Ozh has been around the block a number of times. He is known as one of the longtime veterans of WordPress throughout the community. There are a few people who I look up to as role models within the community. Ozh is one of those people. At any rate, I got the chance to send him a few questions I had on my mind.
How long have you been involved with WordPress?
I began playing with WP 0.71 in early 2004, moments after realizing that a blog I was reading could assign multiple categories to a single post, something I had been dreaming of for years. In May 2004 I relaunched my personal site using WordPress* (version 1.0.1 at that time). A few months later in August 2004 I released my first plugin**
So all in all as of writing that’s five years and a half of WordPress hacking.
* http://planetozh.com/blog/2004/05/planetozh-v300/
** http://planetozh.com/blog/2004/08/ip-to-nation-plugin/
What the heck is your day job?
Bleh. At the moment my day job consists in planning stuff in a gigantic corporation that produces energy. I mostly dislike it, it pays well, it’s totally unrelated to computers, my boss is a jerk, my colleagues and I make an insanely fun group. Overall, it’s bleh.
One Of The Funniest Copyrights I've Read
One of the funniest things about your site is the renaming of comments to Blablas. There are numerous other examples on PlanetOzh of this snarkieness. Is this out of disregard for the usual or just the way you really feel about comments?
I never thought about it this way but yes, I think I’m mostly snarky :)
I definitely have a love/hate relation with commenters. On one hand they’re signs that a site is alive and interesting, but on the other hand they always post stupid questions because they just cannot read plugin manuals
How many years have you been a judge for the WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition?
This was the first time. I have an unreleased plugin I was hoping to release in the competition, but as one of the winners of previous editions I wasn’t eligible to compete this year.
So, I thought, if I can’t play, maybe I can watch others play? Last year I had written an unsolicited review of some plugins and this had been an interesting experience, so I was ready to do it again anyway.
Do you come across at least one plugin that impresses you each year?
Man, much more than one per year. Damn, I hope I don’t sound like the guy who’s never impressed or want others to think he’s never impressed. That’s what I love about plugins: there are a lot great ideas, a lot of great code, and sometimes both at the same time.
The Number Of Users Has Never Changed, Hmmm
What is it about WordPress that compels you to develop for it?
When I first started to use WP and was crafting my first theme, I realized I really liked the way it was coded so I decided to investigate PHP a bit (I was more of a Perl guy back in those days). The learning curve was pretty short when I began digging into WordPress, I found out that PHP was a fun language, and well, I never looked back.
I’ve been asked several times to port plugins to Drupal or Joomla, but I just don’t have enough free time to learn and master those CMSes.
How do you use PlanetOzh? Is it your public WordPress RSS reader?
Well, it’s just my blog. At the beginning it was less WordPress focused than it is now, but I think this just reflects what my hobbies and interests have become and are now.
Which versions of Quake do you play? I used to be pretty good at Quake 3 when I was younger.
I bet I pwn your ass!1!!1
I started to play Doom then Doom2 in free for all deathmatch over my school’s LAN. I briefly tried Quake 1 but had no internet connection at that time. Later when I got my first connection I instantly got hooked with the Quake community. I played *a lot* of Quake 2, then I played *a lot* of Quake 3, then gradually dropped it as Q3 was slowing down and Q4 didn’t take off. I didn’t play for about 2 years and now I’m back as a casual Quakelive FFA player (I typically play one or two FFA games in the morning before going to work, and 3 or 4 games in the evening when kids are in bed). Anyone fancy a game? Add me as a friend, my nick on Quakelive is “Ozh” from clan SARL
God I *love* Quake, I could talk about Quake for hours
What’s your favorite Quake weapon?
The most beautiful one is the shaft I think, but an air rocket is still the most enjoyable way to frag. Or maybe a quadded shotgun run?
Anything you would like to get off your chest or any shoutouts?
WP FTW! (too bad wpftw.com is already taken)
This episode of WordPress Weekly marks David Peralty’s last episode as co-host of the show. He is moving on to other endeavors in his life and I wish him the best of luck. As for what we talked about during the show, plenty of stuff revolving around themes. You’ll want to tune in to listen to our discussion on whether releasing free themes is dead or not, we also discuss what might happen in the theme market now that Small Potato is back as well as the Theme repository now called home for over 1,000 themes.
