Notes on my first few hours of using WordPress through wordpress.com
- Could use a “first-run wizard”, where it prompts you for the everyday things like various settings.
- Very limited selection in themes. I’m shocked.
- The post editor’s spell checker thinks some common words are misspellings, like WordPress, Google and blog. That’s pretty embarrassing. Good thing Firefox’s inline spell checker works in the post editor.
- The RTE (Rich Text Editor) is standard stuff. You can’t really improve on something that’s already good.
- The revision system is pretty cool. I’m very surprised they were able to do it with HTML so well. This has always been a nightmare with RTEs.
- The “update post” or “publish” button is in a stupid place, on the right-hand side. I’m so used to it being just underneath my editor.
- The automatic draft saving is wonderful.
- The flash image uploading is opaque. I can select an image.. and.. then what? There’s no “upload” button for it to actually process the image.
- Update: Flash 10 breaks WordPress file uploading.
- Images aren’t so easily inserted into a post. I’m expecting to be able to just upload an image, and to be able to trivially add it as a thumbnail that links to the full image in a Lightbox. Instead, I upload an image, and if I miss the ‘insert into post”, I am then confronted with a convoluted system of dealing with images in a library.
- Update: I’m not sure why it was so hard for me before, but it’s trivial now that I understand what to do. The proper way was right in front of my nose all along!
- Even after adding a thumbnail to a post, there’s no obvious way to have it link to the fulls-sized image. There’s a link feature, but it always links to the thumbnail and I must manually edit the link every time I want to do this thumbnail-linking-to-fullsize thing.
- Even after Google Gears was activated, some things are particularly slow. I hesitate to say it, but some things feel slower .
- Update: I had gears enabled on the http version of this site, then switched to https. I just re-enabled gears and things ought to work much better from here on.
- Working with the WordPress widgets was a bit of a pain. Having to constantly save and re-load the blog in another tab sucked.
- Bug: Left-clicking on the title area of one of the widgets in the widget editor made the entire widget disappear from the list, forcing me to refresh the page.
- I don’t understand why the search widget also has a category browse feature. That duplication sucks. The search widget isn’t even configurable to remove it.
- I wish there were a simple tags list feature, or more functionality with the tag cloud to make it shout less.
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The meta widget has a link to wordpress.com for some stupid reason. This widget isn’t configurable either.
