Neville on WordPress.com

Ok, now I’ve got it right.

Unlike the previous post, this post really is written with WordPress for iPhone version 1.4 beta 1.

More to come.

A new version of the WordPress app for iPhone is in beta testing, and I’m giving it a go.

The version I’m trying out is 1.4 beta 1 (although the app’s About screen says it’s 1.21, as you can see from the screenshot) and this is the first post from the app on the iPhone.

More to come.

A quick experiment – writing a post on an iPhone.

So easy.

Windows Live Writer, a new blogging tool from Microsoft, was launched in beta today.

It is a very impressive offering. Plenty of conversations about it.

I tested it with my primary WordPress blog. It worked just fine expect for a show-stopping problem with the incorrect date and time.

Tried it to my Live Spaces blog – and it posted with date/time correctly shown.

So is it purely some issue with WordPress? Well, let’s test it here on this WordPress.com blog.

I’m writing this on August the 14th at about 3.45pm…

I managed to log in to this blog at about 11:40am CET this morning. As everyone who has a WordPress.com blog knows, the service has been completely out over the past 24 hours.

This outage brings to mind what happened with TypePad last July, October and December with service outages as well as noticable service deterioration over periods of time.

Those things turned out to be a significant influence for me in making the switch from Typepad as my primary blog to the one I have today which is running on my own server (well, a server owned by DreamHost on which I rent space and bandwidth).

Wherever you run your blog – on your 'own' server or with a hosted service like WordPress.com or TypePad (Blogger, too) – can give you feelings of comfort and assurance that you don't have to worry about anything, just type your stuff and post it. The hosts take care of all the behind-the-scenes things like server maintenance, software updates, backups, etc.

That's a false sense of security. While they do take care of such things, in reality any service can go down at any time. Even if you have your own server physically sitting in your office or home, it can go down. And you are your own tech support. This happened recently with DreamHost, for instance.

The bottom line – always make your own backups of your blog. Although your service provider does make backups, you should not just rely on your provider doing this. Indeed, most providers' terms of service include a clause that the ultimate responsibility for backing-up your blog lies with you, not with them.

So if you make your own backups and if the service you use does go down, at least you will have the comfort of having your content in a form that will enable you to either restore it to your blog or take it with you to a new service if you decide to do that (I do a manual backup every day of my main WordPress blog).

Unfortunately, unlike TypePad, WordPress.com does not (yet) offer an option for you to backup your blog. Therefore, you have two choices:

1. Write your content using an offline blog editor (eg, ecto, BlogJet, Qumana, all of which support WordPress) so you'll always have copies on your own computer of what you write.
2. Subscribe to your own RSS feed so you get all your posts in your RSS reader. This way, you'll also know the URLs for every post, so making it easier to recreate your blog structure if you have to do that.

Hopefully, WordPress.com will have this capability soon.

Just tried the sidebar widgets for the first time. So simple. Drag and drop. That's it.

More commentary on my primary blog.

Having focused on getting my new home on the net up and running – that’s at NevilleHobson.com – plus just being plain busy, I’ve pretty much neglected this place.

First visit back here in a while and much new going on at WordPress.com. New themes, one of which I’ve just implemented. Interesting to note that this theme is designed by Michael Heilemann, the creator of the K2 theme that underpins the look-and-feel of my new blog (which is running on WordPress 2.0.1).

Just read a post by WP creator Matt Mullenweg about WordPress Widgets. Looks interesting, a new way to customize your WP.com blog. I wonder if they’ll work on WordPress itself?

More later.

Thanks to Rob Safuto, I have this new WordPress.com blog to try out. Rob sent me an invitation to start one, and now here I am.

Two immediate impressions:

• As I’m already using WordPress with my experimental blog, just about everything I saw after logging in for the first time was very familiar.
• Setting up this blog was very easy and very quick. Even if I’d never seen the WordPress interface before, I would have been up and running and writing this first post within 10 minutes, which is what I’m doing now.

Very nice indeed. More impressions later.

Having said that, my energies are focused mostly now on setting up my new permanent blog home with WordPress on my own server. Currently I have that my primary blog, Nevon, on TypePad. So I don’t expect to be posting much here during the coming weeks.

We’ll see how it all goes.