GC's HW#5--WordPress

WordPress.com is brought to you by some of the same folks who created the open source blogging software available at WordPress.org. Open source WordPress has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category.

Even with its easy-to-use open source package, there was still a barrier in that it requires a hosting account, a database, FTP, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms that make the average "Joe" dizzy. So the team created WordPress.com to bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience. WordPress.com, is a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge.

WordPress is still rather new to the blogging game, as there are much larger hosted blogging services such as Blogger or Typepad that have been out for years. When WordPress.org got started people said the blog software market was saturated and there wasn’t room for anything new. (The big players then were Greymatter and Movable Type.) Despite the warnings, WordPress has been quite successful. WordPress.com is under very active development, and with new updates almost every day. New features and services are driven by its users through feedback.

Almost everything on WordPress.com is free, and things that are currently free will remain free in the future. They do offer paid a la carte upgrades for things like CSS editing and custom domains. As a free open source software creator, how does WordPress pay for everything? WordPress.com is run by Automattic which currently makes money from the aforementioned upgrades, blog services, Akismet anti-spam technology, and hosting partnerships.

Overall, WordPress.com is fun and easy to use blog site with great features for customization. By simply making a free account you can have a blog up and running in a matter of minutes!

Here is a simple blog I created for CS271. Not much is written on it, but it shows how quick and simple it is to create one's very own blog and share it with others!