“So It’s Come To This:” is a scrapbook for my philisophical essays on the world, casual observations, and personal rants.
I just upgraded my wife’s G4 to Tiger so she could run the latest version of Quark. I don’t care too much about Quark but I’m all excited to use Tiger. So, of course, the first widget I downloaded was a WordPress blogging widget.
Let’s see if this works out. It could be better than Writely.
I know that WordPress 2.0.4 just came out and 2.1 is in QA right now but I can’t help but want WordPress 3.0 to come out.
WP 2.0.4 is fine for most days where I simply write up a quick observation on the world. The admin panel is fine for most days - I actually like how it can simple and powerful at the same time. There are moments when I search for a setting or feature in vain only to find it in an obscure place but its few and far between (and I can’t say that it hasn’t happened to be with other blogging systems). The composition window is good with the WYSIWYG editor perfect for most of my needs and the HTML editor spot on when I need it.
There are a lot of nice templates out there to customize - more so than I found for Blogger - and with a few edits of a CSS file, I’m sure it would be easy to create one on your own; I, myself, plan to attempt such a feat very soon. The power and flexibility of the plug-ins make WP what it is and it’s those templates that make a person’s site unique in its own way. But WP has some limitations that I find annoying and aggravating.
First off, there is no build in spell checker. Virtually every other blogging system that I know has one built in and since I’m a horrible speller, I find it hard to get posts out in a timely way. Not to mention that a misspelled word can totally destroy the continuity of the article and degrade the overall experience of the visitor. There are plug-ins that supposedly get around this but none of them that I try work. I think there has to be some sort of spell service running on the server that hosts the WP instance or it won’t work; because I am a noob when it comes to Linux/Unix, Apache, MySQL, and PHP I don’t even know where to begin installing the wspell service. But the plugins - as great as they can be - are limited in other ways.
Most of the plug-ins are all done in someone’s spare time. They are hardly updated and very often abandoned but their authors because they lack time or interest. They either move on to the next thing or they patch what they did here and there which doesn’t always work. And most of the plugins that I’ve come across are only compatible with WordPress 1.5 - not 2.0+. Its frustrating for me to read all these (recent) posts, comments, & reviews for these plugins when they don’t work with my version of WP. Some authors blatantly admit their code doesn’t work in the new version and inform the world that they don’t intend to fix it (others say they’ll get around to it sometime). If all these plugins worked the way they were supposed to, I’d have an AJAX-ified site with spell checking, gravatars, and who knows what else.
So I’m going to compile a list of demands for the next version of WordPress. Since 1.5 came out in January of last year, and 2.0 in January of this year, I expect all these features by this coming January. So without further adieu, here is my list of features WP 3.0 should support:
That’s all I can think of for now. I’m sure there will be more as I troll through the plugin sites for something I might want to include. But as a general rule of thumb, many Web 2.0 technologies center around offering services for bloggers (site metering, feed management, etc.) but there is very little Web 2.0 in our blogging software; I would argue that for WP to maintain its popularity, it has to inovate faster than the companies that build business models around it. Otherwise, WP will lose out to hosted MT, Text Pattern, Blogger, and Drupal.
I love WordPress but it needs to be better for me to stick with it. At the very least, can we get a spell checker?
Writely - the site I most wanted to get invited to (besides Gmail) has just accepted an invitation provided by these guys. If you noticed the test posts (which I deleted a short while ago) You know I was playing around with the ‘Publish to Blog’ feature Writely brilliantly provided. I cannot express enough how happy I am that this feature works.
WordPress 2.0.4 - in all its greatness - doesn’t have a spellchecker built in and it drives me crazy! I end up cutting and pasting my text to the OpenOffice word processor just to highlight the mistakes so I can correct them.
With Writely, however, I can check my spelling and post directly to my blog. One thing I need to figure out, though is how to add tags/categories to the post so I don’t have to go back and edit those.
I just started using Site24×7 to keep tabs on my hosting provider. Since I signed up with my hosting service, I only had one outage in the many months I subscribed to their service. That is, until today.
Just like the other time I had an issue, the support staff quickly resolved the issue. However, I didn’t know the site was having problems until I tried to visit it - possibly hours after the issue started. Where I work, I have monitors on all the core servers and running services that notify me of any problem. If the server begins to run out of disk space, I know well in advance. If the BES services fails, I know. And if CPU time runs abnormally high for a certain length of time, I get an alert.
So I decided to look for a service that would do this and not charge me a lot of money. Right now, Site24×7 is free and all four sites I actively manage are monitored. Every five minutes, the sites are polled with GET requests. If they fail, I’m alerted to a specific Gmail account I setup and have configured into my Blackberry. I’ll be able to email my hosting support and ask that they look into the matter even while I’m away.
I’ve not tested the service so I can only hope that it works. It does give me some aggregate performance numbers to prove that its actually doing what its supposed to. I’ll only know it works when something goes wrong. But it seems kinda flexible and supports most of the features you want in such a system.
According to their marketing information, it supports HTTPS and authentication. It also can check for defacement by validating against key words you define. It can also deal with dynamic pages. It also handles POST commands and can alert you if there is a dramatic slow-down or sudden increase/decrease in page size.
Of course, I can’t endorse this because I really don’t know if it works but I’m willing to give it a shot. After all, its free for now and it should do what I want it to. If something does happen to the site and I get a notification, I’ll be sure to update this review.
And let’s hope I never do.
