Invites? We doan need no steekin’ invites.

Ok.  So I’ve been found out!

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.

Icon weirdness in IE

I just noticed that some of the icons in wp.com don’t display right in IE.  It’s the +/- icon on the right while you’re writng a new post.  The icon looks weird when the section is open (that is when the – is showing).  Anyone else seeing this?

Upload space down to 25MB

hmmm.  I could have sworn that when I started the blog I had 100MB of space for uploads.  I just notice this is down to 25MB.    That’s not much room for photos.  I wonder if anyone else has seen this?

Where do the cool wordpress.com folks hang out?

WordPress.com is looking pretty cool but I’d like to read up on what’s working and what’s not.  What are we supposed to be testing and what should we stay away from for now?  What’s the roadmap for coming features and all sorts of other stuff like that.  I haven’t been able to figure out where that is yet.  If you have suggestions drop me a comment below.

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.

Need to dig into the more advanced stuff

So I’m liking wordpress.com.  It’s pretty cool and seems quite fast.  I’d like to dig into the more advanced features though.  How can I host on my own domain name?  How can I customize the design?  How do add stuff to the design?  Can I add Google AdSense or MSN AdCenter (when that ships)?

WordPress.com invite

Leave a comment if you’re looking for a wordpress.com invite.  Let the world know what you’d do with a wp.com blog…

Drafts

Ah, ha.  So it looks like I hadn’t lost my post after all.  WordPress had saved it in my Drafts.  Cool.  Umm. Except I’ve since re-typed it and can’t figureout how to delete the draft without actually posting it.  hmmm.  Nice feature though. 

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

Got BlogJet working also

I was also able to get BlogJet setup to work with wordpress.com.  BlogJet has a default entry for page to use when posting and it’s /WP_PATH/xmlrpc.php.  I just couldn’t figure out what the path was until I got some help on #wordpress channel on freenode.  On wordpress.com the page is just simply /xmlrpc.php which makes sense.  Should have tried that!

Feedback Link is working

Ok.  So the feedback link is working.  Got a comment from donncha earlier that he’d had a look and fixed this.  He was apparently using some feature that was not available in IE and juest went ahead and fixed it.  I posted some fedback earlier today and it worked great.  Nice little dhtml form that available pretty much whereever you are in the admin section.

Good Stuff

I just realized that so far I’ve only posted the bad stuff.  But that’s ’cause I lost the good stuff. 

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.