Matt on Not-WordPress

If you’re a WordPress.com user (or a 1.6 tester) run (don’t walk) to your “Manage” section and delete a few posts, categories, comments, etc. Notice the alternating backgrounds.

That is all.

I just wanted to post a quick clarification that Safari is not quite up to snuff for all the things we’re doing yet on WordPress.com. Where possible we will try to make it as elegant an experience as we can, but the Webkit engine is still evolving pretty rapidly and it may be a release or two before it’s fully caught up with things like Firefox.

For those of you already on WordPress.com, I finally got some time to pretty up the feedback form a bit. It was already all hip and AJAXy thanks to Donncha, and hopefully now it’s a little friendlier too.

As we boldly go where no blogging service has gone before, it seems we don’t have enough power! As in electricity to physically power all of the new hardware we have. I asked if hamsters on wheels would help things out but they seem to think the power requirements are even beyond that. It’s not an issue, because we’re not one thousandth of one percent to the capacity of our existing servers, but I’m personally looking forward to firing up the new hardware, so I imagine some of you might be anxious too. I will keep everyone updated on this WordPress Power Saga 2005 as it unfolds.

If you thought things were fast now, check this out.

They just said if I blog about MT there’ll be a prize.

They’re making a lot of bold claims, they just said it is the “most used blogging platform in the world” and it has the “best community and support in the world.”

Now they’re showing the video that shows a demo of upgrading. Upgrading is now much simpler. New feature: System Overview. (It’s really hard to see the screens because my the screenshots have small text. I’m getting older, maybe my eyes are getting bad!)

Comment spam – “silent data loss, big management burder, no way to know who’s building your community.” Spam is spam. “Movable Type 3.2 is the only blog platform with a junk folder” where it automatically deletes things after a while. Comments have a virtuous cycle.

“You can post from Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Word.” Favorite of Mena Trott: Context-sensitive search. You can customize the interface. Integrates into tools you have now. “No need for scripting.” Use Golive or Dreamweaver.

“Most important reason: best support in the business.” Brand new user manual and prints on demand. Manual allows comments from bloggers. (Why not just use a wiki?) Help ticket system integrated into application. “We’re realising it next week.” “Blogging platform that’s ready for business.”

The prize is the first three people to post about this demo get a copy of Hacking Movable Type. I just posted but I’ll leave the copy of the book for someone who needs it more. Jay Allen has hair now!

First I wanted to thank everyone that came out terribly early in the morning at 8 AM for the WordPress presentation, espescially in light of some of the great parties last night. Don’t forget to email me if you caught me right after the presentation and gave me your business card, as that way I’ll be sure to reply.

Here’s some of the feedback I’ve been seeing, I’ll update this post throughout the course of the day as feedback shows up on Technorati and Feedster and in the WordPress dashboard. If you have a post I’ve missed please leave a comment.

• San Jose Mercury News — “So it was Thursday, as 21-year-old blogger Matt Mullenweg navigated the hallways of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, giving select corporate and other confidants a sneak peak at his latest offering: a special blogging software tool for companies.” BTW, Matt Marshall (who wrote the article) left a comment on this blog about the headline on the article.
  
• BBS05: Matt on WP — “It really looks like WP is going to make serious strides with these advances.”
• BBS05 – WordPress.com is Simply Awesome! — “Then add on the awesome drag-and-drop administration interface, an advanced WYSIWYG editor, and it seems too good to be true. But it gets even better, it’s free!”
• WordPress.com announced — We like to surprise people.
• Better Every Day — Owen posts more generally about new features of 1.6.
• Andrew is also following developments
• Flock and WordPress.com, nifty tools — “We say corporate, but anyone will be able to use it. “The point is to get everyone in the world a blog,” Mullenweg told us.”
• WordPress going up against Typepad — “This is going to be a hosted blog service a la TypePad, but of course using the WP platform.”
• WordPress dot com — “…can’t wait to get a hand on a (free?) blogging service with WP in it. Count me in.”
• WordPress.com – Social Blogging? — “It seems they will be using an invite only system, making sure that a it is controlled who gets to make a blog on the site. This will also create a community atmosphere similar to Live Journal and other such invite-mostly blogging sites.”
• WordPress Commercial Arm to Compete Against Typepad — “in my absense some 200 km North and internet free for some 28 odd hours, Matt Mullenweg, the guru and all round good guy behind WordPress has annonuced WordPress.com”
• WordPress starts hosted blogging service
• Are bloggers really selling bottles of air? (No!)
• WordPress.com — “Next thing I am dying to see is WordPress.com invitations being sold on E-Bay for hundreds of dollars or being exchanged for Pancakes and Apple Pies in colleges.”
• WordPress.com sure to be a hit!
• The Future of WordPress

Some photos from Flickr:

Photos by Kris.

