Mark Armstrong posted: "Today we're announcing that Atavist, a multimedia publishing platform and award-winning magazine, will be joining WordPress.com parent company Automattic. This news is exciting to me on a few levels -- eight years ago I had my first introduction to Atavi"
This news is exciting to me on a few levels -- eight years ago I had my first introduction to Atavist when I met a journalist named Evan Ratliff for coffee at Housing Works in New York. He showed me the first pieces of what became a bold new platform for long-form storytelling, which he created with co-founders Jefferson Rabb and Nicholas Thompson. At the time I had just started Longreads, so we shared an interest in seeing a revival for long-form journalism on the open web.
Fast-forward to today and we're thrilled to have the Atavist and Longreads teams now together under the WordPress.com banner. Atavist's publishing platform will be moving over to WordPress, and its award-winning magazine The Atavist will continue to serve up outstanding in-depth storytelling with a new feature each month, under the editorship of Seyward Darby. Also joining the team is Atavist CEO Rabb and head of product communications Kathleen Ross.
Cesar Tardaguila posted: "Maybe you're reading a blog post while sipping your morning tea when you suddenly realize it's getting late, or you're browsing on the bus -- but you just got to your stop. The WordPress.com Reader is a great for to catching up with your favorite blogs "
Maybe you're reading a blog post while sipping your morning tea when you suddenly realize it's getting late, or you're browsing on the bus -- but you just got to your stop.
The WordPress.com Reader is a great for to catching up with your favorite blogs or exploring interesting new reads. And now, you can save those posts and resume reading at your leisure with Save For Later.
How does it work?
First, make sure you have the newest version of the WordPress app on your phone or tablet -- version 10.2. Open the app, and head into the Reader.
Saving content for later
Whenever you find a post you'd like to save for later, tap the bookmark icon (). The icon will change from an outline to a solid color () so you know the post has been saved.
Repeat the process as many times as you like! You can save posts from your list of Followed Sites, Discover, Search, or My Likes -- anywhere in the Reader.
Reading your saved content
When you're ready to read, open the app again, go back to the Reader, and select Saved Posts. Everything you saved will be waiting for you there, even if your device is offline.
Once you've read a post, you can remove it by tapping the bookmark icon again.
A few other notes
In this initial release, images aren't guaranteed to be available offline. More importantly, Saved Posts is currently a device-specific feature -- saved posts aren't synced between devices or the web, so they're only available on the device where you saved them. Logging out or uninstalling the app will delete them.
Karen Arnold posted: "Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do in the community. Members of Automattic's Happiness team have traveled to Sou"
Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do in the community.
Members of Automattic's Happiness team have traveled to Southeast Asia three times since last September to meet people in communities across the region. Our goal? To encourage people based in South Asia to apply to join us in supporting WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack users.
In January 2018, the Happiness Engineer Hiring team, our Events Team, and Mahangu Weerasinghe, a Happiness team lead, collaborated to take a slightly different approach to recruitment in the region. Automattic is a company that aims to build a diverse and inclusive work environment, yet we'd been seeing significantly lower numbers of women applying from South and Southeast Asia. There are a few efforts in the WordPress community to encourage and empower women to get more involved, and we decided the add our voice by organizing a workshop for women. Our plan was straightforward: a free, one-day workshop to inspire participants to set up an online store for themselves or put their newfound skills to use for clients. We talked about the Membership and Subscription extensions for WooCommerce and the Sensei plugin -- invaluable tools for enhancing an online store, setting up recurring payments, and managing memberships.
The first workshop took place in January. We chose Udaipur, India, thanks to its strong WordPress community. We attended WordCamp Udaipur, which was organized by an all-female team, and took the opportunity to staff a booth there while our colleague, Rahul Gupta, gave a presentation about how WordPress helped him put food on the table. The next day, we welcomed 40 women to the workshop, exceeding our expectations and requiring us to bring in extra seats!
After the workshop, we invited the community to join us for networking over tea and chatted again with some of the folks we'd met the day before. While the main focus of our trip was outreach to women, we also wanted to do something for the larger community.
Talking to the WordCamp attendees
Workshop attendees ready to learn
One of our Happiness Engineers giving guidance
One of our Happiness Engineers giving guidance
Setting up our booth at WordCamp Udaipur
One of the attendees was Digication's Surbhi Jain, who works on digital literacy and skills in India and runs WordPress workshops for students -- including in remote areas -- increasing awareness and teaching WordPress hands-on. Surbhi attended our workshop to level up her skills and to network, and she's been helping us spread the word about our hiring efforts since the event.
From Udaipur we traveled to Mumbai, where we taught an abbreviated version of the workshop to women of the local WordPress meetup community. We invited them to learn about options they could use to turn their online store into a membership site and to create and manage products with recurring payments.
The class
Networking
We had such a positive response in India that we decided to try the workshop model in Singapore, a city with a strong technology community. The Happiness Engineer Hiring team, affectionately known as Athena, met up with Leviosa, another Happiness team, to co-host the workshop. Two team members, Kruti Dugade and Rose Pajaroja, led the sessions. Kruti had recently joined Automattic -- after attending our visit to the Mumbai WordPress user group in September! Again, we drew from the local WordPress community to find attendees and also reached out to other women-in-tech groups. Just like in India, we had a very positive response.
The whole class
Attendees in Singapore
Attendees in Singapore
One of my favorite moments during this trip happened at the networking event directly following the workshop. I was standing in a circle of six women -- three young women who worked at a web-design firm together, one woman in her 50s who was running a successful family-powered marketing business, an expat from the US, and me. We chatted for quite a while as they shared the struggles and joys of tech in Singapore. It was fascinating to get a glimpse of their work and lives, and learn about the commonalities and differences in our experiences of navigating both.
Since this series of events, we've seen an increase of applicants from the region, both male and female. We've already hired two new Automatticians from among the people we met during our trip and hope to welcome more in the months to come.
As we strive to provide world-class support to our customers in South and Southeast Asia, we want our team to reflect as many of the diverse communities across this vast region. If you or someone you know is interested, we're hiring.
Meeting new WordPress friends in India in Singapore was a wonderful experience. While we don't currently have plans for similar workshops, we hope to have more opportunities in the future to connect with people from other regions.
WordPress.com
). The icon will change from an outline to a solid color (
) so you know the post has been saved.
