General
| Name | Dan Knauss |
| About Me | I am a Solution Architect for Multidots, an enterprise WordPress agency. Previously, I worked as a technical generalist for Liquid Web’s StellarWP family of brands, weaving between marketing, product development, and design teams, writing, editing, and QA in each area. I mostly focused on SolidWP, Solid Security, and Infosec topics. From 2016 to 2023, I was the editor of Post Status, a wonderful part of the WordPress community for people making a living with WordPress and learning together. There, I learned, wrote, and did podcasts on the business and culture of WordPress. I started freelancing as a web designer in the late 90s. I moved into the emerging open-source web app space to take on clients who wanted to publish, sell products and services, build communities, and/or market themselves online. That was my main focus from roughly 2004 to 2014, which allowed me to work at home and be a full-time parent active in my local community. By the end of that period, I was doing WordPress projects almost exclusively. I continue to operate a consultancy, New Local Media. I enjoy planning, designing, building, and sustaining websites that people enjoy using, help them do great work, and are simple to maintain. Since the 00s, I’ve moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to rural Iowa, and now Edmonton, Alberta. I’m originally from upstate New York. I’ve also lived in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Micronesia. |
| Website URL | dan.knauss.ca |
| Current Location | Edmonton, Alberta • Canada |
| WordPress Origin Story | After years of hand-coding in the ’90s, (and not counting the original blogger.com) Movable Type was the first extensible content management/publishing web application I used heavily, starting in 2001. A great community grew up around MT, which had some fantastic Perl plugins contributed by the late Alex King (who would found Crowd Favorite) and John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Markdown fame. A lot of that talent and vision came over to Dean Allen’s influential Textpattern CMS and then WordPress as people who cared about quality writing and open web standards realized the value of working together under an open-source license. Doing web projects on the side grew into a full-time service-oriented consultancy for me in 2004-06 thanks to open-source content management systems. Today I still have a dozen+ long-term clients, including several who have stuck with me since that time. I remember trying b2 and hearing about WordPress emerging from it as a fork, but I didn’t get deeply into it right away. I started building blog sites with WordPress but preferred Textpattern for a while, and I dipped into Drupal. Most of my work projects use the Joomla CMS (and its forked precursor, Mambo) until WordPress 2.9 came out at the end of 2009. Joomla’s plugin architecture and third-party product ecosystem made them incredibly versatile and simple to deploy for all kinds of projects. (Mambo even had an auto-installer.) After the WordPress 2.9 release, it also had these key qualities and features, which led to its increasing usefulness as a CMS for client work. Within a few years, I was WordPress-exclusive. I still like to get back to the nineties’ coding simplicity when I can. I have a strong attraction to flat-file CMSes and anything simple or minimalistic, but WordPress has been my go-to web publishing tool for over a decade as a consultant, writer, editor, volunteer, teacher, and parent. |
Extras
| Company | Post Status |
| Job Title | Editor |
| Interests | Anything, everything? If there is something uninteresting in the world, that would interest me too. |
| WordPress Usage |
Contribution
| Sponsored | No |
| Hours per week | 0 |
