Onswipe Partners With Automattic To Power iPad Traffic On 18.6 Million+ WordPress.com Blogs
Basic gist of what’s happening:
All of WordPress.com including most of its VIP blogs will be Onswipe enabled for the best browsing experience possible on iPad. It’s available for all .org users too! It’s a preview of what’s to come with more designs and cool functionality in the works.
We’ve been working on something really big here over at Onswipe HQ for the past few months with the awesome team at Automattic. As of today, all WordPress.com powered blogs will be using the tech we’ve built for the best browsing experience possible on iPad. It’s also available to self hosted WordPress.org blogs too. It’s an all new built from the ground up design and a preview of what’s to come from us!
Here are some thoughts on why we’re doing it and what’s special about it.
Bringing The Best Browsing Experience Possible To Publishers Of All Sizes.
What really got us excited about working with Automattic and our entire vision here at Onswipe is making it easy for publishers of all sizes to use our technology. Those publishing on WordPress range from personal bloggers such as Raanan at Automattic to CNN/Fortune Tech. By using the Onswipe platform we’ve made it insanely easy to get started without the need for crazy in depth custom work. If it can work for an audience of 100 it can work for an audience of a million.
iPad and tablet traffic as a whole may be small right now, but it’s certainly growing with hundreds of millions of devices expected in the next couple of years. We’re setting the best practices and delivering an enjoyable experience that was built for the tablet web. We’ve been testing WordPress.com powered blogs with Onswipe technology for a while now and it’s just the best experience we’ve ever had. The key we think is that the focus is finally on the reader and the readability of the content.
We Love WordPress
We’ve all been heavy users of WordPress for many years and have been developing on the platform for a good while. It’s what power this blog, all of the team at Onswipe’s personal blog, and millions of sites across the web. Wordpress represents how publishing should be and what we’re doing is a great example of how the WordPress ecosystem embraces developers looking to move the publishing world forward. In Automattic’s announcement, they noted that over 750k pageviews a day come from iPad across 18.6 million sites and it’s only going to keep growing as more and more tablets are sold.
Some awesome functionality
- Over 9 skin choices for coloring
- Accelerometer aware
- Swipe to open the cover and swipe to go between index pages
- Add to homescreen functionality
- Create a custom loading screen for a native app like experience
- Beautiful native commenting
- Built in social sharing
- Customize and add your logo
A Preview Of What’s To Come
This is just the start of what we’re working on. It’s one theme for one device. The full Onswipe platform will come with a vast number of themes, support a ton of touch devices, and other sources such as twitter, flickr, and youtube. There’s also some secret sauce we’re working on for social interactions across all Onswipe powered sites. If you know our history, we started out as PadPressed, a simple plugin, and decided to build towards the larger platform that is Onswipe. This partnership has also let us really understand how to build a solution that molds to a lot of different use cases. We’ve seen blogs with lots of content, no photos, lots of photos, video, long titles, and more.
Available For .Org Installs
As said with the Jetpack release, if you’re a .com or .org user, you should get the same benefits from WordPress. Available today is the same exact plugin… for free. You will be upgraded with new features, devices, themes, and more automagically.
Download the plug-in for self hosted WordPress Installations
Some cool sites to check out from your iPad
Make Myself At Home
Jasonlbaptiste.com (my blog, .org install)
Matt Mullenweg
Japecake