WordPress 2.7 at WordPress.com
December 5, 2008
The 2.7 features are now here at WordPress.com (where this blog is hosted, despite it’s .org URI). My reaction is mainly positive:
- The transition time was announced in advance. In the past, some WordPress.com bloggers have felt ambushed by new features, especially if they didn’t like the change.
- I didn’t like some of the previous changes, particularly categories and tags being pushed “below the fold” so that I had to scroll down to them on the post screen. 2.7 restores them almost to their rightful place, near the top and alongside the post itself.
- 2.7 also allows me to customize my admin interface by dragging boxes around. And yes, I have already dragged the categories and tags boxes even higher.
My main dislike so far is that WordPress.com seems very slow at the moment. I expect this to pass: there are probably a lot of people trying the new features, and there may be some back-end tuning that will speed up the new regime.
There are some other changes to which I am indifferent. In particular, corners seem rounder. (Hey, should I include a screenshot? It’s probably not necessary, since if you’ve read this far, you’re probably on WordPress.com yourself, or able to get a release candidate 2.7 for your self-hosted WordPress blog.)
So a thumb up from me on the WordPress 2.7 changes at WordPress.com. Rather, I should say at the “write new post” screen. One thing I would like is a small and simple Publish button (not in a box that includes things like post status, just a publish buttom).
Avatars, Blavatars, and Gravatars
December 2, 2008
Blavatars? Blog + avatars, explained Heather earlier today on the WordPress.com blog. I was confused, because a WordPress.com user can already have an avatar: an image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on avatar enabled sites.
There’s no explanation of the differences between an avatar (as already available at WordPress.com) and blavatar (as announced today). I think that there are two main differences. First, an avatar is associated with a user, while a blavatar is associated with a blog. A WordPress.com user can have many blogs.
Second, an avatar appears when you comment on a blog or when you post to the support forums. A blavatar provides the much-requested favicon, and also appears when you ping another blog.
If you’re wondering where gravatars fit in: a WordPress.com avatar is essentially a gravatar. The Gravatar web service was acquired by Automattic last year.
Theme Thoughts
October 30, 2008
I’ve been looking through WordPress themes recently to power a startup. Since I’m using self-hosted WordPress, rather than WordPress.com (which is where this blog is hosted), the number of available themes is well into four figures. As usual, I was looking for a clean theme. I had some additional criteria.
The main thing that struck me was the clumsiness of the search tools available. Of course, it might just be that I’m bad at searching for search tools. But at a time when semantic search is all the rage, it should be possible to express preferences and get a few good results amidst a domain of only a thousand or two entities.
Long story short, I ended up with Orange Techno from the German firm AOE media. AOE has made several themes available to the WordPress community under the GPL, and I like their “clean but with a personality” approach to theme design.
So, the theme for Wijard is a tweaked Orange Techno. And I’m still looking for an extremely clean, but not annoying, theme for the companion blog.
LinkedIn to WordPress
October 29, 2008
Automattic Heather just pronounced herself happy to announce the launch of the WordPress App for LinkedIn. I just added the app to my LinkedIn profile. When prompted for the URI of my blog, I specified this blog.
But there’s at least one other WordPress-powered blog I’d like to add to show up on my LinkedIn profile. So, while I welcome the WordPress App for LinkedIn, I hope that it will soon allow my LinkedIn visitors to see posts from multiple WordPress blogs.
Clearspring Widgets at WordPress.com
October 16, 2008
The previous post provides an example of a Grooveshark music widget on this WordPress.com blog. It also notes that Clearspring’s widget platform is involved. How do I know that? Because the code generated by Grooveshark for WordPress.com includes the shortcode: clearspring_widget.
The existence of the clearspring_widget shortcode was news to me. It might also be news to whoever maintains the FAQ: What are the WordPress shortcodes?
If you’re interested enough in WordPress.com to have read this far, you’ll probably agree with me that this is news of the big and good variety. You might even forgive me for pointing out that Automattic seem to have taken the advice I offered Automattic 11 months ago: Make a wide variety of widgets available. Partnering with a trusted “widget broker” might be the best way to do this.
Having said that, I can’t claim to be breaking this news, given a post two months ago by Justin of Clearspring: when you post an ad-free Clearspring widget to a WordPress.com blog it will now show the entire widget inside of a blog post. But I didn’t see Justin’s post until I went looking for it this evening.
I certainly didn’t see the Clearspring shortcode mentioned over at WordPress.com, and I can’t find any reference to it in the official blog, in the FAQ, or in the forums. Guess I’ll mention it in the forums myself now.
By the way, other interesting Clearspring reading includes: their White Paper: What’s a Widget and Why is it Important? and the Wikipedia entry on Clearspring (which is where I found the logo at the top of this post).
PollDaddy Becomes Automattic
October 15, 2008
Polls were one of the features missing from WordPress.com as at the start of 2008. Automattic addressed this in May, when a shortcode to include PollDaddy polls became available.
Now Automattic has acquired PollDaddy. For more coverage, see posts at ReadWriteWeb, WordPress.com, and PollDaddy.
The latter post includes the three points familiar to those of us following Automattic acquisitions: great fit in terms of people working together; acquired service will be improved due to Automattic’s infrastracture; service will remain committed to multiple platforms, not just to WordPress. For example, PollDaddy commit to improving support for support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, etc.
