Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Wordpress

Matt Mullenweg on scalability

WordPress recently bought a ton of resilient hardware and have undoubtedly improved the quality of service for the 200,000 WordPress users.

Matt Mullenweg gave an interesting interview to Om Malik and Niall Kennedy about how startups can plan for future capacity, provide resilience and maintain performance & scalability.

The IT architects at the UK ISP, Blueyonder, should really listen to this podcast.

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changes at WordPress

I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UK’s gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes.

The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides.

In addition, every single post is now prefixed by ‘Posted by Andy C’. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off. This is my personal blog. Who else is going to be posting to it ?

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heart stopping moment

Just went to delete ‘whiteside.wordpress.com’.

Hit ‘Yes’ I am really, really sure I want to delete this blog for eternity. Yes. I acknowledge I will never be able to access the blog again or reuse the name ever. Or, in vi terms, ‘:q!’.

Received an email from the WordPress Workflow Monitor Agent. Clicked the link to confirm I really, truly do know what I am doing and do indeed want to consign the blog to Room 101.

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I come to praise WordPress

…not to bury them.

I have been unable to administer this blog for a couple of days. However, thanks to the unstinting efforts of Ryan and Donncha, I am pleased to say the problem is now resolved.

I was trapped inside a recursive, infinite, endless loop hell which severely tested my sense of humour after 28 minutes. In fact, I was positively irritated, frustrated and tending towards ‘annoyed’.

I was aware there were a few issues at WordPress following recent changes. Initially, I assumed my problems were related and just waited. However, then I saw people merrily posting away on their WordPress blogs (and not just Scobleizer who has a custom template and a dedicated server farm).

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the post that never was

I am a fan of WordPress. I like their software. I like their humour.

I pay absolutely nothing for the service so I really can’t complain when it breaks.

However, today is the second day I can’t access my blog on WordPress.

Nothing on Technorati. Nothing on Digg. Nothing on tech.memeorandum. Nothing on TailRank. Nothing from those Wordpress ‘A’ listers, Scoble and Winer.

In fact, as I could see other people sporadically blogging on WordPress, my paranoia took hold and I started to wonder whether I was the only person in the entire blogosphere affected by this problem.

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WordPress humour

Normally, when something isn’t working, I get a little annoyed.

However, with WordPress, you just have to smile.

WordPress1.jpg

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small is beautiful

I had a beautifully crafted draft that said…

So MySpace has a staggering 55 million users (well 54 million angst ridden, teen blogs with garish colours, dodgy photos and flash animations galore) while the more recently launched WordPress.com has a mere 110,000 blogs but a far more discerning, perceptive, technically minded and intelligent user base. Quality not quantity.

…but now I see the most popular WordPress tag is ‘LECTURES’ so maybe WordPress also has 109,998 students, a Microsoft blogging evangelist and me.

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life is so unfair

You spend 3 months watching your WordPress statistics bumbling along the horizontal axis close to zero.

Some traffic dribbles in. The graph accelerates into 10’s of hits daily. You feel better. You will persist with this blogging experiment for a little longer.

At this rate, it may soon be time to consider a proper blog using WordPress.org and Adsense to make the millions that eluded me during the dot com boom.

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