[ad_1] Castos, a WordPress-powered podcast hosting provider, announced a $756K pre-seed fundraising round today from Automattic, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, and other individuals. The company raised money from all the investors in this round via a SAFE note, which founder and CEO Craig Hewitt said is a fairly standard investment vehicle for companies at Castos’ stage of growth. “On both the individual and corporate investor side I think the investors see the vision that we have for what the Private Podcasting market can mean for Castos and want to help us achieve that potential,” Hewitt said. Private Podcasting is a growing trend where creators and organizations broadcast to supporters in a more intimate format that isn’t open to the public. Hewitt likens them to membership sites, except in audio format. It is often used by people who are running membership sites, courses, or online communities as a way to stay connected with members. “The other application is companies wanting a way to connect with their employees in audio format,” Hewitt said. “Podcasting is perfect for that because it’s mobile-first, on-demand, and can be consumed asynchronously. We call it the Step Away Experience. Companies that are adopting Private Podcasting internally are giving their team members a way to consume their internal content without being tied to their computer on a Zoom call or glued to Slack.” Castos is developing a mobile app specifically targeted at the private podcasting market. Hewitt’s team is aiming to have the app become a place where people can listen to all of the private podcasts for which they have a subscription. Listeners would simply use the app instead of going through the process of manually subscribing to all their private podcasts via RSS feed. New episodes will appear automatically in the app for subscribers. “For our corporate clients, the ability to white label our app with their own branding/style is a big win,” Hewitt said. “It’s also a much more secure way to distribute private podcast content. There’s no RSS feed to share around, no files to download (our app is streaming only to offer more security to those files).” The pandemic ramped up unprecedented interest in podcasting when lockdowns were in place across the globe. Even with vaccines more readily available now, Hewitt said Castos is still witnessing strong growth in the podcasting industry. “There are all the new podcasters in the market now since so many launched podcasts during the pandemic, but now that people are traveling again and commuting to work we’re seeing listenership going up quite a bit,” he said. “This is a trend we expect to continue into the future.” In the past 10 months, Castos has grown to serve nearly 3,500 customers and the team has grown from seven employees to 13. The company’s Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin is used on more than 30,000 WordPress sites. Castos is actively hiring for several roles right now, thanks to the new round of fundraising. “All of the funds will go towards growing our team,” Hewitt said. “This will be pretty evenly split between product (designers and developers) and Sales and Marketing roles – more people, more energy, more great minds working on ways that we can better serve our customers.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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Automattic Releases Sketch Block for Drawing in the WordPress Editor – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Automattic released a new plugin titled Sketch Block earlier today. It is a one-off block that allows end-users to draw directly in the editor. The plugin is marked as a beta release and requires Gutenberg to be activated to use. It is a part of the company’s Block Experiments project. To be perfectly honest, I spent an excessive amount of time playing around with this block plugin today. And, if I am going overboard with that honesty, most of that time was just trying to write out my name. It was hard not to. Drawing things directly in the editor is just kind of fun. Attempts to write my name with Sketch Block. I am unsure how many practical uses the plugin actually has at its current stage, but not everything needs a purpose outside of pure entertainment. Like an embedded Block-a-saurus game and ghost-written headings, sometimes we just need reminders about the wild and whacky side of the web. We also need to experiment with new ideas from time to time, which can lead to unexpected discoveries, creating the foundation of future technological advancements. Sometimes we just need to relieve some stress and sketch out our names in a new tool. I tested the block using my laptop’s trackpad — not an ideal method for freehand drawing. Unfortunately, I did not have access to a larger touchscreen device for a more thorough test. The block offers a limited number of controls as of version 1.0.7. Users can select between three different stroke widths and choose from their theme’s color palette. The block’s height can be resized, but there seems to be a minimum of 200px. I did manage to break it a few times, running into the “This block has encountered an error and cannot be previewed” error. There also seemed to be an unknown minimum width, which could not be adjusted. My goal was to create a columnized team page with each member’s signature beneath their profile photo. However, the Sketch block kept breaking outside of my columns. In the end, I created a single-member bio section: Creating a profile card with Sketch Block The plugin is built on top of the Perfect Freehand JavaScript library. When comparing Automattic’s block implementation to the library’s demo, the plugin falls short of offering the same experience in block form. Perfect Freehand’s demo felt smoother. I was able to consistently draw with more accuracy using my laptop’s trackpad. I do not know if just the size of the drawing area made a difference or if the editor interfered with the feeling. Drawing in the Perfect Freehand demo. The JavaScript library has a ton of extra options too. Users can transform even the worst drawing into something a bit cleaner with the thinning, smoothing, streamline, and other controls. I would love to see the Sketch Block plugin integrate the full suite of tools available through Perfect Freehand. Despite a few bumps, the plugin is a solid first release for a beta project. I am eagerly waiting for what future versions have in store. I also wonder what applications it might have outside of piddling around for fun, such as notetaking or animations. