But what if you just want to get up and going– you know, take that first step and get some content out there?  You want your site to look good but you don’t want to have to edit every page by hand to get the content in there.  And what about updating content in the future?  You also want to have more control than some of the big blogging sites currently give you and have a solid platform for growth in the future.

Enter WordPress.   It’s not just blogging software you know.  With the blogging explosion in the recent past, WordPress was born and has grown some hefty legs along the way.  It has been steadily raising the bar in the past couple of years, and has moved from just a blogging system to becoming a platform.

By platform I mean that you can build sites with WordPress that are not just blogs, but are robust, flavorful sites with a lot of features and power.  And here’s the elements that make WordPress so powerful:

• A huge number of themes
• Tons of plugins
• Moderated multi user contribution
• Easy content creation
• Multi domain capable with WordPress Mu

If you install WordPress on your own server account, which isn’t hard, you then have ultimate control over this system allowing you to run ads or monetize your blog as you see fit.  Most of the big blog hosting sites out there just don’t give you this level of control.  Hosting companies like DreamHost, which is a green, carbon neutral company to boost, allow easy one-click install of WordPress to get you going fast.

In this series I’ll discuss each of the points outlined above to give you more detail on each facet of the platform so you can see the true power of WordPress.  Stay tuned for part 2 on themes.

When I first saw the Google Wave developer preview video, I wanted to play around with this cool looking new system from Google.  Luckily I was granted a preview invite back in September and was able to share a few invites with our team.  Since then we’ve been using Wave internally for some small collaborative projects.

In general, I do like the idea of a Wave and the nice threaded interactions being stored in one place.  It’s really nice to be able to add other users to the Wave and have everyone contribute.  We’ve used it on some website changes to discuss mock ups and work our way to a final version.  The playback feature is useful in seeing who has made which changes.  You can also make a Wave  public by adding the user public@a.gwave.com to the Wave.

I think that Wave is coming along quite nicely overall and, of course, there are always glitches with technology at this early stage, which is part of the learning process for the product.  We experienced issues with trying to add Word documents to a Wave.  Some docs just wouldn’t load.  I also experienced severe slow down and even some browser crashes (even in Chrome) when trying to interact with large public Waves.  The real time typing updates are interesting, but I’m not sure I’m a big fan or how useful this actually is.  I’m guessing there will be an option to turn this feature off.  The plugin landscape is also pretty sparse right now, so it’s hard to say how plugins will help flush out the product.  Being able to edit someone else’s reply / text is also kind of weird, but you can see the changes in the playback mode.  It might become hard to see where edits were made if there are a large number of them.  A filter on the playback or other form of timeline may be useful.

One thing I think that is really needed is an notify option.  Currently, you don’t know a Wave has been updated unless you are logged into Wave watching your inbox.  Right now we find ourselves pinging each other in IM.. “hey I just updated the mock up wave, go check it out”. There is a FireFox plugin that will help you with this now, but it needs to be part of the core system.  This may be in the plans, and likely is, but I would also like to see integration with Google docs.

Overall, I think Wave is going to be a useful tool.  Will it replace email?  unlikely.  Will it be a useful tool for smaller teams and friends to collaborate on units of work?  I think so, but I’m not sure it’s going to be quite as game-changing as Google hopes.