No Guinness

Asides

Been in Ireland since Saturday, and it couldn’t be better. What a lovely country with lovely people. One thing I’ve noticed, at least here in the “real capital” Cork, that “Guinness is for tourists.” Everyone here drinks Murphy’s. Anyway, back to work with Donncha on some WordPress.com goodies.

London Troubles

Asides, ,

Geez, I should have stayed in Paris! When I arrived at my hotel in SoHo London last night around midnight I found out they had no record of my reservation from Orbitz and no rooms available. What makes this worse is my reservation for 4 nights had already been charged. Every hotel in town was booked solid for the night. Several hours later I found myself in a hotel waaaay out by Heathrow and now instead of exploring London I’m trying to clear things up, find a place to stay in town tonight, and catch up with work I was planning to do last night.

About.com switching to WordPress

WordPress

Sheila Coggins just published an interview with me on About.com Weblogs, which came out fairly well and talks a little bit about new efforts like WordPress.com.

The timing for the interview couldn’t be better. As people watching closely may have already started to notice, About.com has begun switching their sites over to WordPress from Movable Type. They’ve been doing it quietly and one-by-one for at least month now, you can see WP in action on Weblogs, Baby Parenting, entrepreneur, US politics, and many more. They’ve integrated it so tightly with their system most of the usual signs of a WP blog aren’t there, but the dead giveaway is the comments. In fact none of their older blogs seem to have comments enabled, just the upgraded WP ones.

About.com isn’t very “2.0” hip but they are still get some of the highest traffic on the web, easily within the top 50 sites in the world. From what I understand they haven’t made any changes to the core code, all of their customizations have been through plugins. They’re also looking at bringing a WP “powered by” link to the pages. (Which, as noted in the previous entry, is completely optional.) I’m very glad About has found a platform that will grow with them. 🙂

The good news keeps coming in.

German Focus

Asides, WordPress

So the next trip to Europe I’ll have to catch the Netherlands and Germany, I’ve met some fantastic WordPress users (and future users) from both. There is someone on stage from a German media organization talking about how they’ve begun emphasizing blogs much more in their publication, Focus. After browsing a bit I noticed that blogs.focus.msn.de (yes that’s MSN) is all WordPress blogs — cool! What’s interesting about being Open Source is that the software turns up places you would never suspect or know about.

Yahoo on WordPress

Asides, WordPress, Yahoo

Stephen Steele (is that a real name?) just wrote in that the new Yahoo Mail updates blog is on WordPress. As far as I know this is the first official Yahoo blog on WP I’ve seen. What makes it really interesting is it’s the first time I’ve seen third-party software (like WordPress) on the yahoo.com domain. You’ll notice every time they’ve done blogs before it’s been on a different domain like yahoo.net or ysearchblog.com, I imagine because of the incredibly strict security requirements anything with access to Yahoo.com cookies must meet. This is very exciting news. 🙂