One of the reasons why I absolutely love wordpress.com as a blogging platform (aside from the fact that they make hosting a painless affair) is the fact that the developers are continuously working to make it a better place. Together with the users, the developers have nurtured a vibrant community which encourages the art of blogging. And in doing that, this year, they have put the average blogger on the forefront. No longer does one have to be an Adrianna Huffington or Seth Godin to have their blogs read. The number of “just another wordpress blogger” blogs that I have subscribed to from the freshly pressed sites is huge.
Anyways. I guess one of the most inspiring things was the setting up of the Daily Post. And that has been followed by the introduction of the Writing Helper (though I am yet to use this feature, one never knows when a dry spell on the blogging front shall make it worth the while!). They then brought in the system allowing posting iframe contents, letting us post our google docs on the blog (I had a few issues posting the first GDoc on this blog, but I must say Veselin, the guy who brought the feature in, helped me loads to get it to work eventually). For collaborative bloggers like me this was a huge bonus. And now we have a distraction free interface to write away.
One of the reasons why I tended to use the Windows Live Writer for posting on the blog was the ease of handling it, even when offline. The other reason was that the writing panel would get really messed up on my small screen notebook. So using the WLW was a lot lesser pain.
And then, this happened.
I logged into my blog, planning to check out the numbers before going back to WLW to write a depressive account of how Saurav Ganguly’s Pune (?Puny) Warriors crashed to a massive defeat against his erstwhile franchise, Kolkata Kinght Riders (match scorecard). But then, when I checked into the dashboard, it seemed very different. And I knew at that moment, that these guys were up to something and I headed over to the wordpress blog to find out what was happening.
As it turns out, they have been doing some house keeping and have updated the looks of the things, one of the updates being a distraction free writing board (which I am using to post this eulogy instead of my WLW).
Anyways, to make a long story short, 5 reasons why I prefer the new look wordpress:
5. Its swanky, more compact and somehow more visually pleasing with the new logos and other doodads.
4. The ugly New Post/Page/File drop down list has travelled to the nav bar which has made it clutter free.
3. The word count is in a more conspicuous place and reminds me to keep my ramblings in check.
2. The wordpress.com updates have been merged into a tabbed box, which makes the dashboard all the more minimalistic and clean, which is the way I like it!
1. I love the new distraction free writing panel which makes blog posting a pleasure, and so, indeed, it encourages us to Just Write!
And of course, Jane has promised that she will read all the Just Write posts in the first 48 hours personally. Its not often that I get one of the big people to come over to my geekdom, so I thought that it would be a great way to show them my appreciation of the good work that they are doing and get them to have at least ONE look at my blog!
But whether or not they read this, I just want to thank them for making blogging such a joy!
Scepticemia 