WordPress.com

Grrr. I don’t know what the deal is the past few days on my blog, but I’ve been getting hammered by spam, particularly spam trackbacks. Akismet has done an amazing job up to this point catching all of it; why it’s getting through now, I have no idea. I just had to go through and manually delete about 35 spam trackbacks. Bleh.

For the time being I’ve disabled trackbacks on my blog. I don’t really know what else to do about it at the moment.

I was just reading some stuff in my feed reader* when I came across this from the Official Google Blog:

We’ve added a bunch of new features, which you can check out in the new version:

• You can add stuff to your blog (cute cat photos, lists, feeds) without needing to know HTML.
• You can also make a completely unique template that has just the color scheme you want, without knowing any CSS.
• Don’t want your mom to read your thoughts? Make a private blog.
• Label your posts, to group related ones together. Use one of our new templates.

Let’s see. The “add stuff to your blog” bit sounds an awful lot like the widgets in WordPress. I’ll have to give it to them, being able to make a template without knowing any CSS is pretty darn cool; WordPress guys, pay attention to that one! The private blog bit, though? Come on. That’s blatantly ripped from the WordPress.com guys. Even the options page for it seems eerily reminiscent of the Privacy page in the WordPress.com dashboard. Label your posts, huh? Categories, anyone? Yeah, I thought so. And lastly, Google has finally thrown out some new templates. The WordPress.com guys have been regularly adding new templates for quite a while now.

I must admit. I’ve used both Blogger and WordPress.com now, and I can’t imagine ever going back to Blogger, even if the responsiveness of the site is much better now. (When I first started blogging a few years ago on Blogger, it was terrible. Sometimes it’d take 3 or 4 tries to publish a post.) WordPress is just better than Blogger, period. And yes, I know: I’m biased.
* Just a note: I’m not anti-Google at all. In fact, I love Google and many of their services. Gmail is my only email app, and my feed reader is coincidentally Google Reader. I just think with WordPress.com becoming such a hit, Blogger.com might be a lost cause. All of the cool kids are going to WordPress, as they should.

Technorati Tags: blogger, google

The WordPress guys have started offering another upgrade: lots and lots of upload space. You can upgrade to 1GB, 5GB or 10GB of space. They posed the question, what would you do with 10GB of space on WordPress.com? And no, you can’t upload your entire MP3 collection!

I don’t post many images on my blog, so I’d never use 10GB of space for images. One use I thought of would be for podcasts. This got me to thinking that perhaps the WordPress guys could build in a podcast recording thing on the blogging dashboard: you could simply record your podcast in WordPress, and then post it to your blog. I know you can record podcasts at Odeo and then post them in your blog, but I figure being able to record podcasts within WordPress would just be 1 step simpler. I’ve often seen WordPress blogs being used in conjunction with podcasting, so it’s not that long of a stretch.

I’ve never tried making a podcast, and never even considered starting a regular podcast, but I’d probably use it occasionally if it were built right into WordPress, if for nothing else than a change of pace on my blog and for a bit of fun. It can’t hurt for readers to know more about me, even if it’s what I sound like.

Just a note to anyone visiting my site directly: I haven’t gone insane and reverted the look to plain text on white. A bunch of WordPress.com blogs are having the same issue. We bought the CSS upgrade; the custom CSS is still in the Presentation area; but our blogs aren’t actually showing it.

So, worry not. It’ll be fixed soon, I’m sure.

Update: And things are back to normal.

Today, WordPress.com released yet another feature: domain registration and mapping. This basically lets WordPress.com users use their own domain name for their blog. If you don’t already have a domain name bought, you can buy one through your blog dashboard. Once the domain name propagates (it took mine about 2 minutes), you can make your domain name the primary address for your blog. WordPress.com automagically redirects to the correct address. So, getting a domain name for your WP.com blog won’t break all of the links to your posts. People will just be directed to your posts at your new address.

As you can guess from the title of this post (or from the address bar, if you visit my blog directly, as opposed to via feed), I grabbed the domain name system13.org. I was hoping system13.com or .net would be open, but alas, they were both taken earlier this year in August. Kind of odd, actually; that was just shortly after I started this blog. Darn. Ah well.

Honestly, I didn’t really have to have a domain name for my blog here. I’ve been quite happy with system13.wordpress.com for months now, and I could continue happily blogging at that address indefinitely. So, why buy the domain name? Quite honestly, to give a bit of kudos to the WordPress.com guys. I think they deserve it. Since I started blogging a few years ago, I’ve used / test-driven a lot of different blogging platforms:

• Blogger
• TypePad
• WordPress (with my own hosting)
• And finally, WordPress.com

Out of all of those, my experience with WordPress.com has been by far the best. When I first started using Blogger, and up until I switched to WordPress, the performance was awful. Half the time you couldn’t log in. Half the time when you could log in, Blogger would refuse to post; other times, it’d act like it posted your entry, but instead, it would actually eat your post. In general, it sucked. I can’t really comment on Blogger’s recent performance though, seeing as I’ve not used it in a long time.

TypePad was alright, but the pricing is a bit steep considering what you get. It’s really steep when you consider the fact that you get a better blogging platform with WordPress, which is free. (I’m not biased, am I? ;)) Even if TypePad were free, though, I’d still prefer WordPress.

Stand-alone WordPress (i.e., hosted on my own webspace) was great, barring the fact that I always had to worry about hosting issues. Invariably, there were hosting problems. Site unavailable; the server my site was on was too crowded, and thus, my site was slow; permission problems on the files, which threw ugly database errors at me. That, and there was the fact that I had tinkeritis, and every time I’d mess with something, I’d break something. But I digress..
My experience with WordPress.com has been awesome. In the few months I’ve been blogging here, I’ve never tried to log in and it not work. It’s never lost any of my posts. Akismet catches basically 99.999% of the spam comments that come through. And, besides paying for the domain and custom CSS, it’s all been free. I’ll be able to use my domain and CSS until late into 2007. Where could I find a webhost that offers awesome service, unlimited space and bandwidth, and great features, all for $30/year? I don’t think it’s going to be happening.

Thanks for all the work, WordPress.com folks. You guys rock.

Ah, one more bit to the folks linking to my blog: if you want to change your links to point to system13.org, that’s cool. If not.. that’s cool, too. People will end up at System 13 regardless.