Monthly Archives: January 2012

As I was trying to explain the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org to a friend recently I thought that instead of me trying to explain it maybe it would be better to make the decision more interactive. So since I have been messing around with Wufoo on WordPress.com recently I decided to make an interactive form to see if it helps people decide which flavor of WordPress is right for them. Its pretty rough atm, but you get the general idea. Its probably easier/better to point people to this support doc but I was a little bored :) . See the form after the jump.

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Today it dawned on me that when working with WordPress I tend to use a lot of jargon (the language, especially the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group). Now I didn’t realize this until someone pointed it out to me as since I use it everyday it doesn’t seem that foreign to me. However, I recognize that to others, especially those new to WordPress, I might as well be speaking greek.

What I thought would be a fun/useful project would be to start a WordPress dictionary. Not just for WordPress specific terminology but also for some basic computer/internet terminology that comes up frequently in relation WordPress. Now I’m sure that some of these terms could be found in the support docs, but I also realized that the support doc use some jargon as well, which might be keeping users from getting full use out of the documentation. Also it looks like dictionary.wordpress.com has not been used in almost seven years so maybe it would be ok to bend the rules a little bit and have WordPress.com reclaim it :) . It would be fun if you could have some sort of submission form as well so community members could propose terms that they want included.

I love Sublime Text 2

I’m loving my switch to Sublime Text 2. Its almost like a cross between Coda and Textmate. While it polished and runs great like Coda it also has more advanced features like you would find in Textmate. If you haven’t tried it out yet I highly recommend that you do.

My little sister turned 20 on January 16th and I thought what would be a better gift than the gift of WordPress, so I decided to move her blog to WordPress.com. Her biggest obstacle to blogging regularly is the fact that no one was reading her blog besides me and mom. With the social aspect of WordPress.com (the follow feature, global tags, etc.) I think she will have a much easier time getting readers on WordPress.com than she would on a self-hosted install. She is into crafting and such so I went with Pretty Young Thing by StudioPress which was right up her alley. So if any of my readers (all four of you) know any crafty people send them over to her blog sarahhamze.com.

One thing that takes a little getting use to on WordPress.com is not being able to put whatever you want in your posts. It’s necessary in a shared environment like this and there are approved (safe) ways to embed just about anything you would want to but it still takes a little getting use to. The only thing I don’t like about the fact that certain things you put in your posts are stripped out is that there is no indication that something was stripped out except for the fact that part of your post is no longer there.

I don’t know if it is feasible but it would be really neat if every time code was stripped out of your post there was some sort of indication or admin notice. It would be even neater if that admin notice could be based on what was stripped out. For example, lets says you paste the regular Paypal embed code into your post. Once you press publish and the code is stripped out it would be nice if an admin message would show up and says something like…

“For security reasons this Paypal embed code is not allowed on WordPress.com and has been removed. Please visit this support page to learn how to embed Paypal buttons in a way that works on WordPress.com.”

What I would like to see is basically something to let the user know why their code was removed and how to acheive their desired result in a way that works on WordPress.com. As I said earlier I have no idea if this is at all possible but it would be really cool to have.

If you are looking for the right away to do contextual help in WordPress 3.3 look no further than Twenty Eleven. It does everything by the book including a fallback for WordPress 3.2. Just look in /inc/theme-options.php in Twenty Eleven starting at line 114. Props to @nacin for pointing this out to me.