This is a very interesting discussion on the change to how the categories and tags appearing on our blogs work. If anything, I’ve learned over the nearly 5 years I’ve been on WordPress.com is that changes go on here all the time over which we users have zero control and input.
If you want control, you move to hosting your own WordPress.org install.
Otherwise, it pays to be really, really zen.
Happy 8th anniversary to @wordpress & @wordpressdotcom! Did u know you can stumble through the best of WordPress blogs: http://su.pr/1K5LSA—
(@StumbleUpon) May 28, 2011
Even though WordPress.com has a couple of months to go before its 6th birthday, forgive StumbleUpon the small faux pas just for the cool present of the WordPress.com Stumble browser bar.
Go discover something new and Stumble your favorites.
Oh! And a Happy (belated) 8th Birthday to WordPress.org. Thank you Mike and Matt. Without you, we wouldn’t be here. 
This past week WordPress.com rolled out a spiffy Dashboard interface update to its users and with it officially dropped support for IE6*. Don’t get me wrong. If you’ve read my earlier post on IE6, you know this makes me happy, although it seems not everyone is.(What is it they say about behind every joke lies a kernel of truth?)
I love the new Dashboard, a lot. It’s cleaner, clearer and much easier to navigate. The only real caveat I have is when using it on my netbook. Before the redesign there were two points along the left menu sidebar where one could collapse the menus to icons to reclaim some screen real estate (very important when using a netbook). Now there’s only one and it’s at the very bottom of the menu list. If there are menus open on my netbook, even using Chrome, which has more screen real estate above the fold to begin with, this can involve a serious bit of scrolling to get to. Reintroducing that second collapse point above the fold would make a great redesign perfect.
The Admin bar also has gain a new feature when you are in your Dashboard. The button that was located at the top of the screen where you could click to straight away write a new post or page has been replaced by a new button in the Admin bar instead. A very simple, but elegant, functional change.
But the real excitement in the Dashboard redesign announcement was saved for the new “Distraction-free” writing mode when in the Visual or HTML Editor. Distraction free it is. Nothing but you, your keyboard and, except for your words, a near-empty screen. Being someone who is more visual than literal this is going to take me some time to get used to!
(Also hidden in that new Support doc was an Easter Egg in the shape of “SimplyNoise“. The “brown noise” with low oscillation is close enough to the sound of ocean surf at the beach, a sound I sorely missed when we were living abroad and landlocked, and am completely addicted to.)
*Updated: If you are one of those few people still using IE6, check out “Browse Happy” to review different browser choices and upgrade your Internet experience.
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)
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After the WordPress.com dust-up with Picapp in November last year about the change in Picapp’s shortcode implementation, WordPress.com and Picapp separately announced that the Picapp shortcode would no longer be supported by either party on new posts. Previously embeded Picapp images would be available for as long as Picapp will allow them, announced Ryan Markel, WordPress.com Happiness Engineer, in the Support forums. Picapp’s CEO and co-founder, Eyal Gura, said in an email sent to registered Picapp users that they “intend to keep supporting the delivery of the already-published images to the publishers that meet our TOS, and by doing so to provide as much continuity as possible.”
You might remember when the Picapp hit the fan, a certain prominent blogger discovered that Picapp had taken over every image on the front page of her self-hosted WordPress blog and linked them to Picapp’s lightbox galleries, even though neither she nor her webmaster had installed Picapp’s widget on her site. This behavior prevented her from crediting the source of her images. Picapp quickly backpeddled and apparently adjusted something on their side to end this behavior. At that time, this behavior was not evident on WordPress.com blogs.
To my complete astonishment, while recently browsing through my archives here at WordPress.com, I discovered that Picapp’s lightbox image gallery has since taken over images on any archive or category page where both full posts appear and Picapp embeds and non-Picapp images share the same page. (This behavior does not occur on single posts viewed individually nor on themes where archive/category posts are excerpted or truncated.)
Where I could, I resized my own images to below the 250 pixel width that triggers this lightbox behavior. However, I couldn’t do the same for images linked to their original source. Needless to say, this behavior is still not acceptable. As raincoaster pointed out, it interferes with crediting image source and could lead to a ToS breach on some sites, such as flickr.
Click to view large
As a last effort I tried to log in to my Picapp account to see if I could adjust my site settings, but discovered that my account no longer existed. After registering again, my activation email arrived and included two links: one to turn all my images into Picapp galleries and one to turn only previous Picapp embeds into their lightbox galleries. Obviously, I picked the second link. In spite of that, it took some additional tinkering of my site settings in my Picapp dashboard before I was finally able to turn off the Picapp lightbox behavior on non-Picapp images on my site. As was pointed out in my previous post on Picapp, the default behavior should be to limit the lightbox gallery behavior to only Picapp embeds. WordPress.com users should not have to register and log in on Picapp in order to control image behavior on their WordPress.com site. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.
Picapp continues to have an odd blind spot when it comes to understanding bloggers’ rights to control how their content is used and seems to be almost clueless as to how their default “takeover” of non-Picapp images irritates their potential user base. This is doubly true for those WordPress.com bloggers (16 17 million and growing) who already have or may have self-hosted blogs in the future and are looking to monetize their sites. The only thing these users will remember is their previous Picapp experience.
(Editor’s note: If you have not previously used Picapp image embeds on your WordPress.com site, the above does not apply to you.)
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