Happy second birthday, WordPress.com

I am really a newcomer to WordPress.com . It’s been only a couple of month since I’m trying it out, but I have to say, that I am totally in love with it. It’s fits the big picture perfectly…

You see, I’ve always been a fan of keeping my own things at my own control. For years I had my own home server which ran my mail server, my web server, my file server, my DNS server, my … everything. As much as I enjoyed the general developments on the Internet, I never saw myself being a user of any of those services, because I had all this power and flexibility at my disposal.

But something happened. Not at once, but slowly slowly. First, I got rid of my DNS server, even though I owned more domains than ever. GoDaddy did the job just fine. Then my pictures moved to Flickr. Then I rented some shared web hosting space and moved my web sites there. Then my email moved to Gmail. Then I got rid of my home server altogether.

As strange as it is, I don’t know the IP address of my home connection (here I lose half of my geek points), I don’t have any name mapped to it (here goes another half), and, in fact, all external connections are forbidded, including SSH. I can switch off any computer at home, and that won’t cause any connectivity problems for any of my services. In fact, the other time I lost all data on my laptop, and I got back to work 10 minutes after I did the complete re-install of the operating system. All my stuff is online.

One of the things that I got a little bit annoyed with recently, is the maintenance of all those blogs that I have or help with. There are about 20 altogether and it takes me noticeable time to upgrade and support all of them.

As I said before, recently I tried WordPress.com and loved it. It’s so simple, yet powerful. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that I can use on my standalone blogs, but, the truth is, I don’t need most of those anyway. And the complete truth is, I’m not even using all that many bells and whistles anyway. It’s all about the “potential” use vs. “real” use. And WordPerss.com sure offers plenty of good stuff for “real” users – Akismet anti-SPAM, comments tracking, excellent statistics – simple, up to the point, and real time; and the best of all – The Community.

Now I have this sad feeling that I haven’t started all my blogs at WordPress.com, because it’ll take time and effort to move them all there. But I also have this positive feeling, because I know that a better way exists. A way that can make my life easier, as well as bring some more audience to my blogging.

So, with all that, I wish WordPress.com a very happy birthday. Guys, please do what you do, because you are so good at doing it. And I’ll see you more over the coming time. Happy Birthday!

Google Reader under control

Finally! I’ve got my RSS addiction under control. First of all, I am back to a single feed reader for a while now. aKregator was a tiny bit too annoying to use together with Google Reader, so I got rid of it.

Then I started cleaning up my subscriptions. I hit it hard the first time removing almost a 100 (!!!) feeds. Then I dedicated a few minutes on an almost daily basis to cleanup things here and there. Google Reader’s “Trends” functionality was invaluable in the process.

Today I realized that I see something on my screen that I haven’t seen in a long time. There are only 3 (!!!) feeds with unread items: 6 articles from List A Part, which I tend to need a special mood to read, and two very high traffic Flickr groups – those are simply impossible to catch, as they get around 300 pictures a day each. Overall, that is my equivalent of an empty feed reader with nothing to go through.

Trends page informs me that I have 135 feeds altogether. That’s still a tiny bit too much as I’m waiting for a few feeds to expire my no-activity time limit (3 month).

Overall I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the state of affairs. Much help in achieving current situation came, unexpectedly, from email. Quite a lot of stuff which I had feeds for, can be reproduced via email, and in most of the cases, I can go through those faster than through feeds (my Inbox now has 19 unread messages and half of them don’t even need a reply).

Hooray! And a pint to that!