I’m a Firefox/Flock guy at heart, but Microsoft just gave out this really nice bag that’s perfect in every way except for the Internet Explorer logo on the side. I don’t want to be shunned at the geek meetings and dinners, so I’ll probably stick to my current setup, but if I got a bigger laptop I’d probably use this bag. They also attached a CD with IE 7 beta on it, so that’s pretty interesting. I may try that out on my computer at work.

1. Hello world.

Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble are arguing about feeds. Full feeds vs. partial feeds, connectors and readers, ads vs no ads. Bob Wyman is saying partial feeds don’t matter, because you should be putting as much effort into your partial feed as into your full feed, don’t auto-generate excerpts. (Like most blog software does automatically. WordPress allows custom excerpts.)

They’re recommending going to geek dinners and networking events. Robert goes home with a stack of business cards and visits each site to see if anything is worth talking about.

Robert: Another thing I do is link to everything in the industry. The more inclusive you are the more authoritative you are.

Matt Marshall’s idea: rank auto-suggested categories by popularity.

Comments were missing because I had accidentally deactivated the option that tells me when a comment is held for moderation. They’re all approved now so go crazy. I thought it was odd that this entry didn’t get any comments before.

I have a meeting at CNET I have to head to so I’m actually going to miss the parts of Dave’s session where he talks about Blogger and Typepad and “Smart Blogging Techniques.” I’ll update this post with links to people who did blog it when they surface on the search engines.

Dave Taylor is doing a fairly good talk, though I disagree with much of what he’s saying. (But most of the points he’s getting at are good.) However some human error I lost my first 20 minutes of notes, so I’m going to restart in the middle.

“Home pages don’t matter.”

“The design of my site doesn’t matter because more people read my site through RSS than coming to my site.” Design obviously matters, you need to get people to subscribe first!

Pings and Trackbacks. Pings are something that blogs do that make it worth blogging. Search engines tend to be slower, 2-4 weeks. It’s a fundamental problem with search engines. Sometimes content that used to be there isn’t anymore. Pinging is when your blog tool notifies certain other index sites. “Technorati and Feedster and others will all be crushed when Google and MSN and Yahoo release their RSS search engines.” Instead of you having to wait passively for search engine spiders to come to you, you now actively have a tool that let’s your content get out into what’s called the “blog oh sphere”. (No mention of Ping-O-Matic?)

How many know about what Meetup is? “I blogged about that.” About how the CEO notified all the members. 75 minutes later the CEO of the company was on my site responding to it.

Trackbacks, “interesting concept, very poorly implemented, but a lot of people talk about it.” Trackbacks are spammed to death. “I turned off trackbacks 9 months ago.” (He really should talk about Pingback, I get the impression he may not be up to date on blog technology.) He’s showing a comment spam email, looks like he’s running Version 2.63 of MT.

(Problem. Earlier he said he preferred partial feeds, but most of the search engines won’t index his content if it’s not in his feed.)

We’re taking a break now, I’ll publish so I don’t delete everything again.

I’m here at the Blog Business Summit and since the WYSIWYG has gotten pretty nice in WP I’m going to blog what I can from my spot in the back. We’ll see if it helps me follow things or just ends up being distracting.

I just opened up every single blog on WordPress.com in a tab, and checked on each one.

I’m not going to be able to do that for much longer.

New servers are so yummy. We just got started but we already have some new ones on the way to replace the 3 that WordPress.com is currently running on. The details aren’t too interesting, unless you get excited by terabytes of storage, but let’s just say that Dell and Textdrive are my favorite companies right now.

One thing we’re doing different around here, at least for now, is that each person invited only gets 1 invite to pass along. The idea is for people to use their “golden ticket” for the person who is most likely to really take advantage of the service, rather than spraying invites willy-nilly across the internets. It may be a good idea to chat with the person before sending them the invite, too.

Oh, and welcome to WordPress.com.

Update: There’s an invite giveaway here. There is also an invite on eBay.