mullenweg and Automattic criticized for "decimating" Longreads
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First up this week: "My post on this is far from perfect. But I felt like it's worth discussing," tweets Post Status' Brian Krogsgard, linking to his piece Employment troubles at Longreads. In a nutshell: two former long-term "permalancers" at the long-form content site, Sari Botton and Soraya Roberts, who quit in protest this month have criticized Matt Mullenweg on Twitter for "systematically decimating Longreads."
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Sari and Soraya don't hold back, detailing how the employment practices and culture at Longreads deteriorated over time as Automattic continuously cut funding and resources for the site. Automattic bought the long-form content site in 2014. After initially increasing Longreads' budget to $130,000 a month and not getting the results they'd hoped for, it was reduced to just $30,000 a month.
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Soraya tweets: "fear is a hell of a drug. tech ceos seem to run their media empires on low grade dread, ours turned out no different. it takes a special kind of cruelty to buy a company, allow it to flourish into a virtual utopia, then, at its height, suddenly sweep back in to tear it apart."
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Matt and Automattic's official statement both say they continue to be committed to Longreads. But, as Brian points out, it's clear that the 75%+ reduction in funding hit the Longreads team hard.
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Post Status partners launch Commerce Journey with GoDaddy
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"Really excited to finally unveil this project helping entrepreneurs get their stores up and rolling w/ my partner @Krogsgard and @GoDaddyPro!" tweets Post Status partner Cory Miller, who launched Commerce Journey this week, together with Brian Krogsgard and GoDaddy Pro.
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As Cory writes in this week's Post Status newsletter, the project's goal is to help people sell their products and services online with resources and community — and GoDaddy hosting — for ecommerce store owners.
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GoDaddy closing Austin offices, laying off 300 workers
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Retiree Jane Hammons tweets, "I've mostly heard about the permanent closing of restaurants and bars, often with music venues; this is the first big tech-related loss I know of. The severance is decent, but still…". Jay Hill, a WordPress Applications Engineer at WP Engine, cheekily tweets "For anyone in Austin impacted by the GoDaddy announcement, WP Engine is hiring in our sales department."
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WP Engine and employees raising money to support Black community
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According to WP Engine, the group seeks to raise awareness of the perspectives and experiences of all racial and ethnic groups within the tech industry and increase the equality of opportunity. Also, the web host will be holding internal meetings aimed at driving conversations on the issues of race and inequality, and looking for ways to take action as it continues to address these issues.
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"The fight against injustice is a lifelong journey, but one we are proud to keep fighting," says Nakware Howard, head of WP Engine's Represents ERG.
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Meanwhile… "If you were to ask me what feature I most want to see in the next version of #WordPress it is absolutely arresting the killers of Breonna Taylor," tweets PMC Director of Editorial Technology Aaron Jorbin.
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Finding sustainable web hosting solutions
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"After writing about the size, speed and performance of this site, I went down the rabbit hole of green VPS hosting. This is what I found," writes developer Ross Wintle who runs Oikos. He links to Investigating Green VPS Hosting Options where he's published a collection of sustainable hosting solutions for WordPress.
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In this week's MasterWP newsletter, Ben Gillbanks, who runs Pro Theme Design, says he thinks hosting companies could be doing more to make things better for the planet. "If only from a selfish point of view. There's increasing awareness around green issues and this would be a great marketing opportunity. But obviously I don't want this to be something that's used for marketing without any real action. It would be nice to see real improvements," he writes.
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New version of Gutenberg out, plus live Q&A today
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This is the penultimate version of the plugin before the last major version of Gutenberg is integrated with WordPress 5.5. The 5.5 release is anticipated to ship on 11 August.
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Common hosting problems and how to fix them
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There are hundreds of thousands of web hosts that meet WordPress' minimum web hosting requirements. But when you opt for the bare minimum, you're going to run into problems, writes Lindsay Pietroluongo.
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In other news...
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