If you’re running your blog from a hosted platform, such as wordpress.com, Typepad or Blogger, you probably don’t have to worry about database (and/or PHP) servers choking and bandwidth running out. For folks who run blogs on their own hosting accounts or servers, this is a possibility. Yet then again, for the average blogger bandwidth and server resources shouldn’t be an issue. Even the most inexpensive hosting account on most providers these days can give enough for most folks (some hosting providers I can point to are our very own Colorteck and one of our sponsors, Cirtex).

This only becomes a big concern when you become really popular or when you get rare DIGG or Slashdot-effect traffic spikes. Or perhaps your server is a bit low on resources, and is serving up your site slowly. To address these, you can use caching plugins. We have been using several caching plugins on some of our bigger blogs like the Blog Herald and Forever Geek. Not only are traffic levels there consistently high, sometimes we also get frontpaged on DIGG, Slashdot, Stumbleupon and other social bookmarkers.

WP-Cache is one good plugin. Another one is WP-Super Cache, which is actually built upon WP-Cache.

We’ve recently switched to the latter, and so far we’re satisfied.

How caching plugins work

Basically, caching works by generating static files on your server, such that database requests are no longer required. This lightens the load on your database server, and makes loading faster, too.

According to the WP-Cache profile:

It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

And WP-Super Cache improves on this:

[WP-Cache 2 still uses] the PHP engine to serve the cached files.

WP Super Cache gets around that. When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP. How fast can your site serve graphic files? That’s (almost) as fast it will be able to serve these cached files. If your site is struggling to cope with the daily number of visitors, or if your site appears on Digg.com, Slashdot or any other popular site then this plugin is for you.

Pros and Cons

Great! So caching plugins help make my site load faster AND it takes the heavy load off the server by minimizing PHP execution and database queries. However, one big disadvantage of caching is that essentially your site will be static, and any dynamic elements might not work.

Sure, everytime you publish a new post, the cache is refreshed. And everytime someone posts a comment, the cache for that particular post is refreshed. At least it’s supposed to be that way. But how about those instances when you need rotating content or images. For instance, some themes use rotating headers. And sometimes, like with several blogs in the Splashpress Network, we use rotating ads (links or images that share the same spot, supposedly alternating). Another issue is when you pull feeds from external sites, like we do. See those three boxes at the rightmost sidebar? Those are feeds pulled from some of our blogging resources.

I’m not sure if caching plugins support this, but I’m assuming they don’t, since the premise with caching is that static files are served until (1) they expire; (2) they are refreshed with new posts or comments or (3) they are manually reset.

For most folks, this is not an issue. And perhaps we can resort to measures that can help resolve these. But what I’m looking for is a plugin wherein you can define which areas of your blog to cache and which not to. Hopefully that won’t be too complicated.

• 6 Comments

Although WordPress.com and many other bloghosting platforms offer many advantages, as outlined in a previous entry by David Peralty many people prefer to host, more even own their content. One can think of many reasons to host their own content, other than the most heard customization limits wordpress.com usually faces:

• Freedom to switch services or hosting company;
• SEO advantages;
• Easy to correctly forward when switching domains and keep traffic;
• Upload space only limited by hosting plan;
• Complete backup freedom;
• Freedom to criticize the platform you use, without having the fear to be shutdown;

Once you have decided to host your blog yourself and settled on a hosting plan, there are many freely available blog software options. I this entry I will list the most known platforms with their pros and cons and examples of blogs on using those platforms.

WordPress

WordPress is without any doubt the most popular blog platform today. Since its creation in 2003, as a b2 fork, Wp has been 100% open-source, although highly controlled by Automattic.

The community around WordPress is very active, both in theme and in plugin development. There are millions of blogs running on WordPress and thousands bloggers write about WordPress topics. Over the last months WordPress, especially older installations, have regularly been hacked, mainly by link spammers.
The actual version of WordPress is version 2.5.1, a bugfix and security fix released on April 25, 2008.

