Quicksand and Sinkholes

Of the blogging sort, that is. Some people let their blogs linger on and on and others perform a radical blogectomy, deleting all their posts or even their entire blog. Several friends have lately decided to put a torch to what was their home on the Web. One of them routinely does so, along with almost all her other online accounts. It shouldn’t surprise me by now, but it still does. I sorely miss connecting with those online friends, many of whom I’ve known for close to a decade or more. On the other hand, other real life friends have taken up blogging with a passion and it amazes me they waited so long to do it. (Yes, SJ, you’re one of them. )

One of my favorite reads is The Pioneer Woman and her post on Ten Important Things I’ve Learned About Blogging speaks to me loudly, with the obvious exception of her second point, which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stick to and maintain my sanity. (Have I mentioned that I have a brown thumb?) In spite of having a blog, I am not a writer by nature (I tend to express myself visually) and after 8 solid years of daily business writing, my personal  writing “style” has taken a serious hit. Worse still, at times it’s hard for me to find things that I think would resonate with my readers.  Heaven knows there’s enough WordPress.com memes around (Plinky and Post a Day for example), but I find I’m not much of a joiner and tend to go off in my own direction and certainly at my own pace.

There’s a crazy number of blogs online these days, somewhere around 30 million on WordPress.com alone, and finding the blogs that speak to you is an enormous challenge. So if I haven’t said it lately, I’m thankful for each of you that takes a few minutes to stop by my little salon. Coffee?

Fresh! Scott Berkun How WordPress.com is Made

Scott Berkun How WordPress.com is Made

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Straight from WordCamp Seattle, Scott Berkun on how WordPress.com is made. You can read more on the WordPress.com News blog. (Listen carefully for metrics Scott mentions that you may never have thought about that are available as a result of your using WordPress.com.)

To be fair, Raanan Bar Cohen mentioned how Automattic handles internal communication when he spoke at WordCamp Israel in 2008, when WordPress.com had a mere 4.7 million users. Today, WordPress.com is closing in on 20 million users.

(If the above embed link is not working, you can watch Scott’s presentation on WordPress.tv)

Better shared!

My Three WordPress.com Wishes: First Wish

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I WordPress.com. The wranglers, gardeners, engineers and poets do an amazing job of keeping our little home on the web the envy of the blogging neighborhood.

While surfing around the web a few months ago, I kept bumping into articles about apps or utilities that made me think how great it would be if WordPress.com supported them. So, here is the first of my three wishes for making my WordPress.com world rock a little harder.

More Mobile!

Dear @wordpressdotcom a mobile app for the rest of us who don't/won't have a smartphone. #1stof3wishes #11millionusers cc @snaptu @fring—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 02, 2010

Being resigned to the ranks of the un-cool using WordPress.com’s mobile site (m.wordpress.com), I found its bare bones functionality lacking a little something. Actually, lacking closer to everything.

With the estimated number of WordPress.com bloggers having reached 13 million+ (also according to one well-placed source) and WordPress.com celebrating the one millionth mobile user mark, one would hope there’d be some incentive to add an app to the growing arsenal of existing WordPress.com mobile apps for the rest of us without smartphones. Regular mobile phones still outnumber smartphones, especially outside the US. Sadly, however, nothing expected in the foreseeable future. (I know that it’s possible to post by email, but that’s just not the same thing.)

If there’s no incentive for WordPress.com to directly develop an app, then maybe Snaptu or Fring could pick up the challenge. With thirteen million blogs on WordPress.com alone, minus the combined WordPress.com and WordPress.org’s one million users using WordPress’ mobile apps, that’s a lot of potential users.

(The above tweet was brought to you by serendipity, as WordPress.com has just recently started using Twitter’s Blackberry Pie tweet embed. Thank you WordPress.com! #awesome #FTW)

There are, of course, two more posts coming with my additional wishes. Meantime, if you have your own wish that would make using WordPress.com more awesome for you, feel free to leave it in the comments. Better yet, why not start your own “Three Wishes” for WordPress.com. Who knows? Maybe between us, we’ll find that genie in a bottle.

Better shared!

On The Virtual Road Again

My self-imposed intermission is now officially over and I have to admit it was hard coming back here. I was “offline” for 6 weeks++ taking a class about, perversely, being online. But my break from blogging also gave me the opportunity to spend time thinking about my online life and what I want to give to it and get from it.

This blog started out as a scattered collection of thoughts on everything from “soup to nuts”  because I have a smorgasbord of interests. Most of the topic specific content (knitting and photography) has been spun off to separate blogs (except for PhotoImpact, which, if I can judge by my stats, a lot of you arrive here looking for). And while I don’t see this blog turning into a topic specific blog, the use of categories and tags is going to become much more important here as I actually expand the number of topics I talk about. So posting will continue to be light while I rediscover the categories and tags properties and do some surgery on this blog.

At the same time I plan to experiment (a lot!) with the new ways WordPress.com have developed of posting to our WordPress.com blog. Experimenting with technology is the reason I got on the Internet in the first place. I love to break things.

Twitter Millennial

Celebrating my 1000th tweet since posting my first one on August 1, 2008. (Obviously I’m not a power user like some people I know).

(via TweetStats and wordle.net)

I’m not going to try to compete with the many posts about getting the most out of Twitter, but I will list here a few of my favorites that helped me when I started out:

• Webware’s Newbie’s Guide to Twitter
• TheGuardians’ How to make the most of Twitter
• Digital Inspiration How to do interesting things with Twitter

And a recent find for the Twittercentric, ” TwiTip“.

Now if WordPress.com could only get the new Twitter widget to display status updates consistently! Though given the number of apps that are built around and hit up the Twitter api regularly, it’s a miracle that it works at all. So another 2 sites worth bookmarking, “Twitter Status” and “Twitter Help“.

Update! In the category of “Things I wish I’d known before I started using Twitter”, “Ten Things You Must Know Before Using Twitter“. (hat tip @jeffpulver RT @hilzfuld on, what else, Twitter!)

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