Me and WordPress

Let me just start by saying, I love WordPress. Open Source is the way to go and Code is Poetry. Whenever my friends start talking about starting blogs, I always jump on their backs and say WORDPRESS WORDPRESS WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!? When you use WordPress, after all, everyone wins! You get one of the most beautiful-looking blogs on the net, and you ALSO support Open Source developers so they can keep WordPress beautiful. It’s a vicious cycle, but in a good way. Like most things, it is not entirely perfect.

While the WordPress software is a blogging platform, the WordPress.com site is a lot more than that. It’s a community of bloggers. A community of both writers and readers. When there are a lot of blogs you want to read, as would be expected in this community of literary madness, it would be really nice to be able to have a “stream” of recent blog updates, in the same vein as social networking sites such as identi.ca and diaspora* (and other ones… but I can’t recall their names at the moment). WordPress gives you a tremendous number of different choices for how to keep up with other people on their site:

• First of all, there’s good old RSS. This works nicely if you have a desktop feed-reader, or if the blog you want to follow isn’t actually hosted on WordPress.com (and are out of their control).
• Ah, E-mail. Quite frankly, unless someone is writing a blog that you are absolutely in love with, I get enough e-mail without having a blog spam me every time someone posts something.
• Then there’s the subscribe button in the black toolbar up top. That puts a blog into a really irritating little zone called “read blogs” (click on the WordPress button in the top left of the page and you’ll see it). I’m notorious for missing details, but I’m of the impression that I often don’t see posts appear in there until days after they are published.
• There’s the “old subscriptions” system that appears in your dashboard that’s obsolete enough for WP to tell you that you can’t use it, but apparently not enough for them to just remove it.
• Finally, there’s the Read-o-Mattic, which is exactly what I’ve been looking for. First of all, you have to go into the subscriptions and remove all of the tags that they start you with. Then, you individually input the names of the blogs that you want to follow in the list, and they will show up in the Read-o-Mattic’s stream!

That’s a lot of ways to do something that should be pretty darn simple.

Another thing that’s not really irritating me, but getting my attention at the least, was this article on Slashdot. Apparently, some mystery organization called “Federated Media” is partnering up with WordPress to… do… something. Something involving advertising. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but two things bother me about this. One: there were only 33 comments on this article, and I get most of the story from the comments. Two: WordPress has not mentioned this on their blog yet, and that’s disconcerting.

Anyway. I didn’t have anything research related to blarg about today, so I figured I’d just talk about WordPress.com anyway. I love you guys!