Pros

• Active, supporting community;
• Thousands of plugins and themes available;
• Regular updates and known update cycle;
• Easy installation and upgrades (via Fantastico if offered by webhoster);
• Low learning curve to start using the platform;
• Search friendly permalinks and tag system;
• Supports both PHP4 and PHP5.

Cons

• Security QA: WordPress has been the subject of many security vulnerabilities over the last 12 months. Hacks have both been public and unpublished;
• Only supports MySQL database;
• Active grayzone community releasing themes with hidden spam/ads;
• WordPress has no built-in caching system;
• Upgrades usually require (automated) database changes;
• No multiple blogs option (WordPressMU comes to aid);
• Arguably, Automattic’s strangehold on WordPress.

Movable Type

Since December 2007, Movable Type again is available as a free (open source) platform, released under the GNU/GPL license. Movable Type is written in Perl and offered by Six Apart. Once the most used platform, MT lost its popularity in May 2005 when founder Mena Trott announced a new licensing and pricing structure. Many MT users switched to WordPress. More than 3 years later Six Apart released MTOS.
The actual version of MT is 4.1.

Pros

• Multiple weblogs support;
• Static page generation (dynamic page generation available in the settings);
• Easy template tags structure;
• Support for severable databases (MYSQL, BerkeleyDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite);
• Standard OpenID and Typekey integration;
• Active community;
• Known to be secure.

Cons

• Written in Perl. Not every (small) webhoster might have an update Perl configuration;
• Installation has to be simplified;
• Many MT users have often cursed MT after upgrades broke their site;
• Less themes and plugins available than for WP;
• The administration panel requires a rather high learning curve to get used to. And find everything.

Featured Blogs Running MT

• Daring Fireball by John Gruber;
• kottke.org by Jason Kottke;
• 456 Berea Street by Roger Johansson;
• Blogography by David Simmer II.

ExpressionEngine Core

The excellent ExpressionEngine platform probably is one of my favourite platforms. EE comes in different flavours: the free ExpressionEngine Core, a lite version or the full blown, purchasable, ExpressionEngine CMS (pricing details here). ExpressionEngine Core is a great and fast blogging platform, easily customizable. Although the Core version rather limited is in its functionality, with some investigation one will immediately discover the possibilities.

ExpressionEngine Core is offered by EllisLab and the most actual version of ExpressionEngine is 1.6.3. A preview of ExpressionEngine 2.0 can be seen at Gearlive.

Pros

• Easy installation;
• Active community;
• Written in PHP, supports both PHP4 and PHP5;
• Fast page rendering;
• Easy template tag structure;
• Excellent and easy to understand documentation;
• Extensive statistics module;
• Powerful admin utilities, such as SQL Manager and Search and Replace.

Cons

• No multiple blogs support in the Core version;
• Complex administration panel with high learning curve;
• Limited license (commercial use not allowed);
• Less plugins and templates available than for WordPress;
• Although the template tag structure very easy is, it might take a while before one really knows how to make EE theming easy;
• Only supports MySQL;
• Not all the features from the full version can be replaced with existing add-ons.

Featured Sites Running ExpressionEngine Core

• Veerle’s blog, by Veerle Duoh;
• Weblog Design Studios;
• CollyLogic by Simon Collison.

Habari

Habari was already in the news here at BloggingPro and certainly is one of the blog platform to watch. Started by some of the core members of the k2 theme for WordPress the idea behind Habari is simple: a blog platform with the most cutting edge technology.

The current release of Habari is 0.4.1 and nothing describes Habari better than the words of Anil Dash, Vice President at Six Apart in a Metafilter thread:

I work with the team that makes another blogging app, and at least from the standpoint of the quality of the code and application design, Habari is inarguably better. As Sean notes, though, it’s not very mature, so the user experience for a non-technical user would likely be worse. Where you’d make the tradeoff of whether it’s worth it depends on where you reside on the continuum from programmer to non-programmer. Some of the technical things I love about Movable Type (which I use) include support for database abstraction, support for multiple blogs, and a well-designed infrastructure for things like templating — Habari does all of those things very well for a young application as well.

