Oh, joy! (Wordpress)
Two new designs at wordpress, one of which I've adopted for my wordpress blog, which currently houses my attempts at writing. I wish, and I'm sure others do too, that there was some means by virtue of which I could transfer all the old posts to wordpress.
Wordpress is evolving, and it's already better than blogger in many ways. You can now get a wordpress blog for yourself by signing up. Invites, which is how I got mine, are passe. Categories, comment filtering, additional pages, automatic technorati listing...I could go on forever - it's great; just not Blogger. I can even password-protect 'works-in-progress', which I stop working on if I share with too many people, or no one at all. What I don't like about wordpress, is that I can't create my own design.
I'm keenly following Matt Mullenweg's blog for an announcement regarding designs. According to Scobleizer:
And that's why we're happy, and keenly waiting for the announcement. As late as Christmas? I hope not!
Codey tried wordpress for a bit, found it restrictive and then switched back to blogger. Ankit, when I told him about wordpress, said that he'd rather shift to his own domain and then get a wordpress blog that he can customise. I don't know if I'm going to get my own domain, unless it pays for itself, so I'm sticking to the free services. A switch to wordpress in the offing once they allow customising design.
Bye the bye, here's Jakob Nielson, the usability guru, on weblog design and related issues. It's didactic, yes, and his suggestions would make blogs rather impersonal by standardising everything, so take what you want from it. He mentions something that I avoid: listing 'classic' posts- like my take on Kajrare, which I enjoyed reading again today. With wordpress, it'll become unbelievably easy, and you will be able to read other priceless posts that regulars have been subjected to. I'm lazy, all right! Nielson also believes that one shouldn't have a domain owned by a website, like blogspot or a wordpress domain, but then that applies to serious bloggers, not me. ;) A usable read, still.
And while we're on priceless posts (this is another one. I just can stop linking today, can I?), here's a very relevant article by Edward de Bono. I'm a fan, and this article relates to my crazy ideation exercises. Ouch.
Music (on repeat, for the last few hours): Viscinity of Obscenity by System of a Down. A very strange song that is noisy at times. I don't understand what's being said, yet am enjoying it immensely.
Wordpress is evolving, and it's already better than blogger in many ways. You can now get a wordpress blog for yourself by signing up. Invites, which is how I got mine, are passe. Categories, comment filtering, additional pages, automatic technorati listing...I could go on forever - it's great; just not Blogger. I can even password-protect 'works-in-progress', which I stop working on if I share with too many people, or no one at all. What I don't like about wordpress, is that I can't create my own design.
I'm keenly following Matt Mullenweg's blog for an announcement regarding designs. According to Scobleizer:
Oh, while we’re talking about WordPress, lots of people are asking how I got my custom design. That’s actually a preview of a new feature that’s coming to WordPress.com soon, says Matt Mullenweg (he did my custom theme). Thanks Matt, keep the good stuff coming!
And that's why we're happy, and keenly waiting for the announcement. As late as Christmas? I hope not!
Codey tried wordpress for a bit, found it restrictive and then switched back to blogger. Ankit, when I told him about wordpress, said that he'd rather shift to his own domain and then get a wordpress blog that he can customise. I don't know if I'm going to get my own domain, unless it pays for itself, so I'm sticking to the free services. A switch to wordpress in the offing once they allow customising design.
Bye the bye, here's Jakob Nielson, the usability guru, on weblog design and related issues. It's didactic, yes, and his suggestions would make blogs rather impersonal by standardising everything, so take what you want from it. He mentions something that I avoid: listing 'classic' posts- like my take on Kajrare, which I enjoyed reading again today. With wordpress, it'll become unbelievably easy, and you will be able to read other priceless posts that regulars have been subjected to. I'm lazy, all right! Nielson also believes that one shouldn't have a domain owned by a website, like blogspot or a wordpress domain, but then that applies to serious bloggers, not me. ;) A usable read, still.
And while we're on priceless posts (this is another one. I just can stop linking today, can I?), here's a very relevant article by Edward de Bono. I'm a fan, and this article relates to my crazy ideation exercises. Ouch.
Music (on repeat, for the last few hours): Viscinity of Obscenity by System of a Down. A very strange song that is noisy at times. I don't understand what's being said, yet am enjoying it immensely.
Actually the main reason why I have stuck to Blogger is a big one, the Google DC. WP.com currently is on some kind of cluster. If my guess is right some of the high profile blogs are on a better cluster than the low profile ones. I for one do not want to be discriminated against on the basis of traffic or activity, I will NEVER have the same number of posts or visitors as Scoblelizer.
Even on a tech basis, I prefer to run Serendipity over WP if I have to host my own blog/site, which I keep putting off for the lack of time and effort to spare in maintaining it all. Right now I have a set up where I can just push a few buttons and the damn thing works and I've been lucky/smart enough to stay away from comment spam and all the other ailments that blogs generally suffer from. Simply put, it involves a pretty high adoption cost for me. And the geek in me has already put the thing through its paces, so nothing new there either :)
Well, this ignoramus had to Google for Google DC and Serendipity. :)
Scobleizer & Co do seem to be getting special treatment, and frankly Matt Mullenweg seems to have the right to discriminate - it looks like he can choose what to adopt for Wordpress and whom to give it to. Who owns Wordpress? MS? I'm sorry, I've just started taking interest in techie things after almost a year and a half.
I would be less than honest if I said I dont mind moving out of this blog. Took me a year and a half to move out of a Web Wiz ASP CMS that I'd adapted, and I'm quite at home here. And I don't get many comments, leave alone spam. *grin*
I'm waiting for Wordpress to allow users to edit their templates. There's a lot I want to experiment with, techie-wise. I think Wordpress will be for writing, and Blogger for everything else :)
Static X is fun, incidentally. Didn't think much of Scott Strapp's debut album.
Well, I guess he has the right to discriminate, since he owns/runs the service, which is why I did not want to stay there. What really ticked me off was a couple of instances where some sites were up and running while others were not. For all the flak that Blogger gets and the slowness it has displayed recently, I have very rarely ever had any prolonged problems with it. I do take backups of my posts in XML, which needs to be escaped as CDATA at times due to the older entries, if push comes to shove I can always hack an existing import script :)
BTW, you trackback link is broken on this page.
Hmm...Matt owns Wordpress? Well, that explains a lot of things. I'm ambivalent on Wordpress now. The old brinkster blog had a Access DB that I could download. Know less about PHP than I do about ASP. Apropos backups, I just run HTTrack and download the whole thing.
Been planning to tweak the Trackback code. Will do, today. Thanks.
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