WordPress recently bought a ton of resilient hardware and have undoubtedly improved the quality of service for the 200,000 WordPress users. Matt Mullenweg gave an interesting interview to Om Malik and Niall Kennedy about how startups can plan for future capacity, provide resilience and maintain performance & scalability. The IT architects at the UK ISP, Blueyonder, should really listen to this podcast.
I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UK’s gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes. The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides. In addition, every single post is now prefixed by ‘Posted by Andy C’. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off....
Just went to delete ‘whiteside.wordpress.com’. Hit ‘Yes’ I am really, really sure I want to delete this blog for eternity. Yes. I acknowledge I will never be able to access the blog again or reuse the name ever. Or, in vi terms, ‘:q!’. Received an email from the WordPress Workflow Monitor Agent. Clicked the link to confirm I really, truly do know what I am doing and do indeed want to consign the blog to Room 101....
…not to bury them. I have been unable to administer this blog for a couple of days. However, thanks to the unstinting efforts of Ryan and Donncha, I am pleased to say the problem is now resolved. I was trapped inside a recursive, infinite, endless loop hell which severely tested my sense of humour after 28 minutes. In fact, I was positively irritated, frustrated and tending towards ‘annoyed’. I was aware there were a few issues at WordPress following recent changes....
I am a fan of WordPress. I like their software. I like their humour. I pay absolutely nothing for the service so I really can’t complain when it breaks. However, today is the second day I can’t access my blog on WordPress. Nothing on Technorati. Nothing on Digg. Nothing on tech.memeorandum. Nothing on TailRank. Nothing from those Wordpress ‘A’ listers, Scoble and Winer. In fact, as I could see other people sporadically blogging on WordPress, my paranoia took hold and I started to wonder whether I was the only person in the entire blogosphere affected by this problem....
Normally, when something isn’t working, I get a little annoyed. However, with WordPress, you just have to smile.
I had a beautifully crafted draft that said… So MySpace has a staggering 55 million users (well 54 million angst ridden, teen blogs with garish colours, dodgy photos and flash animations galore) while the more recently launched WordPress.com has a mere 110,000 blogs but a far more discerning, perceptive, technically minded and intelligent user base. Quality not quantity. …but now I see the most popular WordPress tag is ‘LECTURES’ so maybe WordPress also has 109,998 students, a Microsoft blogging evangelist and me....
Thanks to AtariBoy, we now know what it takes to feature on ‘Top WordPress.com blogs today’. 11,706 hits (at least). Hmm. Way to go. As our American friends say.
Just noticed that those nice people at Wordpress.com have added aggregated statistics over 7 and 30 days. A software company that actually listens to their users and ' eats their own dog food’. Interesting concept but I don’t think it will ever take off.
You spend 3 months watching your WordPress statistics bumbling along the horizontal axis close to zero. Some traffic dribbles in. The graph accelerates into 10’s of hits daily. You feel better. You will persist with this blogging experiment for a little longer. At this rate, it may soon be time to consider a proper blog using WordPress.org and Adsense to make the millions that eluded me during the dot com boom....