Pros

• Cutting edge technology, PHP5.2 required;
• Support for both MySQL and SQLite (PostgreSQL support is planned);
• Apache 2.0 license, following the meritocracy principles;
• Support for Apache, Lighttp and Nginx server;
• Respected and blog experienced core developers.

Cons

• Cutting edge technology, PHP5.2 required;
• Very young community and software, only few themes and plugins available;
• Apache2.0 license: sometimes discussion, decision can take ages.

Featured Blogs Running Habari

• Sillyness, Werd by Chris J. Davis
• Thomas Silkjær

Surprisingly Michael Heilemann and Khaled Abou Alfa are still running WordPress.

Chyrp

Chyrp is the last addition to this list and probably the most unknown platform. Chyrp is a lightweight and fast blogging engine, perfect if you want to run your own tumblelog. Chyrp is an awesome platform if you mainly blog about new discoveries, repost videos and links. It offers everything you need when all you want to do is blogging.
Other than listing all the pros and cons of Chyrp, I’ll rather tell you to try out the very unique Chyrp Demo platform.

• 18 Comments

So I help run this new media network with about 60 or so sites (ranging from the small, niche ones to the bigger sites with a more general coverage). One big task that usually eats up my daily todo list is managing ad placements. Well, at least I can say I would rather have a problem managing sponsors and advertisers rather than not having ad revenue at all.

Still, I believe in working smart and I’m almost hitting myself in the head for not implementing an efficient ad-serving solution since the start. Now I’m considering a few options:

• Of course the first option here is to serve the ads directly. For most of our sites, the ads are hard-coded into the themes. I do have the ad expiries on Google Calendar, so we get alerted when we need to follow up for renewals. And I get to track clickthroughs and page impressions via pMetrics (crude, yes, but it does work for me). The advantage here is that it’s pretty straightforward. I can say I have full control over what gets displayed on the sites. But the downside is that it gets cumbersome to manage things this way with a big network.
• I could have someone create an adserver from scratch. Actually for some sites that need rotating ads (e.g., two or more ads or banners sharing the same space at random or alternating) I use a simple PHP script, and it does the job well. We’re welcoming some developers into the team soon, and we might as well ask them to help out with this concern.
• However, with readily available adserver options like OpenX, I can just have this installed somewhere and tweaked to our liking.
• But since running my own adserver would require some resources (in terms of servers/hosting and maintenance/management) I might as well have dedicated adserver-providers take care of this for me. Our very own colleagues at Performancing has launched their Performancing Ads. Even Google has launched its (closed) beta of Google Ad Manager.

Whatever happens, I’m sure of one thing: that serving ads manually become really tedious and cumbersome at some point. And this has its inherent disadvantages. For instance, ad-serving software usually let you track and analyze statistics like page impressions, clickthroughs and perhaps even conversion rates. Directly served ads might be more difficult to track.

So in the aim of working smarter, we’re moving toward a more efficient way of doing things. The question is which?

• 3 Comments

While searching for a solution with an comment notification issue problem, I stumbled upon Clean Notifications by Mike Davidson, of Newsvine fame.

What does Clean Notifactions do?

Since WP sends out plain text emails, all of the links get spelled out as raw, unstyled URLs and the emails end up containing probably twice the amount of visible characters than they need to. This is especially frustrating when you’re trying to read notifications from a mobile device like the Jesusphone.
…
Enter “Clean Notifications“. A plug-in that took only 30 minutes to write but is capable of providing digital pleasure to people all around the world.

If you receive many comment notifications from your WordPress blog and have no problems with HTML mail, this small plugin will make your WordPress trip more enjoyable.
Visit the plugin blog entry to view the difference before and after at Mike’s blog.

