center of the miklb universe

Looks like enough bugs have been worked out, and Matt’s gotten enough free time, that he’s adding new themes (finally) to wordpress.com Presentation. He’s soliciting suggestions and links for more themes (though his blog is coming up as private right now, gotta love RSS), now the wonder when will some customization be available? At least a custom .css file…
Nice choice in additions, some new blood, so to speak. Maybe I’ll get my winter theme done this weekend and offer it up.

Ok, so when I attempt to edit a post, the WYSIWYG editor wants to erase what I had previously written. So my original post has been dropped, and my subsequent post was about to as well. The orginal post had to to with a suggestion I had on Matt’s wp.com blog when he announced the admin bar, that it would be nice to incorporate the “link this” bookmarklet into the admin bar. Lo and behold, we now have “Add to Blogroll”, albeit, it’s automatic, so there’s not an option to choose a category. Haven’t played around with it much, but it works.

I now have 4 “blogs”.  My first, more of a political rant type site, with some mixed personal type things thrown in.  I then started a cooking one.  I was afraid of mixing my left leaning rants in with dinner ideas.  Didn’t want to scare away my little old Aunt in Kentucky.  THEN, I started the WordPress “fan” site.  Now I have this one.  Granted, this one is sorta a test blog, but at some point, it won’t be beta, and we’ll know better of what can can’t be modified.  So the question lies, can you have too many?  Should I combine this one with the personal/politico, IF I can import a WP database at some point?  Whittle it down to three.  Might do.  I like the community aspects of wordpress.com.  I’m looking forward to what the final product looks like.

Noticed that wordpress.com now simply says MU, not 1.6 alpha do not use, or what ever it said.  Was that because too many people were starting to use the trunk on non .com sites, or because 1.6 is reaching beta?  We will see.  And when it is beta, which blogs to put it on?  Hmm.  Always changing.  Change is good.  Stay tuned.

It’s not a scrolling ticker in the admin bar , but the genuises behind wp.com have added some very cool community-esque features to the dashboard.(Thanks to daysies for the heads up) As the wordpress.com community grows, one can only catch so much in the site:wordpress.com feeds, so-o-o-o, now we can see who’s saying what, and  garnering outside attention.  Not to mention, it’s a sure way to get you blogging, who doesn’t want their blog on everyone’s dashboard?

Just noticed Matt and co. have implemented the modified admin bar.  I had suggested Matt Read’s wp-admin tool bar plugin, and it seems a modified version is now in use.  Very cool.  Lorelle provided a link to a feed of wp.com sites, but I’d still like a list of all sites, or better yet, implement something similar to the new feature at technorati, in which your blog itself is “tagged” allowing you to find blogs by content. 

So far, I’ve really only used the WYSIWYG editor, but I had several links I wanted to put in a post, and it seemed easier to simply use the traditional manner of posting a link (really, I didn’t understand the WYSIWYG editor until as I right this, just highlight the word you want to use as a link, THEN the link button “un-grays”.)  But you can type in the HTML mode, hit update, and it doesn’t immediately publish, it immediately updates the WYSIWYG editor.  Neat!  Now if I could tab from the title box directly to the text area, it would be even easier.

I think I now understand why people like Podz volunteer in the WordPress forums.  I’ve spent a lot of time there, sorta a forum rat, chipping in when I can, gleaning knowledge where I can.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time there this weekend, and have been able to answer several cries for help, with a very appreciative finish.  There is just a certain feeling when the person on the other end pledges undying servitude for your help.  Sure, there’s those that don’t reply, or post incessantly with negative posts, but the one person that you unlocked the door for, is priceless.  And to be a part of a community that can do that, is equally priceless.

 Hey! spell check showed I spelled incessantly correct!!

Dropped the Blix theme, as I was too lazy to add /wp-admin/ in the url bar anytime I wanted to get to the dashboard.  Some reason, the theme doesn’t have a admin link in the meta.  Personally, I use Matt’s admin tool bar plugin for all my sites.  I’d think that would be a great standard plugin for wordpress.com as well.

So I was doing  a a Google search of site:wordpress.com, and see numerous links to wordpress.com, but they all redirect to the new “splash” screen.  but I found this rss feed containing comments from February.  Someone was quite the nay sayer, and some may get a chuckle out of this, considering where this commentary is being posted…

wordpress mu is the work of one guy who had a b2 fork with multiusers before matt persuaded him to come under the wp umbrella. the wp forums don’t support it and there don;t appear to be any plans to incorporate his code into wp proper. it’s just another b2 fork, albeit one with the wp brand name. i would be very surprised if any wordpress release before 2006 includes multiblogs, as would a lot of other people.

Granted, the commenter may have been referring to wordpress itself having multiblog support, but the sentiment was that the wordpress community wouldn’t support multiblog development, and he was dead wrong.