Its all going to go horribly wrong

2006-02-21

Wordpress has moved from the version I'm on (1.something) to 2.something - it was 2.0 but there were so many bugs in the initial release that a new release was issued some days later. Eager to experience the benefits of the upgraded version and in the name of research and growing my understanding of what's out there, I'm going to take the plunge over the next few weeks and upgrade. I expect one of several outcomes:

- it all goes horribly wrong, and I shall be left with a gaping hole where my Web site used to be - it all happens as smoothly as manure sliding off a well-oiled shovel - something in between

I will of course be backing everything up, but even that offers no guarantees in my experience. Oh well, all part of the fun.

As I was looking at the Wordpress site the other day, I noticed that Wordpress was now hosting accounts - for free I think. Strange - on the basis that I would have paid, I would have charged. There's a business model (if anyone asks how to make money out of free online software, hosting has to be the first answer - but not if everyone gives it away). As a side note, its "powered by Automattic", a spin-off company from Wordpress that claims on its front page, "Blogging is too hard." Insightful... but anyway. There were a couple of Wordpress hosts at the time I set up this site, but I didn't know either and doing it myself seemed to be the best option. Now I'm not so sure - after all if it's good enough for Scoble its good enough for me (how much influence does this guy have?)

There's still some things to do in blogging that currently pass me by - tagging for example, trackbacks and so on. I hope that Wordpress 2.something will offer a suitable base for my continued education. I also notice - this is as much a bookbark as anything - that Yahoo seems to rapidly be hoovering up some of the better blog-related companies, Flickr and the like, and has forged partnerships with both Wordpress and Moveable Type. To inner-circle bloggers this will be nothing new, but to mere initiates like me, its very interesting particulalry given that Google still hasn't really got its own blogging act together.

In the meantime, anyone know of any better RSS readers than Pluck for IE (which seems to have wheedled its way back onto one of my machines) and Sage for Firefox? I've tried a few and they're all either too primitive or too buggy for my liking.