• 0 Comments

Hello folks. J. Angelo Racoma here signing in. I’m not sure if you remember me, but a couple of years back, I was blogging here alongside David Peralty, when Blogging Pro was still owned by the Bloggy Network. Sometime late 2007, Blogging Pro was acquired by Splashpress Media (a new media company which I eventually rose from the ranks to serve as editor in chief). Along with this acquisition, David became part of our team as head of Marketing.

Fast forward to a few months after, Blogging Pro is sitting proudly as one of the more high profile blogs in the network. Sadly, David has had to leave the network to pursue other endeavors (a startup, I hear?). So he is passing along the reins to me.

With me to help spice up things would be Andrew G. Rosen of Jobacle fame. Drew is a mainstay at the Blog Herald and other technology-related Splashpress sites, as well as the snarky (and smart) Jack of All Blogs.

Moving along, when I started contributing here at Blogging Pro, the topic was wide and varied. We usually discussed blogging news, and various tech-related matters like blogging apps and software, plugins, and themes. We weren’t very much platform-specific, but for some reason we tended to lean toward the platform we used on the blog itself, which was WordPress.

Thing is, with Splashpress Media running a handful of blogs about blogging and new media in our network, it gets difficult to determine which gets posted where. Sometimes lines are crossed and toes are stepped on. In short, there tends to be an overlap of the topics that each blog handles.

And Blogging Pro sits smack in the middle of this issue!

So I ask you dear readers, what do you think is best for us to talk about here on Blogging Pro, given that we have other sites to talk about blogging, such as:

• The Blog Herald for blogging news and commentary
• 901am for new media news and commentary
• Performancing for problogging
• Wisdump and Devlounge for design
• Blog Network Watch and Blogger Jobs for blog-network related news
• Blog Tutorials for, well, blog tutorials

And the list goes on.

So how about we focus on what we’re best at: the technical side of things. Whether it’s WordPress, blogger, or other blogging software, we will focus on plugins, installing, tweaking, upgrading, and the like. We might still have some overlap with the other blogs, but we can get more in-depth here.

Any other bright ideas?

• 3 Comments

Weblog Tools Collection has announced another WordPress Plugin Competition, this time for the new WordPress 2.5 release, as many important plugins haven’t been updated for this new version.

Some important details for those looking at entering.

All code must be GPL and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Some relevant details:

• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
• True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
• Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
• Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
• All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

I think these competitions are a great way to show off what WordPress can do, so I am very hopeful that this competition will bring out a new group of “must have” plugins for WordPress 2.5.

• 1 Comment

Jim Kukral is a great guy, and a huge fan of the Flip video camera. Today, he uses the Flickr video service to ask “what color is your Flip?”

If you want to participate in his experiment, add a video or photo to flickr and tag it “myflipcamera”.

I love it when bloggers try to interact with people on a different level. This is also a great time to blog about the camera and attach it to the event. I have yet to purchase a Flip video camera, but it is definitely getting more and more attention every day as the Flickr or WordPress of video recording devices.

• 1 Comment

So a very interesting article has popped up on Coding Horror that paints the WordPress software in a bad light. A friend of mine Mark from 45n5.com posted about it on Twitter, using it as another jab against all the WordPress “fanboys” in the world.

This is an incredibly scary result; blog.stackoverflow.com is getting, at best, a moderate trickle of incoming traffic. It’s barely linked anywhere! With that kind of CPU load level, this site would fall over instantaneously if it got remotely popular, or God forbid, anywhere near the front page of a social bookmarking website.

For a bare-bones blog which is doing approximately nothing, this is a completely unacceptable result. It’s appalling.

I looked over the article, and didn’t see anything wrong with it. I think it tells the truth and is just a fact when working with WordPress. I have heard from numerous people that WordPress doesn’t scale very well, but I would also like to add that Automattic and all of the WordPress developers are doing better and better with each release at addressing that issue.

I also want to say that I have never seen WordPress cause such high CPU usage in any of my dealings with the software.

