by The 13-blog Strong Boles Blogs Network have been back on WordPress.com for a week or so, and in our two-year absence, there are many new things that have caught the love our eye. Here are our Top Ten moments of rediscovered WordPress.com passion in no particular order.
1. Stats
WordPress.com have always provided excellent stats, but the little extras and the deep analysis just keeps getting better and smarter. You really get a profile snapshot of your site in real time.
2. Dashboard Replying
You can now do a quick comment reply via your blog’s dashboard. It’s quick and simple and it saves a lot of time.
3. Quick Image Insertion
We like lots of images and we can now remotely call all our images in a freewheeling and snappy way from any URL.
4. Nested Comments and Quick Edits
Another big change for us is the ability to have nested comments so we can finally see which commenter is replying to which comment. We can also do a “Quick Edit” of published comments and posts without having to take time to have the entire thing load. Editing in list view is super-fantastic and fast.
5. Site Verification
Using META tags, you can now “verify” your blog ownership with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and the Bing Webmaster Center. Giving us ownership of our blogs in the mindset of Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft is a great gift that allows us to more deeply explore how we are viewed and indexed by those third party sites.
6. Sub-Domains
When we were previously on WordPress.com, we could not map a subdomain to a WordPress.com blog. Now we can! So, blog.bolesuniversity.com is now alive and well — rescued from Blogger — and safely residing on WordPress.
7. Twitter Widget
We now have a Twitter widget written by WordPress.com so it will work on our blogs. While the updates aren’t as instantaneous as the native Twitter badges, your blog will update within 10 minutes for any new Tweet you submit.
9. Email Subscriptions
We love the easy email subscription. We subscribed to all our blogs and we get immediate email notification of each new blog post. The email looks professional and clean. We appreciate this sort of “outsider” confirmation that our work is being seen, processed and logged beyond our fingers.
10. Mobile Site Formatting
WordPress.com makes it really easy to format your blogs for clear viewing on mobile devices like my beloved iPhone and iPad.
As you can see, there’s so much to love about WordPress.com. In another article, we’ll take a look at the Top Ten Things WordPress.com needs to fix. We will see you there!
I love all of those things, David! 🙂 Especially the mobile viewing 🙂
The mobile viewing thing is really genius, Gordon. It is forward-thinking and it works so well. We never had anything like that on Movable Type. There wan an iPhone plugin for version 4.3x that allowed you to manage your blogs, but it was never updated for 5.01.
I think the email subscribe thing is neat. Looks really professional.
Yes, the subscribe thing is definitely neat. It arrives quickly in your Inbox, too.