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.
I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UKs 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 ?
Also, the categories and 'Add comment' now appear at the top of the article rather than the bottom which I also dislike intensely as it adds distracting clutter.
WordPress have also added feed statistics which is a welcome addition although the statistics are not as comprehensive as those provided by FeedBurner so I'll continue to keep the Feedburner feed alive for now.
Oh - and before you all jump to signup at once - WordPress had an outage over the Easter weekend.
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.
[ Wonder why some ~~idiots~~ people end up posting on the Support Forum 'HELP !!! I've deleted my blog by mistake' ]
Watch in horror as browser fleetingly accesses 'andyc.wordpress.com' instead and brings me to this dashboard. So, on second thoughts, I think I will leave things just as they are.
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).
I tried a few things myself (cleared cookies, different browsers, different computers) but all to no avail. I started a self-help group for affected bloggers. I scanned digg, reddit, tailrank memorandum, Google (and the BBC World Service) in vain for mention of this catastrophe in the blogosphere.
I posted a few rapid fire entries on my new shiny blog (the soon to be, sadly, departed 'whiteside.wordpress.com'). I thought up a fantastic new tag line - 'interminable bytestream'. I used the Performancing for Firefox blog editor which was excellent and was also impressed by the recently released Metrics.
However, I persisted reading and posting to the WordPress support forum and eventually got into an email dialog with Ryan. His email actually 'thanked me for my report' (as if I was somehow doing him a favour), apologised for 'breaking my blog' (as though I am a paying customer), described the progress so far (interesting) and assured me they were 'trying to put it right' (reassuring).
And within a short period, they did.
I am a fan of WordPress. I like their software. I like their humour.
I pay absolutely nothing for the service so I really cant 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.
Then, finally, I read the following posting from Matt Mullenweg in the WordPress Support forum
We're shifting some things to address the problem, and there is new hardware and such coming online as soon as we can get it.
So, that's fine. An update from someone in the know although the phrase 'new hardware...when we can get it' makes me slightly uncomfortable and reaching for my Blogger details and the non-existent WordPress 'export' button.
Anyway, I am sure that when a spate of other high profile Web 2.0 companies (del.icio.us, Blogger, TypePad) had problems in December last year, the news was plastered all over Technorati and elsewhere.
So, are WordPress so fantastic and so powerful, that they are actually beyond reproach ?
Normally, when something isnt working, I get a little annoyed.
However, with WordPress, you just have to smile.
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.
'Fancy a drink after this lecture ? No thanks. I simply must go back to the library and blog about it.'
Thanks to AtariBoy, we now know what it takes to feature on Top WordPress.com blogs today.
11,706 hits (at least).
Hmm. Way to go. As our American friends say.
Just noticed that those nice people at Wordpress.com have added aggregated statistics over 7 and 30 days.
A software company that actually listens to their users and eats their own dog food'. Interesting concept but I don't think it will ever take off.
You spend 3 months watching your WordPress statistics bumbling along the horizontal axis close to zero.
Some traffic dribbles in. The graph accelerates into 10s 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.
Then those pesky developers from WordPress.com alter the Y-axis dynamically, on the fly without even asking so the statistics now start at 40 and the graph looks just the same.
Life is cruel.