automattic

New WordPress.com Dashboard Live !

I’m writing this post from the all new WordPress.com dashboard.  If you are on WordPress.com, go check it out.  For those of you on self-hosted WordPress, the new UI will be part of the 2.7 release which is due out next week, and you can download 2.7 RC1 now and auto-update to the final version when it’s out ( auto-updating of the core is a new feature in 2.7 ).

I’m biased — but this new UI is simply breathtaking and clairvoyant in it’s intuitiveness — how you would expect to do things is now how things are done — a very zen-like experience !  And the feedback pouring in from bloggers on WordPress.com has been very positive.

And just a quick word on the pure launch logistics last night on WordPress.com – simply amazing.   When you take into consideration that we are completely virtual company and in multiple countries, a relatively small team, run a service in multiple data centers with nearly 5 million blogs, and you look at the sheer amount of work and coordination that it took – not to mention the technical skill – it was a thing of pure beauty to watch it all come together.   Everything happened in real-time, there was no down-time maintenance window, no launch and revert and postpone, and no 5am all-hands meeting.  Just a group of rockstar colleagues working in sync and getting things done – really impressive.

PollDaddy

Exciting news – PollDaddy has joined the Automattic team.

The timing is great since the Automattic team is in the mountains of Colorado at our bi-annual company meetup, and we’ve all been able to get the know the talented PollDaddy team of Lenny and Eoin.

From my earlier days at TIME.com I’ve known that polls were huge and that readers loved particiapting.  This has been echoed in the WordPress world with very popular WordPress plugins for polls.  I’m including my quick poll here:

As Matt mentioned in his blog post, in terms of integration, “we just enabled PollDaddy with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have also released the first version of their .org plugin.”

Check out the screencast below for how to add a poll on WordPress.com:

WordCamp SF 2008 Coverage

We had a great WordCamp in San Francisco this past Saturday.  For those of you who couldn’t make it, here are a few sources to browse through:

– The multi-talented Adam Tow captured some great pics including a panorama of the main room: tow.smugmug.com
– Andrew Mager from ZDNet.com live blogged the event and even found a good spot for the WordPress tattoo: blogs.zdnet.com/weblife
– TechCrunch coverage: techcrunch.com
– los of tweets: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wordcamp+sf
– presentations are beginning to appear on slideshare.net

WordPress.com Gears

It’s been live for a few days, but now we have officially announced Gears support for WordPress.com.

WordPress version 2.6 ( currently in beta ) also has Gears support.

So what is Gears ?

Gears? It is a browser extension like Flash or QuickTime/Media Player. However Gears works with the browser to enhance web based applications. It can create local database and file storage, and run JavaScript in the background to update them without slowing down the browser.

Gears has been in the making for over a year and is well known among the web developers. Currently it supports Firefox versions 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7. Safari 3 support is coming soon.

On WordPress.com it is used to store all images and other web page components from the admin area to the user’s PC, speeding up access and reducing unnecessary web traffic.

The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody’s blogging experience more enjoyable.

How do you turn it on for your blog ?

To enable this new feature, click on the “Turbo” link and follow it to Gears’ site to install it in your browser (if not already installed). Then the browser will have to be restarted and after logging back in WordPress, click the “Turbo” link again to give permission to Gears to work on WordPress.com.

After that Gears will download around 200 files and store them on your PC. It will also update them when needed automatically in the background, no other actions are required.

Update: you can follow the coverage over on techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080702/p72#a080702p72