Doc Pop’s News Drop: Storify Shuts Down and More

Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.

This week’s episode covers a bunch of great topics, including: Pippin’s Plugins Ends Memberships
WordCamp US Videos on WordPress.TV
Storify Is Shutting Down
FCC Repeals Net Neutrality

Love WordPress News, but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

We have a ton of news to cover this week, so let’s start with Pippin’s Plugins.

For the past 6 years, Pippin Williamson has been using a subscription based model to share his premium WordPress tutorials. For a monthly fee, subscribers had access to tutorials, code reviews and member’s only benefits, but as Pippin’s WordPress business grew, he had less time to create new content.

So last week, Pippin announced the end of his Premium Membership model. The good news is that he’s now released all of his member’s only content for free. So check out pippinsplugins.com/learn to see the full archive of articles.

Speaking of archive, Storify is shutting down.

Since the early days of social media, bloggers have struggled to find a good way to archive collections and threads from social media sites. One popular solution was to use Storify, a service that allowed you to collect tweets, facebook posts, chats, and instagram photos and arrange them as “stories”.

The site was really popular with WordPress users, thanks largely to it’s handy plugin, but after 7 years, Storify has announced it will be shutting down in May of 2018.

If you used the service on your blog, I highly recommend archiving your posts. The tools are fairly limited, but Storify is offering a few ways to export your Stories from their site. Check out the FAQ link at the top of Storify.com for more details.
https://storify.com/faq-eol

If you missed WordCamp US a few weeks ago, now is your chance to catch up. All of the speaker videos are freely available on wordpress.tv, just search for WordCamp US 2017. There were lots of great talks this year, but be sure to catch Josh Pollock’s talk “Five Attitudes Stopping You From Building Accessible WordPress Websites” and Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s talk “Gutenberg and the WordPress of Tomorrow”
wordpress.tv/event/wordcamp-us-2017/

Remember the Mirai Botnet? The one that crushed major websites and even brought down the internet for an entire country? We now know that it’s creators originally intended to target Minecraft servers. The three creators were running their own Minecraft servers, which is apparently pretty profitable, and they created the botnet to target other services. The code they used was later released into the wild in 2016 and used in at least 15,000 DDoS attacks since then. The Mirai-style botnet has evolved since then and still appears to be the biggest threat to most sites and internet providers. All of this is to say ‘you can blame Minecraft for the current DDoS arms race we are all in’

You’ve probably heard already, but the FCC recently voted to repeal the Net Neutrality act. There’s a lot of speculation out there, but I’d love to hear you thoughts on how specifically the end of Net Neutrality could impact WordPress sites and users. Share you thoughts in the comments below, or record them in a short 30 second video and we’ll share them in a future News Drop video.

That’s it for this week’s news drop, by sure to subscribe to our channel for more WordPress news and we’ll see you next week.