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.
New Feedback
For those of you already on WordPress.com, I finally got some time to pretty up the feedback form a bit. It was already all hip and AJAXy thanks to Donncha, and hopefully now it’s a little friendlier too. 🙂
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.
New Hardware
If you thought things were fast now, check this out. 🙂
Movable Type Demo
They just said if I blog about MT there’ll be a prize.
They’re making a lot of bold claims, they just said it is the “most used blogging platform in the world” and it has the “best community and support in the world.”
Now they’re showing the video that shows a demo of upgrading. Upgrading is now much simpler. New feature: System Overview. (It’s really hard to see the screens because my the screenshots have small text. I’m getting older, maybe my eyes are getting bad!)
Comment spam – “silent data loss, big management burder, no way to know who’s building your community.” Spam is spam. “Movable Type 3.2 is the only blog platform with a junk folder” where it automatically deletes things after a while. Comments have a virtuous cycle.
“You can post from Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Word.” Favorite of Mena Trott: Context-sensitive search. You can customize the interface. Integrates into tools you have now. “No need for scripting.” Use Golive or Dreamweaver.
“Most important reason: best support in the business.” Brand new user manual and prints on demand. Manual allows comments from bloggers. (Why not just use a wiki?) Help ticket system integrated into application. “We’re realising it next week.” “Blogging platform that’s ready for business.”
The prize is the first three people to post about this demo get a copy of Hacking Movable Type. I just posted but I’ll leave the copy of the book for someone who needs it more. Jay Allen has hair now!
Presentation Feedback
First I wanted to thank everyone that came out terribly early in the morning at 8 AM for the WordPress presentation, espescially in light of some of the great parties last night. Don’t forget to email me if you caught me right after the presentation and gave me your business card, as that way I’ll be sure to reply.
Here’s some of the feedback I’ve been seeing, I’ll update this post throughout the course of the day as feedback shows up on Technorati and Feedster and in the WordPress dashboard. If you have a post I’ve missed please leave a comment.
- San Jose Mercury News — “So it was Thursday, as 21-year-old blogger Matt Mullenweg navigated the hallways of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, giving select corporate and other confidants a sneak peak at his latest offering: a special blogging software tool for companies.” BTW, Matt Marshall (who wrote the article) left a comment on this blog about the headline on the article.
- BBS05: Matt on WP — “It really looks like WP is going to make serious strides with these advances.”
- BBS05 – WordPress.com is Simply Awesome! — “Then add on the awesome drag-and-drop administration interface, an advanced WYSIWYG editor, and it seems too good to be true. But it gets even better, it’s free!”
- WordPress.com announced — We like to surprise people. 🙂
- Better Every Day — Owen posts more generally about new features of 1.6.
- Andrew is also following developments
- Flock and WordPress.com, nifty tools — “We say corporate, but anyone will be able to use it. “The point is to get everyone in the world a blog,” Mullenweg told us.”
- WordPress going up against Typepad — “This is going to be a hosted blog service a la TypePad, but of course using the WP platform.”
- WordPress dot com — “…can’t wait to get a hand on a (free?) blogging service with WP in it. Count me in.”
- WordPress.com – Social Blogging? — “It seems they will be using an invite only system, making sure that a it is controlled who gets to make a blog on the site. This will also create a community atmosphere similar to Live Journal and other such invite-mostly blogging sites.”
- WordPress Commercial Arm to Compete Against Typepad — “in my absense some 200 km North and internet free for some 28 odd hours, Matt Mullenweg, the guru and all round good guy behind WordPress has annonuced WordPress.com”
- WordPress starts hosted blogging service
- Are bloggers really selling bottles of air? (No!)
- WordPress.com — “Next thing I am dying to see is WordPress.com invitations being sold on E-Bay for hundreds of dollars or being exchanged for Pancakes and Apple Pies in colleges.”
- WordPress.com sure to be a hit!
- The Future of WordPress
Some photos from Flickr:
Photos by Kris.
Internet Explorer Schwag
I’m a Firefox/Flock guy at heart, but Microsoft just gave out this really nice bag that’s perfect in every way except for the Internet Explorer logo on the side. 😉 I don’t want to be shunned at the geek meetings and dinners, so I’ll probably stick to my current setup, but if I got a bigger laptop I’d probably use this bag. They also attached a CD with IE 7 beta on it, so that’s pretty interesting. I may try that out on my computer at work.
Demo
- Hello
world.
BBS: Building Traffic: Posting Isn’t Enough
Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble are arguing about feeds. Full feeds vs. partial feeds, connectors and readers, ads vs no ads. Bob Wyman is saying partial feeds don’t matter, because you should be putting as much effort into your partial feed as into your full feed, don’t auto-generate excerpts. (Like most blog software does automatically. WordPress allows custom excerpts.)
They’re recommending going to geek dinners and networking events. Robert goes home with a stack of business cards and visits each site to see if anything is worth talking about.
Robert: Another thing I do is link to everything in the industry. The more inclusive you are the more authoritative you are.
An Idea
Matt Marshall’s idea: rank auto-suggested categories by popularity.
Comments back
Comments were missing because I had accidentally deactivated the option that tells me when a comment is held for moderation. They’re all approved now so go crazy. I thought it was odd that this entry didn’t get any comments before. 🙂
Whoops
I have a meeting at CNET I have to head to so I’m actually going to miss the parts of Dave’s session where he talks about Blogger and Typepad and “Smart Blogging Techniques.” I’ll update this post with links to people who did blog it when they surface on the search engines.
