Yesterday morning, I needed to peel myself off my chair in disbelief when I received one particular e-mail: its the WordPress.com Golden Ticket. This barely month-old blogging service is apparentl giving out one of the hottest web invites to get since Gmail.
Thing is, why bother using a hosted WordPress service when I already run WP itself on my own hosting account? After choosing from the 8 un-editable default templates, setting up categories and pages, you’re really left with nothing else to do, but post. This takes away the need for the never-ending chore of editing the look of your blog, and the endless installation and upgrading of every WP plugin available. It lets you focus on what is essential: your content.
As for the setup itself, it just feels like you were given a lower user level inside WP. Aside from the feature-rich enhanced posting mode, which needs some getting used to for someone used to typing ‘< 's and '>‘s, there really isn’t much of a difference from a WordPress installation you did yourself, since the system uses WordPress Multiuser, or WordPress MU.
More insights:
- There’s a set 25MB upload limit, which I find reasonable, though the 300MB photo storage available for every BlogSpot account is still noteworthy.
- Everytime you make successful edits, the confirmation text boxes provides a really nice cooling down effect turning from a hot yellow color, to light blue. Makes you want to flash that geek smile everytime.
- On your Dashboard, you’ll be able to see the latest entries from other WordPress.com users. Lo and behold, I got my first comment a couple of seconds after I posted my second entry. Reminiscent of my Livejournal days.
- But how and where do I put my ads, you ask? I can’t see any easy way to have ads display on the blog, unless you’d want to insert your code with each post.
More info here: What can you do with wordpress.com.
