// Internet Duct Tape

As I mentioned here, I’m going to be going through all the WordPress.com themes one-by-one and evaluating them. For the first go I chose a few of the best themes: Shocking Blue Green, Blix, Regulus, Sandbox, and Kubrick (aka WordPress Default).

After a break, an overview of Shocking Blue Green, Blix, Regulus, Sandbox, and Kubrick themes plus a big table comparing the features.

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WordPress is the best blogging platform.

Running a website on WordPress.com instead of self-hosting gives you access to the latest and greatest features of WordPress Multi-user, as well as the opportunity to provide feedback before the features become public. It also has it’s downfalls with the restrictions on custom plug-ins, javascript, embedding flash, paying for CSS editting and only being able to host image specific file types (images, doc, pdf, ppt). Most of these restrictions are for the best because they keep away the sploggers and force minimalism. This is a good thing, there is far too much sidebar cruft out there which distracts from content.

You know, content? The reason why people read blogs in the first place? The reason why people write blogs in the first place? (And you thought it was AdSense revenue)

In my five months at engtech.wordpress.com my most negative experience with has been themes. Theme selection isn’t a problem, there are a number of themes to choose from (although there is a distinct lack of cat-focused themes, but hey, I can suggest one). It is the inconsistency in theme features.

Choosing a theme is like buying a house, there are purely cosmetic features that will appeal to some, but what’s of real importance is the bare bones — the foundation. My goal is to find the themes with the best foundations, and hopefully draw attention to the themes with poor foundations so they can get some Automattic lovin’.

Around once a week I’m going to review 4-5 different themes on WordPress.com and post my findings. I’ll highlight features and bugs, as well as develop a spreadsheet of what’s available so that the WordPress.com community can evaluate themes at a glance. Luckily switching themes is very simple, so I can do it all with one test blog.

This is why I read the WordPress.com forums: pressing Alt-B Alt-V in the Rich Text Editor brings up a second menu with advanced options.

UPDATE 2006/09/22: The keystroke has changed to Alt-V. Alt-E can be used to switch between Compose and HTML mode.

UPDATE 2006/09/23: Mr. Matt of WordPress points out that you can insert page breaks instead of paragraphs in the Rich Text Editor using Shift-Enter.

UPDATE 2007/01/10: If you’re having trouble getting it to work, make sure you click in the text entry box first. Also try Alt-Shift-V instead of Alt-V� (if Alt-V is bringing up the View menu in your web browser).

The biggest surprise was that you can cut-and-paste from Microsoft Word to WordPress and have it generate good HTML!

It has options for

• selecting text and applying formatting
  • paragraph
  • address
  • preformatted
  • heading 1-6
• underline (also Ctrl-U)
• align full (full justification, IE: text is fully justified on the left and right columns with extra spaces between words)
• text colour
• paste as plain text (instead of doing an OLE paste that will retain formatting)
• paste from Word (haven’t tried it, but I assume it correct some of the HTML cruft from Word)
• remove formatting eraser (leave text content, but remove and of the HTML around it, useful for correcting a messed up section)
• clean-up messy code (HTML auto-correction)
• insert custom characters (accents, special characters like copyright and trademark)
• undo (Ctrl-Z) and redo (Ctrl-Y)

After the break, formatting examples.
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There are only two things about wordpress.com that seriously annoy me.

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I was looking at the Presentation option on my dashboard, and I noticed the “Edit CSS” button. My first thought was that some kind soul had bought the feature to force me to make this site more readable. But no, this the Automattic guys being the geniuses that they are and letting you try out and mess around with the stylesheet before you buy.

Damnit, it was so easy to avoid purchasing this feature when I could lump it in with “CSS Editing is Hell”. Now that I can try it out and potentially develop something I really like, I know I’m going to get suckered into it.

>> WordPress.com » Try Custom CSS

Previous Posts

>> WordPress.com announces it’s first pay feature

WordPress.com is the best freely hosted blog solution. That’s why I use it. They’ve always been saying they’ll eventually offer pay features to make money. Today’s feature announcements (new minimal Sandbox Theme , private user-level access controlled blogs, custom CSS for a fee) revealed the first pay feature.