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingAutomattic Launches Mayland Blocks, Its Second FSE Theme on WordPress.org – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Automattic released its second block theme to the WordPress theme directory last week. Mayland Blocks is geared toward photographers and other users who want to showcase their projects. It is the child of Blockbase, a sort of starter/parent hybrid the company’s Theme Team recently announced. I had high hopes for Mayland Blocks going in. I have kept a loose eye on its GitHub repository in the last couple of months. It was one of the first 100% block-built themes the team seemed to be working on. While block themes are still experimental at this stage, I was admittedly disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high. I was eager to be wowed when I should have gone into this review more level-headed. However, I am who I am, and that is someone who is genuinely excited each and every time a new block theme comes along. I am ready for the next big thing, but Mayland Blocks did not fit the bill. As I began the process of testing the theme, the first order of business was to recreate the Masonry gallery as shown in the theme’s screenshot: Expected gallery layout from Mayland Blocks My first thought was that the default gallery output would automagically work. It did not. Then, I looked for a Gallery block style. Nothing there. I searched for a custom pattern. Nothing there either. In short, it was impossible to recreate the gallery shown in the theme’s screenshot — one of the primary features that drew me to it. Bummer. I was looking forward to seeing a Masonry-style gallery of images built on top of the block system. Standard gallery output with Mayland Blocks. With a tiny bit of sleuthing and peeking under the hood of the theme’s demo on WordPress.com, I saw that it was using the CoBlocks plugin by GoDaddy. The thing that made the theme special had nothing to do with the theme. After a quick install, I converted my existing gallery to the CoBlocks Masonry block. Success! Masonry gallery output via CoBlocks. At that point, I began to wonder why I was even testing Mayland Blocks at all. Its claim to fame hinged on showcasing photography. The core Gallery block works well enough, and I can use CoBlocks with any theme. Most decent ones provide the sort of open-canvas template that is no different than Mayland’s front page. What would have made it a great theme would have been living up to its screenshot’s promise. This was also a missed opportunity to showcase some alternate Gallery block styles and patterns. If we want more users to buy into this system, some of our best design and development teams need to take that one extra step. For such a simple theme, one well-suited as a one-page design, this was the moment to lean into the photography angle. Provide users a Polaroid picture frame option: Add a “no gutter” block style: Bundle a few patterns that combine the Gallery block with others. Give us a little flavor. Mayland Blocks works well as a WordPress.com child theme because its suite of plugins is available to all users out of the box. For a publicly-released project on WordPress.org, it is a little disappointing that it was a straight port. The child theme is essentially its parent with an open-canvas front page template and some trivial font and color changes. Surprisingly, it made it into the theme directory with so few alterations. Two days later, another child theme was outright rejected for just adding “some minor changes which can be made directly from the parent theme.” The inconsistent application of the guidelines by different reviewers has long been a thorny issue, especially when more subjective rules come into play. However, block themes have more wiggle room at the moment. There are so few for users to test that it makes sense to let things slide. One of the Themes Team’s previous hard lines has been that bundled front page templates must respect the user’s reading settings. This meant that if a user explicitly chose to show blog posts on their front page, the theme must display those posts. Mayland Blocks is the first that I have seen get a pass on this, a hopeful sign of more leeway for directory-submitted themes in the future. Block themes are a different beast. HTML files are not dynamic, and there is no way to put a PHP conditional check in a front-page.html file in the same way as themers once did in a front-page.php template. There is a technical workaround for this, but I do not think it is necessary. Block themes are changing the game, and the guidelines will need to follow. I love seeing the contribution — any contribution, really — of another block theme to WordPress.org. However, I want to see more artistry on top of the Blockbase parent theme. