Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

As I have mentioned before, I received a golden ticket for WordPress.com, the hosted version of the WordPress software (think Blogger running WordPress). I set my blog up and have used it off and on for the past few weeks. I have been really impressed with the functionality of the backend, so I thought I would put some of my thoughts out there and see what others are thinking.

The one thing I can say is that I hope a lot of this functionality makes it into the next release of WordPress. All of the “boxes” of the admin interface are collaspable, making it easy to hide options you do not need. The WYSIWYG editor seems to be really nice, using (I think) the tinyMCE Editor. It is easy to switch out of WYSIWYG mode into the raw code and back. You can also choose to disable this option all together, defaulting to the standard Wordpress editor with Quicktags.

The Admin panel gives you many of the options that are available on standalone installations of Wordpress, including the ability to create static pages, links and categories (which Blogger does not offer). It also has comment moderation options, which help cut down on comment spam.

One of my favorite features of the WordPress.com backend is the ability to add categories on the fly. In the current install version of WordPress, if you want to add a new category while you are writing a post, you have to save your post, go to the categories panel, add whatever you need, then return to the saved post and check the categories you just added. With this new feature, you simply type the category you wish to add, and it automatically gets added to the list. It also gets checked by default because it is assumed that you are adding the category because it is relevant to whatever you are about to post.

Overall, my experience with WordPress.com has been great and I have enjoyed using it. I don’t yet have a solid use for it as I have my own hosted site, but I could definitely see it coming forward as a competitor to Blogger and TypePad.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at November 14,2005 @ 9:57 am and is filed under Blogging, Blogs, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.