Mike Little’s Journalized

For those who have been waiting, WordPress 2.0.1 has just been released. This version has seen a month of bug fixing (over 100 bugs squashed), the majority being issues with the administration screens and their behaviour. There were some pretty detailed discussions on the developer and testing mailing lists to resolve some of these issues.
Alas, the WYSIWYG post editor is still not accessible to keyboard only users, so if you can only use a keyboard and not a mouse make sure to turn it off.
If you want to mark up your posts semantically you might want to turn it off too. With this new “Visually rich editor”, if you want to quote somebody, you need to think “indent”, and if you want to stop quoting them, think “outdent”.

The all singing new media uploader, which is right on the edit page where it should be, at least seems to work better now… but only if you can use a mouse. If you are unable to use a mouse, you will be unable to upload images and other media to your blog. Even with the fancy editor turned off. You are unable to perform this task. I know it wasn’t very friendly in the last version, but it did work, you were able to upload images, and copy and paste their tags into your post. You can no longer do that — it does not work.

I’m sorry to harp on about this but removing basic functionality, even if it were for a small number of people (which it is not — a large number of people have trouble using a mouse with precision, if at all), is still a step backwards in my book.

Wow! My visitor count, which has been running since April 2003, has just popped over 500,000. That’s half a million visitors to my little old web site! I can hardly believe it.

I’m seeing over 40,000 unique visitors per month now. The daily average is over 1300, with a noticeable dip at weekends. Most of those visitors, 62%, are still using Internet Explorer, but an encouraging 31% are using Mozilla or Firefox in some form or another. On the OS front, 74% are on Windows XP, 9% on Windows 2000, with Mac OS X running a poor third at 6.5%.

As I usually do, I’ll point out that these are real visitors to all parts of this domain apart from the Gallery, which has a separate counter.

My page count, which counts any requests for blog pages including from web crawlers and bots, is quite close to 5 million.

My top two referrers are both Google (.com and .co.uk), with the third place convincingly held by the WordPress Codex. Google, in various geographic flavours, holds 25 places in my top 50 referrers! Other search engines hold another 7 places. In terms of numbers Google far outranks all other referrers in the top 50 — 130,000 versus 52,000.

Another interesting high ranking referrer is blogging.typepad.com, almost certainly this list of WordPress themes, which, along with the third place appearance of the Codex, probably the Codex Theme List, tells me that a lot of people are looking for 3 column WordPress themes.

I finished creating a new site for Jan last night: it’s a Card and Crafting site. She has her first lot of Valentines cards and some crafting embellishments for sale.
It’s all done with WordPress of course. I started with the Dixie Bell Theme from Jen from GeeksMakeMeHot
We are still using eBay for the sale handling, but as soon as I get my head around how to set up my own shopping cart

Doing this is the reason I missed my deadline for the next Journalized theme beta. I’m working on it this evening though so, it’ll be here soon.

Wow, WordPress is a mere three years old today. It seems like it’s been going a lot longer, but the birth of what turned into WordPress was three years ago today.

Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.

Comment by mike — Saturday January 25, 2003 @ 3:58 pm

For a three-year-old its doing very well. It’s got a great team behind it, a massive community, a lot of big name endorsements, a book
(well a third of a book), or two, and a great future ahead.

Many happy returns!