One of the main advantages to running a wordpress.org self-hosted blog versus a wordpress.com multi-user blog is the ability to customize your layout via themes and install plug-ins. WordPress.com offers a limited selection of 38 themes. The themes are very inconsistent. Each theme supports different features and has different bugs. In fact, the only thing themes have in common is that they all seem to have bugs.
I wonder if the ability to customize CSS for a fee will deprioritize fixing theme bugs even further? I trust the guys at WP, but I know that fixing theme problems would be the last thing on my list if people could get around it by using custom CSS.

The price is a reasonable $15/year. The average cost for having a custom WordPress blog hosted professionally elsewhere is around $7/month. I’m assuming that once you’ve paid it is good for all of the blogs hosted on your user account, but it may be by individual blog.

Update: it is per blog, not per user.

I hope once they’ve added other wordpress.com “products” they start offering bundles. There should always be a bundle with all the wordpress.com products that is similiar in cost to hosting elsewhere.

>> WordPress.com � Custom CSS

>> CSS Customization � WordPress.com Forums

Google Sitemaps has been updated to offer site statistics if you’ve verified your blog. The verification method requires either uploading and html file to the website root directory or placing a specific meta tag in your HTML HEAD element to prove that you are the owner of the website. Both of those methods of site validation are not possible for users of WordPress.com because you do not have the ability to edit the HTML template.

I was asking Lorelle of Lorelle On WordPress to see if she had any suggestions for a workaround and this is what she had to say on the subject matter:

Honestly, if you have a WordPress.com blog, then skip submitting your sitemap. WordPress.com’s pinging service gets you totally into Google. Focus on creating intrasite links between your posts, use Most Recent Posts in your sidebar, and choose a Theme with good intrasite links well-featured, and you don’t have to bother with this. Google finds you and crawls WordPress blogs REALLY well. Submitting a Google site map would be redundant, and could penalize you.

Be sure and create a body of work, about two to three months of consistent blogging before you do a search on Google to find out how many posts it has found. Usually they are found by Google within hours, but you make it into the page ranking through time and volume.

As for verification, I didn’t have to go through that when I wrote this article and submitted my blogs. This may be a new feature. All you should need is to follow the instructions above.

As for meta tags, some WordPress Themes include meta tags in their Theme’s header. Check your source code to find out if they do. If they didn’t, understand that few search engines even pay attention to meta tags any more, so they aren’t the SEO feature they used to be. Too many people abused them.

Pings are the way to go and you can get much more mileage to know who WordPress.com pings and how to ping other search engines and directories.

>> Lorelle on WordPress » Submitting Your Sitemap and Feeds to Google Blog Search and Site Submission

I have to laugh at the work-around I was using to have a categories in Blogger versus the simplicity of WordPress. So far I am really enjoying it. It was very easy to import the existing posts from Blogger. I seems very well organized as far as maintaining categories, posts, links (blogrolls). I also like how there are options for creating static pages (like an About page), and then automatically generating a site map off of those.

One really great feature is that you don't have to modify templates at all, which makes switching between templates very easy (unlike Blogger where you would have to merge over your links, etc). WordPress seems to be designed so that all the blog specific information is stored as part of the blog, not as part of the template.

Update: The category hierarchy is interesting. When viewing posts in a parent category, it will automatically go through all of the child categories as well. If a post belongs to multiple child categories in that tree, then it will repeat.

Update2: Just tried out Sidebar widgets for the first time. This is a very good idea. It lets you change the look of your sidebars without affecting your themes at all. There are several interesting default choices (including Flickr photostream). They don't seem to have all of those "Add to Digg" etc badges, but I'm sure I'll find them somewhere.

Update3: I'm really impressed with the HTML Post editor for WordPress. It has just the right amount of features to be very useful (bold, italic, strike-through, lists, block-quotes, alignment, links/images/line-breaks, spellchecker and the ability to look at the raw HTML to fix something to look very specific). I especially like the status bar that shows you which element you are on, so if you want to grab an entire table or a specific row of a table you can.

Update4: The Post editor for WP has a re-sized bar for text entry. That's so cool. The spell-check feature is rather versatile as well, as it will underline in red all of the misspelled words, and then you can right click to get a list of suggested correct spellings. I'm a bit surprised that it doesn't recognize "blog" or "WordPress".