The Wordpress.com Deal & Getting an exclusive invite

October 4th, 2005

Well if you don’t know what Wordpress.com is about I’m gonna tella you. Wordpress.com is a free Wordpress hosted blog by Wordpress. Here is a screen shot of the *dashboard* and *presentation tab*

If you havn’t guessed it yet, this was introduced to raise revenue and increase popularity and downloads for Wordpress. Eventually wordpress will have ads on it’s free hosted blogs and at a small fee you can have a full hosted Wordpress blog. This is done in association I believe with Textdrive which is managed by the guys who brought you Textpattern

The dashboard

The dashboard looks different to the normal dashboard for the latest version of Wordpress… its a blueish colour and has the following on it, Quick links to help you change your blog title, description, password and profile… Top 5 Wordpress blogs today and the Fastest growing blogs on Wordpress today… – I guess that’s the insentive to make you keep on blogging.

Writing a blog

It looks very similar to the normal wordpress but there is removed features and layout has been reorganised there is now two columns and on the right you have discussion tab, password protect, categories, post status, post timestamp and post author. You have to go to advanced post settings to upload images, there doesn’t seem to be a total image upload limit though.

Writing a page

Same system as above also to mention and improved UI on the Post editor with highlighted bold and italic which kind of looks like the VB Forum advanced post form.
Custom fields can be added to post blogs and pages.

Managment

The managment page tabs are a bit different they include

1. Posts
2. Pages
3. Categories
4. Comments
5. Awaiting Moderation
6. Invite – an invite system similar to Gmail.
7. Referers

Note also that there is the removed file manager and files cannot be modified I guess this is so that advertisements can just be cleanly added into themes and removed like a piece of cake.

Links

Links allow you do the same with the standard Wordpress system I am running normally Wordpress 1.5.2 and I do not believe there is this feature – Import links. So I believe this is a new feature – if I’m wrong add a quick remark

It allows you to go to upload or link an OPML file and select where to import the links to – by categories which can be edited and deleted like the usual Wordpress.

Presentation

Because Wordpress wants to be able to change and add to your blog, fix up ads and make sure you don’t abuse the service this means that they don’t allow you to modify themes to the extent you would only certain themes have the ability to be modified limitly like Font size colour etc. The themes available for Wordpress.com Blogs are:

1. Kubrick 1
2. Almost Spring 1.1
3. beloved Blix 0.9.2
4. Connections 1.0
5. Green Marinée 1.0
6. Ocadia 1.1
7. Pool 1.0.7
8. Wordpress Classic 1.5

Profile

Editing your profile is simeple, the fields available are:

• Username, First Last Nick, publically visble name
• About your self, shown on the front page.
• Contact info; Some IM details – AIM, Yahoo, Jabber/Google but no MSN - I wonder why…
• and Password updates

Options

Sadly they don’t allow you to specify how many articles to include in RSS and ATOMs only include except, users prioritys, ban users, Permalink options. The only options available to is to use Wordpress’ new RichText editor or the standard.

The service is not fast but is reasonable. If you wish to join the hype of Wordpress you can join Wordpress mailing list at wordpress.com or get one off some one, eventually it be like Gmail everybody who wanted one Got one.

Here is your chance to win a wordpress Invite

Ok all you have to do is either, pay me :p, or you could request it by the end of this month October To request it I have set up a new form at *http://fabio.ugtech.net/wordpress*

The results will be drawn on November the 1st along with the new site Reboot. Good luck.

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