In case you didn’t know already, there is a new Blog Showcase in town. Just thought I would pass that along… [via Red Said]
Or you might prefer to Judge Blogs By Their Covers. Full of beautiful sites I might have otherwise missed. (With lots of great tips – good, now that I have time to focus on things like that again!) [via PhotoMatt.]
I remember the day I came up with the name for WordPress like it was yesterday. Photo Matt was incredibly excited about his new project (not surprising, if you know Matt – he is quite full of enthusiasm), but didn’t have a name yet. He told me he kept thinking about printing presses and how they helped get the word out to the common man. I brainstormed for part of an afternoon, and then it hit me. The URL was available, and I think I was screaming on Matt’s voice mail as I left him a message about it. He agreed that he like the name, and WordPress as we know it was born.
Once WP went public, he offered to convert my sites. Matter of fact, my huge blog data dump was used to help them with the MT import feature option. But I held out. Life was up in the air for me, things were really busy, and I just didn’t want to add learning a new CMS to the mix.
Now? Now I have WP envy. I visit WP blogs, and I realize that posting comments is so much faster. Then I watch over at ScriptyGoddess, and Jenn is focusing all of her time on WP hacks. New, sparkly, twinkly toys.
The final straw? I need to go through and seriously clean up my Blogrolls. They are a mess. I have sites listed that I never read, and sites that I read all the time aren’t listed. It’s a mess. It was then that I realized that it is silly to tweak my Blogroll (which may be slowing my site down) when I can convert to WP and manage the Blogroll internally!
I’ve hinted to Matt that I was probably ready for a change. Today I placed the call. Saturday afternoon at Chez Tremoulet we will become a WP family. (Mike was a part of the original dev team, although work pulled him away from it.) Hopefully, with my recently acquired free time, I can help WP write the instruction docs that they need, and I can help find interesting gadgets, tweaks and hacks for the other WP users. I have my new PHP 5 book here, so hopefully I can learn to write my own code. I could never do that with Perl.
This blog needs some changes. Things need to be shaken up. Hopefully, this will help not only me, but it will help you too. The pages will load faster, and commenting will be a breeze!
Have any WP feedback you want to share? Tips and tricks? Interesting things the world should know? (Ok, that was a loaded question, but I’ll leave it that way…)
I finally got invitations! I have five Gmail invitations to give away. Tell me why I should send you one, and I will. One rule though – if you have never left a comment before and are coming out of blurkerdom just for an invite, your need had better be really, really good. Schmooze me…
Leave an e-mail address so I can get the invite to you! (I’m leaving soon to get my hair cut though, so you won’t get the invite until tonight.)
UPDATE: They have all been sent out, including an extra one that I snagged from Mike. I’ll post again when I have more.
Matt is the bomb. He hooked me up with a lovely little Gmail account to call my own.
In the process of signing up, my initial choice of usernames was not available. I knew “Christine” would be taken, but it is always worth a shot, right? Gmail is nice enough to offer you alternatives though. Here is what it offered me:
christine.tremoulet
ctremoulet
tremoulet
tremouletster
What?!?? Tremouletster? WTF? Uhm, yeah. I passed on that one. I went with bigpinkcookie, because it’s easy to remember. Get down with the BPC…
“Over the past couple weeks, we’ve read and listened to user feedback and have carefully considered the criticisms and suggestions that were made.” Six Apart Announces Pricing & Licensing Changes to Movable Type.
The key thing that the last update on this subject didn’t seem to fix? “Unlimited Personal Edition ($99.95): Allows for an unlimited number of authors and weblogs for personal use. This license is new, allowing unlimited authors and weblogs for personal use.” This was the biggest complaint I continued to hear, and as someone that once ran a group weblog, I’m glad to see the change.
The really cool new features are still coming; the latest version of MT 3.0 is a developer’s version. For developers to use to create new things. Not for the average user. If you don’t want to deal with potential bugs, keep on using MT 2.661. I am.
All of this is a great example of Six Apart being willing to take the feedback (even if it wasn’t positive) and allow for things like Trackback on their own site so that everyone could be heard. Mad props to the Six Apart team!