WordPress – Page 27 – Something Odd!

What’s my name?

Gather around, let’s all say it together.. it’s Donncha, not Donna, never have been a Donna, never will be. It’s weird how people reply to my mails or comment on something privately, saying, “Hi Donna” when there’s no mention of such a person on this site or any other I run, well, apart from this post of course.

How do you pronounce Donncha? If you’re an English speaker, it sounds like “dunaka”, not dunka, or donsha or bert or ernie. Err. Not sure how that will sound in other languages but there ya go. Best I can do for the time being.

For future reference, here’s a pic of me with Podz and Andy taken in San Francisco a few weeks back. I’m in front holding the camera with the insanely wide lens. If you see me on the street with my 20D just say hi. I won’t bite (much).

Happy Birthday WordPress.com!

One year on and still going strong! Lorelle was the first to notice but shortly afterwards Matt posted a nice message saying that yes we had forgotten to celebrate the birthday but it was great that one of our own bloggers had remembered. Nice list of trivia too!

Reading through that list, it’s true that Matt and I hadn’t met when I started working for him. In fact it was several months later in December before we met.

Post WordCamp, Post SF, Post Haste

Last week I went to San Francisco to meet up with the rest of Automattic and attend WordCamp 2006. There's plenty of coverage of WordCamp so I'm sure you're not interested in me telling you how great it was, who said what, what sucked, etc, etc!

What I would like to say is my heartfelt thanks to Matt and Toni and those who control the purse strings in Automattic who made last week possible. Podz, Andy and I stayed in a fabulous house where everyone gathered to work and brainstorm new features, work methods, discuss our strengths and weaknesses and work super-fast on finally getting the Upgrades feature of WordPress.com out.

What are the guys in Automattic like? They're smart, they're enthusiastic, they're really driven by blogging and making things better. They live and breath blogs and tech but they really do worry about how a beginner views WordPress. They're also fun and great to be with and I look forward to the next Automattic get-together!

Much to my delight everyone I met was nice. In the cut-throat world of business it's not often that can be said. It's such a simple thing, that word, "nice". How often can you describe your work colleagues and business people in general that way? I hope that things remain competitive and fast moving but that people don't lose their humanity over the all-mighty Dollar.

I hope Matt doesn't eat all that brisket, I know it tastes like heaven but I think it may be off by now!

Oh yeah, a final thank you to you all for being so patient when I would say, "hang on, I just saw something" and go shoot a lamp post or a doorway, or some other street furniture or a silly yellow "computer guided" tourist car. I have 5GB of Jpeg files to look through! 🙂

WordCamp Pictures and Words

WordCamp went really well yesterday. I’m a little hungover today so I’ll point you in the direction of others who blogged the event:

My Day at Wordcamp 2006
WordCamp Notes
Scott’s photos
Camping on Words
My photos
Flickr’s wordcamp tag
WordCamp Wrapup
The women of WordCamp 2006
Blog Herald coverage
Changing Way
LBnuke – Wordcamp 2006
WordCamp Wrapup
Gonzoblog summary – probably the most exhaustive list of meta data about the conference. If Carlsberg did WordCamp summaries, Gonzo would do it for them!
Finally, Newzpile – WordCamp have a decent number of articles and photos of the event. Looks like I’m the only one to upload to Zooomr however!
Much later… Mark comes out at WordCamp – Mark Jaquith was one of the many great people I met in San Francisco, he tells all in this post!

Later – I uploaded my images to Zooomr and created a smart set there. That was a nice experience, the uploader is slightly better than a regular HTTP upload and the smart set feature is like virtual folders in Thunderbird. If they had upload by email I’d be there every day!

WordCamp Today!

The day has finally dawned. We leave to help set things up for WordCamp in a few minutes. See you there!

WordPress.com Paid Services

We finally launched the store to the public at large after what seems like an eternity in development! Andy's Custom CSS Editor is the first product there, and priced at $15/year it's very reasonable. Feedback has been positive mostly, although mixed at times.

There does seem to be some confusion about the CSS Editor, you can modify the css of any of the existing themes by taking advantage of the "cascading" feature of CSS. The styles you define in the editor override those in the theme's stylesheet.

I can't wait to see what people do with this. I hope to see a lot of talent come out of the woodwork and make their blogs prettier and unique!

We [heart] WordPress

Via Podz, the I [heart] WordPress thread continues and is a sticky on the wordpress.com forum. If you like penguins then you'll enjoy this message! Make sure you turn up your sound too!

I'm still quite fond of my original "We [heart] WordPress" on the beach!

We Love WordPress

Holy Shmoly, it lives!

This site has moved. It's now at ocaoimh.ie where I can play with a more up to date version of WordPress.

Upgrading was a breeze:

I dumped the old database tables and copied them over here.
I installed this site with the usual defaults included near-empty tables.
Then I fed my old db tables back in, changed the prefix in wp_config.php to point at those old tables.
I changed the siteurl and home in the options table to point at the new url.
Finally, I visited the upgrade url which magically brought the db up to date!

I decided on using K2, and modified the default theme slightly to match my old theme somewhat. Unfortunately I had to edit index.php so I have to watch out when I'm upgrading.

I decided I needed a related posts plugin as well as one to display the latest comments. Both required a little bit of massaging to work with the development WP 2.1 which I'll update this post with later. Next in line is something to resurrect my "popular posts" list using data from my referrer plugin!

What about my old site? I used some rewrite magic to bring you here didn't I? 🙂

Damien had a nice lunch, I had sandwiches. Thought you'd like to know!

WordPress Gathering in San Francisco!

I’m off to San Francisco at the end of the month! Matt is organising WordCamp, a free WordPress conference on August 5th in San Francisco and I’ll be there along with the rest of the Automattic guys.

I’m really looking forward to it, meeting people I talk to every day online, hacking on WordPress stuff and taking lots and lots of photos. I’m not the only one making the trip across the Atlantic either; Podz is flying over too!

Corporate WordPress support is evil?

Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but ~~Peter~~ Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.

I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!

This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.