It has been over 5 years since I created this page as reminder to myself that I wanted to give recognition to projects, products and services that I use and appreciate. I haven’t done anything else with it until now. It is fitting the the first entry is for WordPress.

WordPress

All my blogs (including this one), and my wife’s blogs, are powered by WordPress, and have been for almost a decade. I think the first version I used was 1.5.

Matt Mullenweg and a few collaborators created WordPress out of an earlier open source blogging package called b2, or cafelog. The software has come a long way since then. What may impress me most is that Mullenweg has not just improved the original, open source WordPress blogging platform, but that he has done so while building a successful business and a rich ecosystem around it.

Much of the work to improve WordPress is paid for by the commercial WordPress.com hosting service, but almost all the code behind the service, including the code to create and manage a big multi-user, multi-blog WordPress installation, is still released as open source. Anyone can install it on their own server, and they’ve made it relatively easy to move a blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted installation.