Some people have made fun of the article, saying that WordPress is a PHP application and the Windows server that the author is using isn’t a good platform to run WordPress on, but I don’t know enough about the Windows Server environment to agree or disagree with them, though commenters have been quick to point out that the operating system shouldn’t matter “that” much.

One thing I will point out is that WordPress does need some form of caching to work effectively at higher levels of traffic, and that many plugins are not optimized well, and can cause excess database calls and thus more load on the server.

People always ask why certain advanced features are not part of WordPress’ core and why certain things are defaulted in what they consider “odd” ways, and I think the answer is fairly obvious: some WordPress users are unable to do simple computer/server related things.

Setting up caching and dealing with any errors that arise can sometimes be more difficult than just turning on one of the plugins that have been created for WordPress. I have heard of many people how they tried one caching plugin and it didn’t work correctly for them while another did. These features are not in the core as they would make WordPress too complex for the average user. WordPress is designed in such a way to work on as many different environments as possible, as quickly and easily as possible.

People are suggesting things like Drupal which is a pain to install and configure. It absolutely blows my mind. I think that the issue of CPU usage was blown out of proportion and that ninety percent of the people that blog would be better off on WordPress, Movable Type or something comparable rather than moving to a full blown, complex CMS.

• 7 Comments

Jeff of Jeffro2pt0, recently put up another episode of WordPress Weekly, the informal podcast he runs to talk about WordPress, and this week the show ran two hours thanks to the interview with Lorelle, a strong presence to be sure.

From the show notes:

we covered everything from WordCamp Dallas to tips on using WordPress and then dove into some of the concepts of using WordPress to make money as well as general blogging issues.

The interview was less like an interview and more of a discussion between like minded friends with questions bouncing back from interviewee to interviewer from time to time.

All in all, its a great listen, and I highly suggest you check it out.

• 0 Comments

Yesterday, the web was buzzing due to Six Apart’s mention of a new advertising service and blog management service they are building. The advertising part of their business will be managed by Adify, the same service that so many companies are using to roll their own advertising network out these days, including Forbes, and others.

The blog service will include management of the back end, SEO, and blog design as well as consulting. This could mean huge issues for other companies that have built up services supporting Six Apart’s user base.

Darren Rowse has all sorts of details pertaining to the deal and what kind of things we can expect.

Read the rest of this entry »

• 1 Comment

Charles Stricklin, Mr. WordPress Podcast, has been putting up some amazing posts with regard to running a WordCamp. Unlike most Barcamps, WordCamp was set up very much like a traditional conference, but Charles didn’t have hundreds of thousands in free money floating around.

His posts are very informative, and have tips, tricks and thoughts that could help conference organizers from small to super large. Thus far he has only put up two sections of his series, but they are both amazing and deserve your time and attention.

Here’s a rather long, but mind blowing sample from one of the posts:

Suppose you expect 500 people to register for and attend your WordCamp. You ask the hotel for a meeting room or auditorium capable of seating 500 people. They tell you they’ll let you use The Fluer De Lies Ballroom, which accommodates 500 people nicely, for free if you agree to a 250 room block. They explain that their normal rate for rooms during the dates you’ve chosen for your WordCamp normally run USD$150/night, but your attendees will be able to rent rooms at a rate of USD$110/night. They then tell you the percentage of rooms rented is 75%. You agree to their terms, and you sign the contract.

Here’s what that all means: You’ve just agreed to ensure that 75% of 250 (or 188 rooms) will be rented for 2 nights at a rate of USD$110/night. You’ve just agreed to ensure that the hotel will receive $41, 630.00 when then contract comes due. “So what?�, you ask, “Probably half the people who’ll attend will be from out of town. Maybe so, maybe not, but how many people will blanch at paying USD$110/night and go on Priceline.com or some other service and find a cheaper hotel and stay there? There are even reports of other hotels advertising on Google, making it appear to be the official hotel for the conference when they’re really not.

