Those busy people at WordPress have opened up a couple of forums for support issues and feedback for users of WordPress.com
This is a brilliant idea as I currently have to use the 'Feedback' form for all my brilliant suggestions and reporting minor glitches which was a little lonely and uni-directional.
WordPress made some changes to the available themes just before Christmas which I have only just noticed.
I particularly like the changes in Regulus 2.0 by Ben Gillbanks as you can now customise the theme a little. You can choose to have the calendar displayed (Howard will be pleased), change the 'Blogroll' to use link categories, change the header image and the colour scheme. Also, the irritating 'Message essage' bug is fixed.
There are new, improved blog statistics available from WordPress.com with more to come.
No additional Javascript needed. Integrated reports from the dashboard. Superb.
As Matt said in a recent interview, these guys are active bloggers themselves so they understand what users want, what is useful, what is not and they also listen to feedback.
Doug Burns raises a surprising number of issues in a seemingly throwaway comment about music.
I used to say I only have three passions in life 'Music, Football and Girls. The only thing that changes is the order.' :-)
Stuff that is too personal to discuss in a blog. I am startled about certain stuff I have seen posted in blogs. Personal stuff that I would never dream of posting.
Oracle versus Music versus Football. I started this blog after lurking on the Oracle blog community for a while and initially thought I would post occasional enlightening, technical articles which were met with worldwide acclaim. After a while, I realised, those posts would be few and far between.
The other Oracle bloggers cover that stuff far better than I ever could. Also, I would make idiotic mistakes and have people correcting me all the time. I think I can spend my time more profitably reading and learning from others. To be honest, the technical niceties of PL/SQL 'bulk collect', bind variables and 10046 trace analysis can be a little dry when that is your day job. I probably care more and have more to say about music, football (blogging, software etc).
Another quandry about ' blogging etiquette '. I commented on Howard Rogers' view on the importance of calendar functionality in a blog. He answered my questions fully and politely (but I still hold a contrary view). Now do I take my followup to email or continue to comment on his blog article when most people probably aren't interested ?
Indeed, should this lengthy post be a comment to Doug's comment, a private email to Doug or a post in its own right ?
Diction. When I read my own blog, I see long, rambling, interminable sentences. This concerns me. Especially as I write a lot of technical reports as part of my job for paying customers and I also play a major role in the content of my kids' homework. I - sorry, my son - recently got a B+ for a scintillating project on San Francisco. I swear it should have been an 'A++'.
Old news is like yesterdays papers. No-one is interested.
The chart of failed spammers is as good indicator of traffic to your blog as any.
Old gems may totally get ignored depending on timing.
I might have one avid reader.
Lots of people are looking for information about 'Dixons Tax Free Shopping', 'SonicStage 3.3' (are you listening, Sony ?) and, oddly enough, 'Paul Scholes + family'.
Google is a popular but sub-optimal search engine for blogs as monthly archives may contain a wide variety of unrelated content (Roy Keane, Antibes, Blog, Chameleons, DAB) which will ultimately confuse people and waste time.
Not many people will comment. Even fewer will link.
The news is out. Yahoo! will be offering WordPress hosted blogs for small businesses and charging a monthly fee for the service.
I think this is good news for all WordPress users (.com and .org) as it provides a revenue stream for future development.
Some professional (but impecunious) bloggers feel it is very important that there should be a regular, repeating cycle to the frequency of your blog articles to capture the hearts and minds of your tens of readers.
Thankfully, I am a mere amateur so I will post when I feel like it and have prolonged periods of radio silence when I feel like it.
The Akismet spam filter included with WordPress.com means I am not troubled by comment spam on my blog at all, ever.
However, I recently reviewed the spam sitting there all alone in quarantine. Most was inviting me to sample all sorts of delights describing all manner of different and very imaginative ways that a man and (wo)man can be joined together.
One spam comment stood out head and shoulders above all others though with a blissfully simple but effective, marketing message.
GREAT VACUUM CLEANERS
So Typepad had plans to implement resilient disk storage but had an outage before the work was complete, which meant that users lost access to their treasured blogs as a consequence.
Elsewhere del.ico.us celebrated the Yahoo! takeover by having an outage that also meant that users lost access to their bookmarks.
I also noticed that the transaction log on the database used by Newsgator filled up over the weekend and the forums were also unavailable this morning.
My UK ISP appears to have suddenly been taken by surprise by a slight increase in users which has broken their email infrastructure causing sporadic access to email for a period close to seven days. Isn't anyone at Blueyonder responsible for capacity planning ?
I just downloaded an interesting, wide ranging interview (sorry podcast) by Tom Raftery with Matt Mullenweg and Donncha OCaoimh, the two leading developers behind WordPress. Matt and Donncha talk about their backgrounds, hosted WordPress.com, features in 2.0, blogging, spam, plugins and future WordPress developments.
Tom also happened to ask a specific question about my concerns for the WordPress business model and Matt provided some reassurance that there is a revenue stream through partnerships (hosting companies) so both guys do have enough money to eat, drink Murphys and wear clothes.