{"id":6068,"date":"2026-08-05T01:58:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T01:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/?p=6068"},"modified":"2026-08-05T01:58:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T01:58:57","slug":"matt-michel-the-goat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/?p=6068","title":{"rendered":"Matt: Michel the GOAT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, <a href=\"https:\/\/iterativewonders.com\/2025\/11\/25\/michel-valdrighi-the-coder-whose-code-never-went-silent\/\">Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had to leave a comment, because Michel\u2019s story is not well-known.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn\u2019t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mikelittle.com\/\">Mike Little<\/a> and I met hanging out on the <a href=\"https:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/cafelog\/\">b2\/cafelog Sourceforge<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Freenode\">Freenode IRC<\/a> channel, both drawn in by what Michel had created. It all started on a little island called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Corsica\">Corsica<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bonus:<\/strong> After publishing, <a href=\"https:\/\/jetpack.com\/support\/related-posts\/\">Jetpack\u2019s Related Post feature<\/a> led me to this <a href=\"https:\/\/ma.tt\/2002\/10\/best-blogging-software\/\">Best Blogging Software? post where Michel commented<\/a>, months before <a href=\"https:\/\/ma.tt\/2003\/01\/the-blogging-software-dilemma\/\">the famous Blogging Software Dilemma<\/a>. See, even back then people were arguing about static vs dynamic sites.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent. I had to leave a comment, because Michel\u2019s story is not well-known. Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontlinenewsng.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}