Using the previous example, let’s say 100 people stay at the official hotel the first night and 50 of them check out, choosing not to stay the 2nd night. That’s 150 room nights. You’d agreed to 376 room nights. You’re liable for the remainder: 226 room nights at USD$110 = USD$24,860.00, and they’ll charge you fees and taxes on top of that.

How to organize a WordCamp - Part 1
How to organize a WordCamp - Part 2

• 0 Comments

ReviewSaurus has put up a post outlining just some of the many ways that Yahoo and Automattic would be able to compliment each other if they worked together or if Yahoo acquired Automattic. The one point that really interested me was the idea that the Yahoo Publishers network could be used to feed ads on WordPress.com, thus creating a system where publishers could monetize their blogs.

We all know that Yahoo’s been struggling hard and that sometimes Microsoft or a joint effort of Microsoft and News corp tries to take over it. However, Yahoo has been showing negative signs of selling itself to either of the company.

Even though, it’s been in this position, Yahoo has been making quite bold steps and that includes from acquisitions of the companies to making changes in the YPN.

Well, I was thinking that what will happen if Yahoo takes over or some how partners with Automattic, the company behind WordPress?

The discussion could go much further. What are your thoughts on the idea of a Yahoo/Automattic collaboration?

• 2 Comments

It looks like so many older WordPress blogs are being heavily spammed through issues that have been fixed for over a year now. Why is this? Because we are all too lazy to upgrade our blogs.

Now Technorati, and most likely other services like it are taking a hard look at older WordPress run blogs and are saying “upgrade or we will stop indexing your site”.

From Technorati’s blog:

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

I guess that means that now is the time to upgrade, as the effects of not upgrading and thus being spammed are very far reaching. Splashpress Media had a problem with this once and one of our sites was put on StopBadware.org’s list, making sure that everyone that found us through Google’s search results was warned that we were an unsafe site to browse. This made traffic and revenue plummet and it took a long time to get off that list, even once the issue was resolved.

It isn’t that hard to upgrade, so what are you waiting for? Upgrade to WordPress 2.3.3 or WordPress 2.5 today!

• 1 Comment

On most of the blogs I write for, I usually forget about adding tags. I have always been a category user, not adding all of the tagging plugins that are currently out in the marketplace, and really not taking up tagging, even though it is now in the core of WordPress, but some new plugins by Calais might just rectify that issue for me by helping give tag suggestions automatically.

Found thanks to ReadWriteWeb:

Grossman’s plugins, which are available as an auto tagger and an archive tagger (to go back and tag old posts), received over 500 downloads in the first two days. The plugins work by sending post text to Calais and retrieving a list of suggested tags. The plugins rely on an Open Calais PHP class, also written by Grossman. Eventually, the plugins will be released under a Creative Commons license. Grossman tells us he’s waiting until the next Calais feature update, scheduled for May 1st, before adding any more features to his plugins.

Not only can you install the WP Calais Auto Tagger to help you tag your posts from now on, but they have also developed the WP Calais Archive Tagger which will go back through your posts and tag them based on a semantic examination of your posts.

For those worried about tags they have already added, the Archive Tagger will not overwrite those tags, but instead add to them.

The plugins require PHP 5, and the cURL library which many hosts have, but not all, and so check with your host before installing these plugins.

Read more about them on the WordPress Plugins library under WP Calais Auto Tagger and WP Calais Archive Tagger.

• 3 Comments

With millions of blogs on WordPress.com, it can be hard to find exactly what you are looking for, but Joseph Scott has put up a post announcing the launch of the new WordPress.com search that allows you to quickly and easily search all of the blogs on WordPress.com.

Search results can be ordered by relevancy, our magic secret sauce algorithm that’s the default, or by most recent, so you can see the latest and greatest on any given subject. International communities are very important to us, so from day uno we have language-specific engines for every language we support. For example, Spanish search is at es.search.wordpress.com.

To assist in your exploration we analyze related tags based on your search terms, with the most popular related tag at the top.

