Jason Clarke

Alright, I made it to the WordPress.com beta, woo hoo. I just made it into another beta tonight, but I can’t name the service for fear they’ll not only cancel my account, they might also have some kind of rights to my house. That was one strict set of beta terms.

Anyway, I’m not quite sure what to do with this blog. There have been a flurry of betas lately, so I thought about possibly doing a “beta review blog”, but given the terms of that other service’s signup any beta report blog would have to be anonymous. Since I’ve already chosen “jasonclarke” as my username for this site, that’s a no go.

I do have a fair amount to say just about WordPress though. A bit of history: I’ve been a WordPress user for just under a year, since mid-December of 2004.

I’ve been a web developer and a blogger off and on for a few years now, but it wasn’t until late 2002 that I attempted to install MovableType. Frustrated after a couple days of futility, I built my own system and have been running it for over two years on Moorelies.com. Meanwhile my personal site, jasonclarke.org, went through a series of custom-built solutions and TypePad before finally settling on Blogger’s service in mid-2004. Lack of features led me to ditc Blogger pretty quickly and, impressed with the quick install and customization, I went with WordPress and haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve also installed WordPress about 10 times for various clients and projects, and used it myself on two other sites: Network Landscape, a TV-centric blog, and Yay Me! Blog, the sounding board for a new service I’m working on in my spare time.

So what’s next? As a loyal and generally-pleased WordPress user, I’m quite interested to try out the hosted service. Of course, I have some basic expectations (or predictions?) going in. Here they are, so I can see how they hold up as time goes on:

Pros: I’m guessing that a hosted version of WordPress is going to include at least some kind of upgrades and enhancements over the installed version. Particularly, I’d like the posting interface to be re-designed. My biggest request: a “live” categorization, or tag-like, category assignment system similar to the one I wrote about here.

Cons: Likewise, I’m predicting that although some powerful features may be there, some power features are probably disabled to fit the traditional convential wisdom that “hosted services are meant for the novice user.” By the way: that’s a norm that I disagree with.

As a blogger who has used a wide variety of services- from Blogger to TypePad to MovableType to WordPress to my own custom-built app- and found WordPress to be my favorite among them, I’ve got fairly high expectations for what WordPress.com is going to deliver. I’m looking forward to trying it out and reporting back.