So finally I get THE wordpress.com account. Not from Matt though LOL. I got it from someone else. My first impression of wordpress.com and its WPMU/WP 1.6 alpha version is that it still need lots of improvement but I see the potential. There are some changes. The CMS seems more user-friendly (so WP is for everybody not just for the tech guy). And I see that Donncha already implement some of what Matt said as the AJAXy thing. That is AJAX the asynchronous javascript and XML, not the AJAX Amsterdam. Overall, I can’t wait to try it firsthand. You all can visit my wordpress.com blog through the top navbar or simply put http://eric.wordpress.com on your browser. Don’t expect much since I can’t tweak the HTML and CSS code. Oh, and don’t you worry, I won’t leave this blog here. I will still post here. There’s some dilemma of course. But let me handle that. Just stay with me and I’ll keep writing. Promise?
So, can I self-proclaiming that I’m the first Eric ever to use wordpress.com? LOL.
Oh, Matt a.k.a Photomatt is giving away invitation to WordPress.com. If you want it, you have to write a good comment or post about what will you do if you have it. Well? Should I do it? Why not? What will I do? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m just thinking that since this wp.com thing is still new, maybe I can get myself a first-name domain. That is eric.wordpress.com. With so many Erics in this world, to have a domain like that would be cool, isn’t it? That’s one very unimportant and unnecessary reasons LOL. Anyway, this is a great way to distribute an invitation. And in some ways, this is also a way to promote WordPress further. Besides, for a blog engine, what better way to advertise than to use the blogger-buzz. Keep on blogging, guys. Me too. I’ll just wait for the invitation to shows up on my e-mail box. Whenever it may be.
There are only a few blog theme designer that I admire and one of them is Michael Heilemann. Some of you might have noticed that my blog here once use the Kubrick theme. And I have to admit it, the reconstruction of the layout were based on Kubrick. So far I’ve been hearing about K2 theme. I’ve seen it on alpha testing on Michael’s and Barry’s blog and finally K2 beta one is released. Great. Another theme for WordPress are available. If you like it, download it. If you don’t I don’t think you’re going to read my post this far LOL. Good job, Michael.
Yes, you read it correctly. If you are familiar with WordPress, they were and still dot org and not com. But this is not a hoax since I read about it on Matt’s blog and he has announced it on Blog Business Summit about his wordpress dot com blog. What’s been on everyone’s mind is “What is this?”. Is WordPress go commercial? Darren Rowse wrote about rumor that this is intended to compete with Six Apart’s Typepad. So they decided to make a hosted blog service with WP platform. Hey, then what’s with Weblogs.us, Blogsome and Blogthing. They provided blog service with WP too. Are they going to be any different? One thing for sure, for now they have limited the access to use wordpress.com by using the GMail-like invitation system. Others who also write about this and I somehow found and read are: Donncha, Phoenixrealm, Exit 171, Abdul, and many more who just can’t wait to get a hand on a (free?) blogging service with WP in it. Count me in.
UPDATE: Here’s a related article from Yahoo! about the Blog Business Summit which from the article I get a sense that it has become so called celebrity-blogger-summit. I think it’s nice. I hope I could be there.
Okay, it seems that my new post somehow got error in it. When I publish my third post, it didn’t show instead all my previous posts also didn’t appear. Also I got a message that there are 28 errors somewhere in the storage. I don’t know what that was all about. Were there any problems in my HTML and CSS? Or were there problems in the PHP? Or were there problems in my posting? Anwyay, I temporarily change my theme to this one by Sadish Balasubramanian. Another great theme. It gives me some perspectives on blog-layout. But no offense. As soon as I get to know the problems and fix it, I will move back to my previous theme, Minima Plus. I’ll be right back.
UPDATE: It seems that the people in Blogsome managed to put things back in order. The blogs are up and running again. And now I am back.
I found recently that the Apple Student Blog is powered by WordPress. There were article about it on Matt Mullenweg’s weblog. You can read more about it there. But what I’m interested on is the footer on his weblog. A very nice line that goes like this,
“Proudly powered by WordPress. Also powered by ramen noodles, XFN, Ping-O-Matic, gallery, and love.”
Yes, Matt. I love WordPress too. And though I use it via Blogsome, I know that this is a great blogging tool. I might also put that same line on my blog. Proudly powered by WordPress. Also with love. But maybe without the ramen noodles.
When I first got the chance to use WordPress via Blogsome, I felt excited. Again, there is nothing wrong with Blogger but I just wanted to edit my blog as much as I wanted to (and a blog that doesn’t bring up errors again and again; I couldn’t make my Blogger blog valid). Now that this blog is up and running, I kind of enjoying myself. But recently I found one disadvantage of using Blogsome. I can not edit my PHP files. Not much, but it can be painful, e.g: when I want to use Asides in this theme, it requires me to edit my index.php file. I guess I should aim for the next step, either using other WP-powered-free-domain-and-hosting-blog (if any) or buy my own domain and hosting.
P.S: There are a couple of problems with this Minima Plus theme default at the beginning, but I managed to right some of the wrongs and voila! a valid blog. Some of the errors though, still there and quite annoying. I will write about these errors another time. Meanwhile, you can see Theron Parlin’s blog (the one who made Minima Plus out of the original one by Douglas Bowman) to see some problems and solutions to this theme.
