Matt on Not-WordPress

I switched my site to using the default WP template (Kubrick) but with the new custom header functionality Donncha just turned on to “pimp my blog.”

I did a short presentation yesterday (the “dance off”) at Webzine and I was weirding a Blogger shirt because they had just given me one and they have the best clothing of any of the blog tools. Anyway, Niall felt bad that WP doesn’t have any schwag (yet!) and remixed my shirt.

Just a quick note for those folks trying to use the Webzine invite form: It only works if you’re physically on the Webzine wireless network! So take a laptop to the conference tomorrow and sign up then.

Greg Storey just wrote an article that claims:

In several ways I think WordPress has a lot going for it functionally but in order for the software to seriously gain market share the developers need to recognize that design is needed to complete the product. [...] And if WordPress can’t figure this out their application will always look like the welfare option in blog software.

As this is something we’ve been focusing on a great deal in the new 1.6 release, and WordPress.com users get to interafct with the new interface every day, I’m curious to hear some feedback from the community on this.

A few more changes to the Dashboard tonight. First we’ve dropped down the number of “top” blogs and highlighted more “up and coming” blogs. This list should change more and be a bit more dynamic.

Second is we’ve re-enabled the “incoming links” section which we had to disable before due to timeouts. However this time it’s pulling from the new Google Blog Search, so it’ll be interesting to see how the results look.

For the people who are into that sort of thing:

The easiest (and cheapest) way to get a WordPress.com invite is to fill out your email on the front page notify form. We’re going to start randomly selecting people from that list starting today and will be adding a few more almost daily.

Now would be a good time to check your email filters and maybe whitelist wordpress.com so your invite doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

The content on the Dashboard has been significantly redone to give you something to enjoy this weekend. Thanks to some code-fu from Andy we are now tracking a lot of interesting stats from across all the WordPress.com blogs.

The first thing you’ll notice is we’re highlighting the top blogs of the day across the network. Next you’ll see where there used to be the WordPress Planet feed we now highlight the most popular posts of the day and the latest from around the site.

I’ve also added links to the top blogs to the front page of WordPress.com.

A lot of you have let us know you loved the “community posts” feature we had in the activity bar so we’ve expanded in ways that hopefully make the dashboard a much more interesting place for you. As a nice side-effect, the dashboard loads about ten times faster now.

As always, let us know what you think and any thoughts or suggestions you may have. It’s getting better every day. :) 

Eric discovered the new LiveSearch feature, which has been rolled out for a couple of themes and will be tweaked over the next few weeks.

Purple Lilacs found the new admin bar. Miklb did too.

John Roberts (of News.com) likes the new post screen.

Kathy found a bug, but we’ll fix that soon.

If you can say nothing else about WordPress.com, at least there’s always something new. 

If you’re a current user of WordPress.com and you’ve run out of invites, let me know. I may be able to bump your number back up a bit. We’re also looking into ways we can grant invites after a certain amount of usage or time automatically, but for now just let us know how many awesome people you’ve invited already and how you want to include more.