For those who want to keep up to date with changes to the search results, just subscribe to the RSS feed of the results (at the bottom of the related tags section).

It looks like it could become a very efficient and effect search tool for WordPress.com blogs, and makes me wish, once again that there was some way of the WordPress.org community could be included.

The new search is powered by the open source application Hounder from Flaptor and you can read more about it on WordPress.com’s blog.

• 0 Comments

I recently asked why people haven’t switched over to WordPress.com for their blogging service, and their answers all seem to be the same. The lack of customization, using a WordPress.com sub-domain, and the expense of features.

I guess this really goes to show for me how much work Automattic still needs to do on marketing the service.

Your Own Domain

WordPress.com allows you to use your own domain. They have no problem with that and the fee is fairly reasonable. If you don’t like bloggername.wordpress.com as your URL, you can change it.

There is a great article on WordPress.com about mapping a domain for WordPress.com. The cost if you bring your own domain is $10 a year, or if you want to have Automattic register the domain for you, the price is $15 a year. Which when you really consider it, you are getting unlimited bandwidth to your site as part of that price, and they provide a fair bit of flexibility on what can be done.

Here is a sample from the article to answer a previous visitor’s question:

Q: I own domain.com, and want to map a subdomain of that to my Wordpress.com blog. Is that possible?
A: Yes. You will need to add a DNS CNAME at your DNS provider before the domain mapping will work. You should not change your nameserver information if you just want to map a subdomain. The CNAME should look something like the following:subdomain.domain.com. IN CNAME [your-blog].wordpress.com.Once that DNS entry has been added login to your Wordpress.com Dashboard, click on Settings > Domains and enter subdomain.domain.com into the box. If everything is setup correctly, it will allow you to map the subdomain to your blog. If things are not quite right the system will let you know and provide suggestions on what you need to do to remedy the problem.
Note: You cannot map only the “www� subdomain since we remove the www from all the URLs at wordpress.com.

Limited Design Customizations

Another misconception seemed to be that you would be stuck with one of the WordPress themes that Automattic has applied to the service, but with the Sandbox theme, and the CSS editing upgrade, that point becomes moot.

Custom CSS access is $15 a year, and while I feel that might be a little steep, it is an expense that not everyone really needs to do as many themes come with a variety of built-in customization options.

But if you do pay the money, I don’t think the themes will be the limiting factor anymore. Find a CSS expert that knows the basics of the Sandbox theme, and pretty much anything is possible.

No Plugins

I agree with everyone that not having our favourite plugins can be a huge hinderance, but as with everything WordPress related, Automattic is staying on the ball when it comes to user related requests and has said that things like the popular related posts feature as well as a better post and page search is coming very soon.

This is no doubt the tip of the iceberg as Automattic is continually developing the service, and really, how many plugins do you currently run that are essential to your blog and are you sure most of the results can’t be replicated by the many widgets that WordPress.com includes?

No Advertising

This is and always has been the deal breaker for me when it comes to using WordPress.com, but it makes a fair bit of sense, especially if you’ve seen the amount of spam that I have seen in browsing through Blogger’s many blogs.

Limiting advertising to nothing reduces the changes that WordPress will become a spam haven. I don’t think their approach has been all that great, but hopefully sometime in the future this will change.

Conclusion

So the fact is that you can map your domain to your WordPress.com account, you can customize the look and feel of the site, and add in a variety of features. The system is always been developed with new features, themes, and advantages rolling out all the time, but like you, I agree that until there is an advertising system either built-in or allowed to be used on their service, WordPress.com remains mainly a no-go for me.

If you aren’t worried about advertising, give the service a try, as you might be surprised by both the features and the quality of service. Though, if you are looking for total control, well WordPress will never have that, and that’s not really their target market anyways.

• 4 Comments

I love the Weblog Tools Collection blog as much as any other person, but I always thought that others deserved a more equal billing on the site, especially since WTC updates so often.

