Blog

10up – A Featured WordPress.com VIP Partner

on

Today, Automattic officially announced an expansion of their WordPress.com VIP featured partner program. Among other changes, it will now include consulting agencies for the first time. Here at 10up, we’re proud to be on a list that includes elite WordPress.com partners like Facebook and Flipboard.

“The WordPress.com VIP team vets each agency that applies … to ensure the agency’s capabilities fit the needs and scale of VIP customers.”

At 10up, quality and customer service is number one. 10up’s President is a core WordPress contributor with over a dozen top rated plug-ins to his name. Understanding what it means to build a high quality web solution goes all the way to the top. With a modern, distributed workforce, 10up has been able to hand pick some of the best talent from around the country; talent like Helen, 10up’s Lead User Interface Engineer, and the team representative for User Interface on the Core WordPress.org project. No fewer than five of 10up’s employees are credited core WordPress contributors, more than any other agency in the program – with more on the way.

If WordPress is the best platform in the world for managing a website (and we think it is!), WordPress.com VIP is the best platform in the world for hosting high volume WordPress sites. On WordPress.com VIP’s unique, highly scalable, cloud infrastructure 10up clients never have to worry about their sites going down when their popularity surges. That’s why 10up has brought fast growing clients like Hip2Save – the official deal blog of the Today Show – and Twitchy – an innovative editorial news site centered on Twitter – to the platform.

10up has been privileged to work with an exciting mix of WordPress.com VIP clients, from the world’s top technology news site, TechCrunch, to cable TV sports network Universal Sports, to Canada’s top news portal, Canada.com, to 9to5 Mac, one of the top 100 blogs on the web. 10up is working on its most exciting VIP projects yet, and we can’t wait to tell you more.

Read More on 10up – A Featured WordPress.com VIP Partner

Avatar photo

on • 1 Comment

This weekend is the biggest WordPress event of the year – WordCamp San Francisco. So where else would team 10up be? No, we’re not just sending a couple of executives or a few top developers – you’ll find all of team 10up at this annual anchor event, running around in our 10up gear. At 10up, WordCamp San Francisco is our annual anchor, so we’ll be heading down the day before and sticking around for a couple of days after the camp for some face to face team work and some on site visits with local clients. Hope to see you there!

10up takes WordCamp Boston 2012

on • 3 Comments

WordCamp Boston 2012 occurred on a hot and steamy weekend on July 14 & 15 at Boston University.

My WordCamp experience started with a vibrant presentation by our own Jess Jurick on some lesser trumpeted capabilities that WordPress offers. She covered some of her favorite plugins such as Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and BuddyPress while showcasing some sites that push the boundaries of WordPress far beyond blogging.

Sam Hotchkiss offered attendees another atypical take on WordPress with Using WordPress as a Web App Framework. If you have an idea for an app, you can produce that interactive, secure, desktop-like program using WordPress! Features like user support, admin management, security, rapid deployment and many other essential requirements of app development are all part of WP’s framework.

Jake Goldman, our President, gave a polished presentation focused on applying WordPress to enterprise environments where complex, scalable and mission-critical web development is essential. Topics included marketing to enterprise level clients, demonstrating WordPress’s value as an open source CMS with an enormous developer community, and the advantages of VIP Hosting.

Read More on 10up takes WordCamp Boston 2012

WordCamp Portland 2012

on

It’s WordCamp season for 10up! Well, actually, are always traveling to various WordCamps, but in the next few months we’ve got a few. Near to my heart is WordCamp Portland, rapidly approaching on August 18th. We have four 10uppers attending, two are featured speakers, and 10up is a top-tier, Bald Eagle sponsor.

The three 10up Portlanders: Zack, Taylor, and Jeremy will be there and, since it’s our hometown, we will be volunteering throughout the day. Among the 12 selected to be featured speakers are Zack and Taylor. Presenting development anti-patterns is Zack, with his session titled _doing_it_wrong: Improving Your Development Skills Through Examining Bad Practices. Taylor is presenting a talk about how we, as authors, designers, and developers, should focus our attention on the interaction between users and content. His talk, titled Why We Click Publish: Advocating for User-Centricity through Interaction Design, as well as Zack’s are scheduled simultaneously, first thing after the morning announcements.

Because 25% of 10up employees call Portland home, 10up is sponsoring WordCamp Portland as a top-tier, Bald Eagle sponsor and Jake is flying in to keep tabs on us. If you’re in town for WordCamp, we’d love to meet you: find us in our grey 10up shirts or better yet, attend one of our sessions.

Helen Hou-Sandí

on

Before I move from Wichita back to the East Coast (my original home) in a couple of weeks, I’m going to meet the fine folks of the Kansas City WordPress MeetUp and reprise my WCNYC talk on “Making Custom Content Management Disappear into the WordPress Admin”, since I wasn’t able to speak at WordCamp Kansas City. We’ll be meeting at 1PM at OfficePort (details). If you’re in the area, please come join us!

Interview on CodePoet.com

on

Rebecca Collins, an editor over at the recently refreshed CodePoet.com, has published an interview with me that explores 10up and our WordPress-focused web development business. Rebecca asked some great questions, and really challenged me to expand on topics I may have otherwise breezed over. In addition to articulating our focus on building really rich administrative experiences and supporting high scale sites, we really dived into what communication looks at a distributed company and how we respond to work opportunities that, on the surface, might initially seem like a poor fit. At 10up, we pride ourselves on transparency and sharing, and this very intimate look at our operational philosophies is no exception.

Working With Memcached in WordPress

on • 6 Comments

In the early 2000s, LiveJournal dominated the blogging world. While known as a pioneer in the world of online communities, many may not be aware that  its creators are also responsible for one of the most important caching technologies currently powering the web: memcached (pronounced “mem-cache-dee”). Memcached is the caching engine behind Facebook, Twitter, and, a favorite at 10up, WordPress.com. Even though memcached is a stable and mature caching system, it has subtle nuances that can make it difficult to tame. Given that our work at 10up frequently involves development within memcached environments, we have become quite familiar with the ins and outs of the tool. In this article, I share some of my insights, cautions and thoughts on developing in a memcached environment.

Read More on Working With Memcached in WordPress

Slides: Enterprise Class WordPress

on • 3 Comments

Updated 9/16/2012 with the latest version of the deck, presented at WordCamp Los Angeles.

Here are my slides from Enterprise Class WordPress – a talk I debuted at WordCamp Orange County last weekend. Like What Would Core Do?, the focus was on big ideas, not code. I found this difficult to formulate, largely because it involves a complex “problem” that’s more human than technical, and as such, requires a lot of generalizing. I do think that the underlying ideas are important to WordPress’s growth, and I’d like to see the conversation percolate. I plan to refine the talk and explore this with other communities and at other camps – starting with Boston. Please chime in with ideas!

See you at WordCamp Milwaukee!

on

In an unexpected, but certainly delightful turn of events, I will be speaking at WordCamp Milwaukee next weekend! As some of you may or may not know, my family is from Milwaukee and I lived there for a few years, so I’m really excited to not only attend, but speak at the city’s inaugural WordCamp.

WordCamp Milwaukee will consist of three tracks: User, Developer, and Unconference. I’ll be speaking in the User track and delivering my “WordPress Can Do That” presentation. My talk will focus on showcasing some of the amazing sites running WordPress, profiling unique front-end user experiences and the custom backend publishing interfaces that make managing these sites a breeze.

If you’re in the area or plan on attending the event, feel free to ping me on Twitter (@jessjurick) if you’d like to meet up!