New Dashboard

The content on the Dashboard has been significantly redone to give you something to enjoy this weekend. Thanks to some code-fu from Andy we are now tracking a lot of interesting stats from across all the WordPress.com blogs.

The first thing you’ll notice is we’re highlighting the top blogs of the day across the network. Next you’ll see where there used to be the WordPress Planet feed we now highlight the most popular posts of the day and the latest from around the site.

I’ve also added links to the top blogs to the front page of WordPress.com.

A lot of you have let us know you loved the “community posts” feature we had in the activity bar so we’ve expanded in ways that hopefully make the dashboard a much more interesting place for you. As a nice side-effect, the dashboard loads about ten times faster now.

As always, let us know what you think and any thoughts or suggestions you may have. It’s getting better every day. 🙂 

LiveSearch and others

Eric discovered the new LiveSearch feature, which has been rolled out for a couple of themes and will be tweaked over the next few weeks.

Purple Lilacs found the new admin bar. Miklb did too.

John Roberts (of News.com) likes the new post screen.

Kathy found a bug, but we’ll fix that soon. 🙂

If you can say nothing else about WordPress.com, at least there’s always something new. 

More Invites

If you’re a current user of WordPress.com and you’ve run out of invites, let me know. I may be able to bump your number back up a bit. We’re also looking into ways we can grant invites after a certain amount of usage or time automatically, but for now just let us know how many awesome people you’ve invited already and how you want to include more. 🙂

Admin Bar

We’re experimenting with something new, now when you’re logged in across WordPress.com you should see a blue “admin bar” across the top of your blog and others with a few handy links, including “Edit this page” if you’re on your own site. This is only shown to people who are logged in.

I’m curious what people think of this, and what other sort of stuff would you like to see in your admin bar?

A few updates

It’s Labor day so we’ve been working extra hard for you. Here are a few of the latest improvements on WordPress.com:

  • Managing links works better.
  • You can now use extended entries with the “more” WYSIWYG button.
  • You now get less generic profile information on registration.
  • Invites are a lot smarter — it prefiles a lot of information for people you invite.
  • When you invite someone you’re automatically added to their blogroll on their new blog.
  • Feedback form works in IE.
  • The cool fade I alluded to before is now in full effect. (Delete some more posts and comments.)
  • It should be faster now (and we haven’t even moved to the new servers yet).

All the electricity problems have been solved in the new colo and thanks to the super-human Jason Hoffman everything has been racked and stacked and we’ll begin configuring them this week.

Safari Support

I just wanted to post a quick clarification that Safari is not quite up to snuff for all the things we’re doing yet on WordPress.com. Where possible we will try to make it as elegant an experience as we can, but the Webkit engine is still evolving pretty rapidly and it may be a release or two before it’s fully caught up with things like Firefox.

Beam me up Scotty

As we boldly go where no blogging service has gone before, it seems we don’t have enough power! As in electricity to physically power all of the new hardware we have. I asked if hamsters on wheels would help things out but they seem to think the power requirements are even beyond that. It’s not an issue, because we’re not one thousandth of one percent to the capacity of our existing servers, but I’m personally looking forward to firing up the new hardware, so I imagine some of you might be anxious too. I will keep everyone updated on this WordPress Power Saga 2005 as it unfolds.