The Best of WordPress: September 2016

Hi everyone, it’s been a busy few weeks in the world of WordPress, WordPress.com, and Automattic, so I thought I’d share a roundup with all of you! Here’s a rundown:

• We are proud to host the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s new Biohub, with a bold vision to  invest in science, technology and human ingenuity “to help cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”
• Harvard Gazette: The university’s news site is now on WordPress.com VIP! Here’s their latest story, on Harvard alum Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed new novel, The Underground Railroad.

• New York Times Journeys: A new travel vertical from the Times.

• The San Jose Mercury News: Silicon Valley’s newspaper, now on WordPress.

• The Brookings Institution: The nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC, with a mission “to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.”

Our friends at Feminist Frequency got a beautiful new design for their site.

• Belle Boggs published her much-anticipated book, The Art of Waiting, a memoir and exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility.
• Congrats to Stephanie Land (Stepville), whose viral essay for Vox has led to a book deal with Hachette. “I celebrate today with all of you, my friends, and followers, who have stuck with me through all of these years. Thank you for your support. Thank you for reading. I can’t wait to share my book with you.” We’re excited to read MAID: A single mother’s journey from cleaning house to finding home.

• Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, a book by Kory Stamper at Harmless Drudgery, will be released in March 2017. Kory is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster.

• Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight are tracking the presidential poll data as we get closer to the U.S. presidential election in November.
• Fortune’s Erin Griffith looks at the startups working to build a driverless future for cars.
• Longreads published some excellent new original essays, including Maria Bustillos on her daughter’s MS diagnosis, Rob Tannenbaum on intersex Olympic champion Stella Walsh, a collaboration with The Marshall Project and Pulitzer Prize finalist Tom Robbins, and a partnership with the new Racquet Magazine.
• Automattic’s new Design.blog featured thought-provoking posts on design, inclusion, and careers — from contributors such as Jessica Helfand, Kevin Bethune, Alice Rawsthorn, Julie Zhuo, Lena Groeger, Ti Chang, and John Maeda, our new Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion.
• We launched Data.blog, a new site from the data team at Automattic. Read about network science and mapping the communities of WordPress.com.

This month we introduced new content options, browser notifications, and more coming soon!

“This pioneering tech company figured how to make work-from-home work.” Our parent company Automattic was featured in this new Quartz story by Alice Truong about our distributed work model. How do we get things done with 500 employees in more than 50 countries? (Hint: There’s a lot of blogging and Slack-ing behind the scenes.)

• We are proud to share our commitment to diversity and inclusion at Automattic. See our new page here.
• The .blog domains are starting to appear! Design.blog, Dave.blog, Data.blog, and more. The .blog names will open up to everyone starting November 21.
• Pressable scored high marks from Review Signal for its WordPress-hosting service and performance — and our enterprise WordPress.com VIP got this rave: “I’m also not sure what sort of hardware they are running by they blew my WPPerformanceTester PHP bench out of the water… they put on an amazing show and easily earned Top Tier Enterprise WordPress Hosting status.”
• Our own Derek Powazek spoke at this year’s XOXO Fest to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Fray, the pioneering online community devoted to personal stories, which he launched at HotWired in 1996.
• Congrats to our CEO and WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg, recipient of the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment, and named to Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40” list.
• Our company is now 500 Automatticians in 57 countries, speaking 70 different languages. We all got together last week in Canada for this group photo. Oh, and we’re hiring!