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingAutomattic Acquires Day One Journaling App – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Automattic has acquired Day One, a journaling app available on iPhone, Android, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. The app makes it easy to create journal entries on the go, offers end-to-end encryption for privacy on its paid tier, and has offline capabilities. While most users compose private entries, Automattic’s acquisition announcement promises integrations for publishing to the web: That doesn’t mean that everything you journal has to stay private, though. When you want to share specific entries – or even entire journals with the world – you can expect seamless integrations with both WordPress.com and Tumblr to do just that. On the flip side of that, importing your favorite content from WordPress.com and Tumblr into Day One is on the near-term roadmap. In a post on his personal blog, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said he has been a user of Day One since 2016 and spoke highly of the app’s infrastructure: Day One not only nails the experience of a local blog (or journal as they call it) in an app, but also has (built) a great technical infrastructure — it works fantastic (when) offline and has a fully encrypted sync mechanism, so the data that’s in the cloud is secured in a way that even someone with access to their database couldn’t decode your entries, it’s only decrypted on your local device. Combining encryption and sync in a truly secure way is tricky, but they’ve done it. A journaling app is a surprising acquisition for Automattic, which has traditionally gravitated towards snapping up publishing-related companies and tools. WordPress is capable of powering nearly every kind of public-facing website, but private publishing has never been its strong suit. Though many have used WordPress in a sort of “private” mode for journaling, or set up local installations, the software is not streamlined for this particular use case. Day One expertly handles this niche that has remained relatively untouched in the WordPress ecosystem. In explaining the acquisition, Mullenweg also touched on his “vision of making Automattic the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet,” a notion shared by Tiny Capital and often applied to Alphabet and its diverse holdings. One distinction is that Automattic’s acquisitions tend to complement one another technologically, often introducing the potential for improvements that can be shared with other products through open source software. Day One Community Remains Trepidatious About the Acquisition Why did Automattic buy the company? Day One customers are curious, as some of them perceive Automattic to be another “corporate giant” gobbling up a scrappy startup, ready to squeeze every possible drop of revenue out of the app’s loyal customers. Many long-time Day One users have never heard of Automattic and they are understandably leery of seeing their beloved app change hands. Perusing the comments on the Twitter announcement and in the app’s community on Facebook, the news has precipitated a stream of cancellations and exports as users explore alternatives. Numerous customers were disheartened by one particular ambiguous statement in Day One’s announcement, which left the door open for future changes to the privacy of the app: Rest assured there are no current plans to change the privacy of Day One; safely protecting memories and creating a 100% personal space is the foundation upon which this company was built. The statement has since been updated to be more reassuring to users, although it still doesn’t explicitly promise no changes. It does contain a hint at why Automattic was interested in acquiring the app: Rest assured that Day One’s commitment to protecting your privacy remains unchanged. Safely protecting memories and creating a 100% personal space is the foundation upon which this company was built. (In fact, our technical capabilities around privacy are a large part of what Automattic finds valuable in our company). I have never seen a more engaged community with such a strong reaction following an acquisition. Many are deeply invested, having poured years of their lives and private memories into Day One. “Oh, great. I find a journaling app I really like and have 10 years of entries invested, and they get gobbled up by a bigger fish,” one user commented in the app’s Facebook community. “What will become of our beloved app? Will the safety, security, and integrity of our data be assured? Time to back up all of my data local.” Users have concerns about Day One’s updated privacy policy and whether the company might share data with affiliates. Many embraced the app because it was free of any ties with social media platforms. They have sewn themselves into this app in the most vulnerable way, and they are worried about how their private data will be handled in the future. Automattic may have a long road ahead in easing customers’ concerns so that they don’t feel the pressure to export and look for alternatives. As someone who considered using Day One years ago, I think I would be more likely to use it now, knowing that Automattic is usually in it for the long haul. I passed on Day On at the time because apps come and go and it’s not always easy to predict which ones have the right business model to stay afloat. One of my worst recurring nightmares is that I accidentally throw away my paper journals or that my house burns down with my journals inside. Putting trust in a company to keep your electronic data safe and private is an intensely personal decision. Knowing that a larger company with more resources is behind Day One, along with leadership that bears a genuine appreciation for its underlying tech, it seems like a safer pick for a journaling app that will be around for the next ten years. The company’s founder and CEO Paul Mayne will continue to lead his same team at Automattic and is convinced that the move will be beneficial for “the preservation and longevity” of the app. Given how passionate Day One’s user base is about protecting the app’s future, I’m eager to how Automattic handles the
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