Today, when I checked my dashboard, twelve of the twenty items were from one blog. Half of the remaining were from Matt Mullenweg, and the rest from four others in the community. With WordPress being installed as the go-to software for WordPress, shouldn’t there be better representation of the community in its dashboard?

I propose that the default dashboard feed should be set up in such a way that it doesn’t show more than the two latest items from each site. This would mean that other articles from other sites would be shown in the dashboard longer rather than being pushed out by the Weblog Tools Collection constant and consistent addition of new items.

As a community, what do you think? Is the limitation I am wanting to impose unfair in some way? What blogs would you like to see more of in the main dashboard feed? For all of you WordPress 2.5 users, have you changed your dashboard?

Let me know in the comments below.

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I deleted my Facebook account about a month ago now, having gotten frustrated with how much crud was all over the site. Advertising, information that was useless to me, and the myriad of silly applications that every has added to their profiles drove me away after realizing that doing anything reasonably approximating something productive was too time consuming on the site.

Now, Six Apart has added a new application called Blog It, that will allow you to blog to your Typepad, LiveJournal, Vox, Wordpress.org or .com, Moveable Type or Tumblr blog from within Facebook.

Named Blog It, the application looks fairly simple from what I have seen of it so far, but my main question is, do people feel so attached to Facebook that they want to do everything from inside the site? The only reason I could see to use this is if you couldn’t access the software’s actual administration panel for whatever reason.

I like that it allows for cross posting on multiple blogs, but that seems to be something mostly spammers would use. I like how you can update your Pownce and Twitter status from one location, but there are other ways to do that, without being inside Facebook.

I am probably not the target market for this Facebook application, especially since I am no longer a Facebook member, but I doubt that this is something the blogging community really needs.

Check out the video from Six Apart for more details:

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As WordPress.com continues to grab more attention and adds more features, I continually wonder why most bloggers would want to deal with installing their own version of WordPress?

The only thing that stops me from using WordPress.com is their policy on advertisements. I have, in person, begged Matt to add an advertising system. I even told him that he could keep a small cut of the proceeds, as offloading all the server issues, WordPress upgrades, security concerns and more would be a nice weight lifted from my shoulders, but they’d need to let me monetize my content.

I also think that an advertising system that was controlled by Automattic could be huge in that they could bargain with bigger companies based on the traffic of all participating blogs, rather than single blogs.

It started to make me wonder what is holding back other people. With WordPress.com you get plenty of space to upload videos, images and whatever else, and other than the costs to customize you theme, and get your domain mapped, the service is relatively cheap, especially if your intention is to create a blog with huge traffic levels. And really, isn’t that all of our intentions?

As for customization, as that’s almost always been the biggest response, with Sandbox, you can pretty much customize the theme as much as you want. And that doesn’t even include the myriad of themes installed by default on WordPress.com. The other argument I get is plugins, but that also seems to be an issue that WordPress.com is quickly rectifying as they add related posts and a better search to everything.

So, what is stopping you from using WordPress.com?

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I was just looking at the updated look of WordPress.com and for the most part it is the spitting image of the stock WordPress 2.5 installation. Sure it has some of the normal WordPress.com dashboard enhancements and the removal of the plugins link, but what really drew in my attention was a tab not on my installations of WordPress.

A small tab labelled support just below the normal help and forums links in the header of the administration panel.

On click, this tab does a nice javascript drop down effect showing a wide variety of choices. My first reaction was sheer wonderment. Why doesn’t WordPress.org’s version have this tab? We could then do away with the help and forums links, merging them into Support, and creating a box where specific areas of the forum and codex are linked. This seems like the perfect way to make finding help easier for users, and allowing us to delve deep into the chaotic mess that is sometimes the forum and codex.

It is always nice to see new advancements and improvements on WordPress.com, but I hope there is a plan in place to bring this to WordPress.org users. Not like any of myself or any of the readers here ever need any support, right?

• 0 Comments