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.

Dear Cathy and Clare I am increasingly worried about the size of my Inbox. I am almost embarrassed to admit this but it currently has 6,207 items dating from way back September 2003 (and that doesn’t even include ‘Archived Folders’). Tom Kyte (who I admire and respect greatly) likes to keep everything in its place, spic and spotlessly span and currently has a single item sitting in his Inbox. And his finger is poised over the ‘Delete’ button to expunge that one too ! ...

Oracle have released Raptor (a freely available GUI SQL query tool) which may be of interest to those of you who use Toad or are frustrated with the terseness of the SQL*Plus interface. Raptor is primarily a cross platform, PL/SQL developer tool, written in Java (60 MB download). The SQL output is a scrollable grid (like Toad) and there is the standard schema browser, PL/SQL debugger, SQL pretty printer, DDL generator and a graphical interface to explain plan for query tuning. ...

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.