Interview With Jason DeVelvis – Winner Of 2008 Plugin Competition
By Jeffro on October 12, 2009
As if he rose from the dead, I finally got in touch with Jason DeVelvis, author of the WP Comment Remix plugin which took the grand prize during the 2008 WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition. I think Jason replied to a tweet of mine and once I reminded myself he was the winner, I decided to send him a list of questions I’ve had since he disappeared after he won the grand prize.
Shortly after the winner was announced, you seemed to disappear. What
happened?
One of the reasons I had entered a plugin into the competition was to gain some publicity for a WP Plugin/Themes site that I was building called Pressography.com. I didn’t actually expect to win when I entered, and was just hoping for some of the traffic from the competition to get to Pressography.com and keep coming back. I was pleasantly surprised at the warm welcome Comment Remix received, as well as very honored to have been voted the winner! However, since Pressography ended up being more a labor of love instead of a labor of income, it had to take a back burner to the rest of my business, as did my plugins .
What was the inspiration behind the development of WP Comment Remix?
Actually, it was Lorelle, in her blog post here: I came across her post one day and thought “I can make a plugin that takes care of a number of those things!” and then sat down for some long coding sessions…
What did you end up doing with the prize money?
It’s been so long ago, I’m not sure. I think I socked it away in my business savings account, and its since been spent on hosting fees and other business expenses.
Since the competition, what WordPress related work or projects have you been
working on?
I love WordPress. Period. I actually think about coding in terms of “how could I make this work as a plugin” – to the point where I’m almost finished developing a full product/business portal built to work with WordPress MU and BuddyPress. The full system will allow for membership sites, single product purchases, public blogs, product cross promotion, a support desk, and more. That system should be available in the next few months, with some of the features being open source and others being premium. These plugins will take WP beyond the CMS level, and make it a platform that will run online businesses quickly and easily.
I also have a whole slew of other ideas for great plugins, I just have to find the time to code them all :) (Or any of them, rather)
Get a glimpse of what WP Comment Remix was all about while at the same time, viewing the crappy administrative interface that was WordPress 2.5
Do you plan on updating WP Comment Remix or have you decided to cease development? If the latter, perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving it to someone else to develop?
I’d love to have someone take over development of Comment Remix. It does pain me that it hasn’t been updated since 2.7 came out, but between the huge admin changes that occurred in 2.7 and the fact that many of the WPCR features were integrated in the core, I haven’t had time to sit down and make it work with the new versions… If someone is interested in taking it over, @ me (@jasondevelvis)
What do you think of the built in comment reply/threading that was introduced in WordPress 2.7? Personally, I like your implementation much better.
I’m partial to my implementation, but that’s because it’s mine ;) I’m just glad that reply/threading made it into the core, regardless of which implementation it is. Now that it’s there, it can always be improved upon.
Some people may have forgotten but you were the guy behind a WordPress centric site called Pressography. The site has gone stale. Any plans to revamp it?
Heh, I think most people have forgotten ;) I haven’t updated but a few times in the past 2 years, because of the reasons I talked about earlier – I have to put bread on the table, haha. I do want to revamp it and get it going again, but I’m not sure what direction that’s going to take, or when it’s going to happen. I’m considering pulling it under the same umbrella as the product portal I’m coming out with, but I don’t know how that will look yet, so don’t hold me to it.
Anything you would like to say before we close out the interview?
Thanks for taking the time to remember a plugin dev who fell off the face of the WP earth for a few years :) I feel like a classic rock band having a reunion tour 20 years after breaking up, or that I should be saying things like “back in the day before this young, hip, new admin area was around, we had tabbed navigation at the TOP of the screen!” Haha just kidding.
Also, kudos to you for making WPTavern.com what it is! It’s actually pretty close to what I had in mind for Pressography, and I never got the chance to take it that far.
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Posted in News | Tagged comment remix, competition, jason develvis, Plugins | 1 Response