Mike Little | |
|---|---|
 Mike Little at Young Rewired State 2012 | |
| Born | 12 May 1962 |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Stockport School |
| Occupation | Web developer |
| Known for | WordPress |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | mikelittle |
Mike Little (born 12 May 1962) is an English web developer and writer. He is the co-founder of the free and open source web publishing software WordPress. [1]
Mike Little was born in Manchester, England in 1962 to a Nigerian father, who was a mathematics lecturer and musician, and an English mother who worked as a primary school teacher. [2] [3] Little was placed into foster care when he was four months of age, and was later adopted by the same family. [3] He grew up on a council estate in Brinnington, Stockport, and was educated at Stockport School. [2] [3]
In 2003, Little and Matt Mullenweg started working on a project in which they built on b2/cafelog and later named it WordPress, releasing the first version on 27 May 2003. [1] [4]
Little states that, despite not being invited to join his co-founder's for-profit business Automattic, he and Mullenweg remain on good terms. He clarified: "I don’t want it to sound like he cheated me out of something or ripped me off in some way. He didn’t." [2]
In June 2013, Little was awarded the SAScon's "Outstanding Contribution to Digital" award for his part in co-founding and developing WordPress. [5] [6]
Little has been described as "modest" and living in "virtual anonymity". [6] [4] He has one daughter. [3] He identifies as a follower of Stoicism and a humanist, [7] and in 2021, he became a patron of charity Humanists UK. [8]
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983 and 2015, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990), which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman.
Sir Stephen John Fry is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer. He first came to prominence as one half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring in A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989–1995) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993). He also starred in the sketch series Alfresco (1983–1984) alongside Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Robbie Coltrane and in Blackadder (1986–1989) alongside Rowan Atkinson. Since 2011 he has served as president of the mental health charity Mind. In 2025, he was knighted for services to mental health awareness, the environment and charity.
Richard Keith Herring is an English stand-up comedian and writer whose early work includes the comedy double act Lee and Herring. He is described by The British Theatre Guide as "one of the leading hidden masters of modern British comedy".
Albert Ellis was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He also founded, and was the President of, the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and an early proponent and developer of cognitive-behavioral therapies.
Stockport is a town in Greater Manchester, England, 8 miles (13 km) south-east of Manchester, 9 miles (14 km) south-west of Ashton-under-Lyne and 12 miles (19 km) north of Macclesfield. The Rivers Goyt and Tame merge to create the River Mersey here. It is the main settlement of the wider Metropolitan Borough of Stockport. In 2011 it had a population of 137,130.
WordPress is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, mailing lists, Internet forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems, and online stores. Available as free and open-source software, WordPress is among the most popular content management systems – it was used by 22.52% of the top one million websites as of December 2024.
Dame Joan Dawson Bakewell, Baroness Bakewell, is an English journalist, television presenter and Labour Party peer. Baroness Bakewell is president of Birkbeck, University of London; she is also an author and playwright, and has received a Humanist of the Year award for services to humanism.
Nicholas John Frost is an English actor, comedian and screenwriter. He has appeared in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy of films, consisting of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World's End (2013), and the television comedy Spaced (1999–2001). He also appeared in Joe Cornish's film Attack the Block (2011). He co-starred in the 2011 film Paul, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator and friend Simon Pegg. He has also portrayed various roles in the sketch show Man Stroke Woman. In 2020, he cocreated and starred in the paranormal comedy horror series Truth Seekers with Pegg.
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the free and open-source web publishing software WordPress, and the founder of Automattic.
Massimo Pigliucci is an American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education. His recent work has focused on stoicism.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, also known as Khyentse Norbu, is a Bhutanese lama, filmmaker, and writer. His five major films are The Cup (1999), Travellers and Magicians (2003), Vara: A Blessing (2013), Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait (2017), and Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache (2019). He is the author of several published books such as What Makes You Not a Buddhist (2007), Not For Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices (2012), The Guru Drinks Bourbon? (2016), Living is Dying (2020), and several non-fiction works on Tibetan Buddhism for free distribution such as Introduction to the Middle Way: Chandrakirti’s Madhyamaka with Commentary (2003) and Buddha Nature: Mahayana-Uttaratantra-Shastra with Commentary (2007). He has also written an autobiography in process entitled Mugwort Born. Many of his teachings are available on the Siddhartha’s Intent YouTube channel.
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress. The company's name is a play on founder Matt Mullenweg's first name and the word "automatic".
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Christian Spencer Jessen is an English celebrity doctor, television personality, and writer. He is best known for appearing in the Channel 4 programmes Embarrassing Bodies (2007–2015) and Supersize vs Superskinny (2008–2014).
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as well as living in accordance with nature. It was founded in the ancient Agora of Athens by Zeno of Citium around 300 BCE.
The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008.
The Search, Analytics and Social Media Conference (SASCon) is an annual UK marketing conference series focused on search engine marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimisation. The conference takes place in Manchester over 2 days, and includes seminars, workshops and discussion panels. Venues have included Bridgewater Hall (2010), The Hive (2011–2012), and Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (2013–2014).
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server (C2S) API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
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I am a follower of Stoicism, embracing the philosophy of inner peace, resilience, and virtue by focusing on what I can control and accepting what I cannot. As a humanist, I value reason, empathy, and the potential for human progress, I believe in compassion for everyone and strive to improve the well-being of all people through ethical and rational means.
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