Matt on Not-WordPress

We may have introduced a bug that was preventing the proper pings getting to Ping-O-Matic, which in turn made it hard for services like Technorati to keep up with the updates from WordPress.com. This post is testing that we fixed it.

Check out Donncha's WP.com blog. Notice anything different?

Here’s another new one: Regulus. Again, check it out under your presentation tab!

If you guys have any favorite themes leave their names and links in the comments to this post and I’ll look into adding them.

We actually turned this on a few days ago, but I don’t think anyone blogged about it. You should be able to add other WordPress.com users to your blog now with different capabilities, try it out under the Users tab.

New theme for you WordPress.com guys to try out, called neat. You’ll find in under your “Presentation” tab.

There was a funky bug where some servers (including my own mullenweg.com) weren’t getting mail from WordPress.com. Detective Donncha was on the case and tracked it down and all that mail should start going through now.

Andy has the details.

We just added a new feature to the admin bar, the blue thing you see at the top of WordPress.com when you’re logged in.

“Add to Blogroll” does pretty much what you’d expect, it adds the blog you’re currently looking at to your blogroll. It’ll redirect you back to where you were and the link will then say “Remove from Blogroll” in case you ever change your mind.

As always, your links are available as an OPML file if you’re into that sort of thing.

Not really, but I’m just trying to get in Memeorandum. (Fortunately the trick only seems to work on Sunday nights.)

It’s never good to wake up in the morning, fire up your aggregator, and see “WordPress.com” and “sucks” in the same headline, but WordPress.com-hosted Robert Scoble has declared that our RSS feeds suck. There are a bunch of different things being talked about both in the entry and the comments, so I’ll try to address each one in order.

First Scoble comments on our use of CDATA, which is a more readable way of escaping things in XML. I actually didn’t realize what he was talking about at first, as when you load up the feed in Firefox it doesn’t even show CDATA anywhere, it hides it as any XML processor should, but when you load the feed in Internet Explorer it does indeed format the CDATA sections differently, though I don’t know why. I’m going to have to pass on this one, because CDATA has been a part of XML since I was in middle school and no one should see that anyway. If anything it’s an argument for getting a nice XSL stylesheet for our feeds like Feedburner does.

He then says something about validation, but everything seems to validate and the entry was updated to reflect that, so I guess everything is green on that front.

There seems to be some confusion about Scoble’s default RSS being full-text, which of course it is because I read it full-text inside of Bloglines. (Along with 1,000+ other subscribers to the new feed.) Where is the confusion? Probably related to the fact that WordPress puts a summary in the element and the full content into a element, and has done this for over 2 years. (That means there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of feeds that work like this.) I asked Dave if this was valid back when the whole “funky RSS” thing was going around, and his email said it was a perfectly valid use of RSS 2.0. (This also allows aggregators to show excerpts which may be hand-crafted where appropiate, for instance on a mobile phone.)

Scoble then claims we prefer Atom over RSS, which is silly because RSS 2.0 is the default in every WordPress installation in the world. If we were biased toward Atom then it would show Atom when you type in /feed/. Actually we’re probably behind on Atom because we haven’t upgrade to Atom 1.0 yet.

Before we go any further, I would like to point out that WordPress has the most comprehensive RSS support of any product I’ve seen: we produce a regular site feed, a site comments feed, a feed for every category, a comments feed for every post, a feed for every search, a feed for every month, and you can even combine and exclude categories to create a very customized category feed. All in 4+ flavors of RSS and Atom, with RSS 2.0 being the default. WordPress has Burger King feeds, you can have it your way.

I suspect that two things happened, one might have been a server glitch related to the datacenter move on Friday/Saturday that caused errors in the way headers were sent. In that case I apologize and the problem has been fixed. The other confusion is probably related to aggregators that read the description element but ignore content:encoded. Now I must admit here I can’t find an aggregator that does that, and if you read the comments on Scoble’s entry it’s a bunch of people saying it works fine for them. In every aggregator I have access to — Bloglines, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Newsgator, Onfolio, Rojo, FeedLounge — everything works fine, but we can’t test everything so if anyone finds an aggregator it doesn’t work please let me know and I’ll look into it. Though I can fix WP.com immediately, there are still 700,000+ copies of WordPress somewhere that the aggregator developer will probably want to be compatible with.

A few people in the comments seem to be worried about Scoble being on a subdomain of WordPress.com, we have an FAQ about domain mapping, as soon as the feature is done it’ll be made available to Scoble and everybody. (Yes it will even redirect off of WP.com entirely.)

Finally, since we’re blogging at each other instead of talking: Scoble, I had already replied to your email on this from Saturday, don’t ambush us on a Sunday night!

I think that’s everything to do with RSS on WordPress that I can think of at the moment, but feel free to ask questions in the comments if you have any more.

There was a catastrophic hard drive failure on the central database server very early this morning, Donncha was on the ball and switched all the traffic to a recent backup so most things would work while we investigated the hardware failure. This means that an old version of your site was shown for a few hours.

A few minutes ago we restored the up-to-date database and we’re currently syncing it to the backup to get back any posts you might have made during the semi-downtime. Even though we were able to recover everything, we’re looking at ways to make things even more redundant, so if this ever happens again the problems will be measure in seconds or minutes. Like I said in the last post, all of the new hardware hasn’t been brought fully online yet.

Technical details: The ext3 filesystem was badly corrupted but thanks to journalling there was no lost data.

Update: All posts have now been restored.

Savvy users of WordPress.com will notice something new on your profile page.

What’s it for? Time will tell. Let’s just say WordPress.com is going to become a lot more useful for people who already have WordPress blogs.

Cheers to Donncha for rolling this out, as I’m still mostly incapacitated right now. 

The slowness and problems of the last day or two have been resolved. Some of the new hardware that was set up for us had some configuration and OS issues that were causing a ton of errors, but that’s no longer an issue and things are back to normal. Please use the feedback form if you notice anything out of whack. Most pages are back under 0.10 seconds again now.

Thanks to everyone for the valuable feedback during the transition. Now we can get back to adding and refining features you guys have been asking for.  

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.”

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.

We’re experimenting with something new, now when you’re logged in across WordPress.com you should see a blue “admin bar” across the top of your blog and others with a few handy links, including “Edit this page” if you’re on your own site. This is only shown to people who are logged in.

I’m curious what people think of this, and what other sort of stuff would you like to see in your admin bar?

Lorelle is interviewing WordPress.com users, even though there’s only a few so far. If you like the idea of being interviewed, you should leave a comment on her post.

It’s Labor day so we’ve been working extra hard for you. Here are a few of the latest improvements on WordPress.com:

• Managing links works better.
• You can now use extended entries with the “more” WYSIWYG button.
• You now get less generic profile information on registration.
• Invites are a lot smarter — it prefiles a lot of information for people you invite.
• When you invite someone you’re automatically added to their blogroll on their new blog.
• Feedback form works in IE.
• The cool fade I alluded to before is now in full effect. (Delete some more posts and comments.)
• It should be faster now (and we haven’t even moved to the new servers yet).

All the electricity problems have been solved in the new colo and thanks to the super-human Jason Hoffman everything has been racked and stacked and we’ll begin configuring them this week.

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.