When Matt sent me an invite to WordPress.com I was a little surprised to see that I had in fact been given 50 invites!  Yes, that’s right 50!  “Hmmm,� I thought, “that can’t be right.  I thought everyone was supposed to get only 1.�  So I went ahead and invited a friend and figured the mistake would soon get fixed.  It didn’t.

Ok.  I figured there was a reason everyone was only getting 1 and that was probably so that Matt and crew could manage the growth of the system without being inundated with tons of new users all at once.  That seemed to make sense to me and I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for bringing on too much weight.  So I kept quiet about the 49 invites I had left and figured I’d dole them out if I bumped into folks that could really use ‘em.  I added a post to my blog, in case, a reader wanted to ping me to beg for an invite and left it at that.  Since the blog was new and wasn’t getting much (any?) traffic, no one asked.

Well, then the other day, Matt mentioned that he was upping the number of invites that users had and that seemed to me to indicate that they were ready to take on more users.  All rightie then!  Time to give some away.  I left a comment to Matt’s post letting folks know that I had some to give away and sure enough I started getting some traffic and requests and I gave a bunch away to pretty much anyone who asked.  I mean, what the hell, I had 49.

Uhh.  Not anymore.  Me thinks someone on the team must have asked themselves where I was getting all the invites and slapped their foreheads when they saw I had way more than I should.  They’ve trimmed a little off the top and I’m now down to 10.

Ok.  So I now have 10 invites to give.  I think I now have more request than I have invites.  I need to get creative and that means if you want an invite you’ll need to get creative.  I’m going out of town this week for a conference so I won’t have much time to think about this but I’m back next Sunday and I’ll give away all the invites I have then.

I’ll be judging on creativity, need, chutzpah, and swim suits.  Please don’t email me.  Just post your reason for needing an invite below as a comment.  Let the world know why you can’t live without one.  Inspire us all with the ways that your blog will solve big problems like halitosis or little ones like world hunger.

In the end, we’ll laugh, we’ll cry, it’ll become a part of us.

BTW, I did try out the #wordpress irc channel on FreeNode and I did get some questions answered.  There are a lot of folks there that are pretty sharp.  They know this stuff.  The signal-to-noise ratio is too high for me to hang out there though.

Update: Never mind there is a “Delete this post” function.  Nice!

So let me try and think back.  I really like the UI for this. Very simple and very clean.  There’s no mistaking the the devs are thinking about usability and style (reminds me of Plone a little).  There’s also little things that show the promise.  For instance, I love the “More” and “Next Page” functions.  So intuitive and simple.  I’d never seen that before.

I still haven’t figured out where to go for support.  I’d love to be able to use a rich client for posting (I use BlogJet at work) but have no idea how to configure stuff.

There are some nice templates (8 of them, I think) but I haven’t figured out how to customize yet (or even if I can). 

Anyway, so far I like it.  Sure it’s still beta quality but it sure shows great promise.

BTW, I would have posted these things in the feedback section but I can’t get to it.  The Feedback link is broken (or not working in IE).  It gives an “Error on Page” message (Line 239, Char 3, Could not get the display property, Invalid argument).

 

Naturally there are still some kinks that need to fixed but I’m liking the UI.

It appears that not much testing is going on for authors using IE.  I’m guessing that the devs use something else.