Every once in a while, WordPress goes and does something that makes me want to write a post about them. I was originally pretty angry that they killed the Read-o-Mattic, since I loved that tool – it was so easy to add blogs to my dashboard and read them when research was slow. While it’s possible for me to use my desktop RSS feed reader, I follow way too many blogs for that to be particularly useful for me. I didn’t particularly like the read blogs section of WordPress before, but I’m starting to like it now.
They added the functionality to read non-Wordpress.com blogs. Now if a site has an RSS feed, I can pretty much follow it and check out its newest posts at my own leisure. It pushes the content to the appropriate places, and I get most of the posts of the blogs that I subscribe to. And since I get to see the pictures and the intro text of the post, I can decide whether it’s worth my time to go visit and read it. When you have 100 items in a feed-reading application, it’s tempting to just “mark all as read” and call it a day.
One of the most frustrating things about the Read-o-Mattic was its lack of support for WP.com-hosted blogs that have been through the domain name mapping process. In order to get it to recognize those blogs, you had to find a comment by the author, figure out their WordPress username, and then construct the username.wordpress.com URL. I had a heck of a time following some of my favorite migrated blogs until I figured that one out. Now it automagically handles the mapping, so I don’t have to go through all of that trouble anymore. This is a good thing.
It’s always frustrating trying to learn a new habit, but I’m hoping this will be an excellent way to stay up to date with the rest of the blogging community!
So on the subject of blogs, I am now the new WordPress Webmaster for the Eastern North Carolina Section of the IEEE. I ran for secretary (and lost) but have found myself a little cozy spot as webmaster – since they told me I could use WordPress, I was very happy about that. So strike up another win for the best Open Source blogging platform and content management system there is! Code is Poetry, indeed!
