WordPress.com launched recently, using the invite process popularized by Orkut and GMail to seed the service. Using WordPress MU, multi-user WordPress, WordPress.com looks to be competing directly with TypePad, Blogger, and other hosted blog offerings. I've never used any of those other services, so I can't compare or contrast any of them with WordPress.com.
But I can say that I am thoroughly impressed with what I've seen in WordPress.com so far. I'm still skeptical about the WYSIWYG editor, but I'm giving it the ol' college try. Theme selection is easy, and the bundled theme previews make it super easy to see what you're getting before committing. There are obviously still some bugs to work out, but WordPress.com shows a lot of promise.
And because you can't have too many blogs, you may also visit http://skippy.wordpress.com/.
Lorelle alerted me to a serious mistake with In-Series 1.7: it incorrectly included future-dated posts in the series links displayed to readers!
In-Series 1.8 is now available, and resolves this issue!
WP DB Backup 1.7 is now available.
This version features better error handling, some modest internationalization changes, and an update to the documentation. If you experienced trouble with version 1.6, please try 1.7 and let me know if it works for you!
I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of WP-DB-Backup 1.6!
This version has received a major overhaul, courtesy of Owen:
As you can see from the screenshot above, there's a progress meter now, telling you how far along in the backup process you are. Each table is still backed up individually, but now each table is also backed up just a few rows at a time, to better support tables with huge numbers of rows (as might be found from stats or anti-spam plugins).
WP-DB Backup should now handle databases of all sizes! Indeed, it's been tested successfully on two large databases -- one nearly 10 megs, and one over 32 megs -- as well as several small ones.
WP-DB Backup now also automatically detects gzip support. If available, your backup will be compressed on the fly; if not available, no compression will occur (obviously).
Now that huge databases can be backed up reliably, I have added support for optional tables to be included in the scheduled backups. Remember, though, that most email servers block attachments larger than about 5 megabytes. If you have an enormous database, the scheduled backup email delivery may fail.
French translation available -- thanks Ozh!
I'm pleased to announce the release of subscribe2 version 2.1.5!
This version should correctly work around a subtle bug in the way WordPress handles posts published from drafts, which means that the permalinks in the notification emails should obey your rewrite rules. This fix also ensures that exceprts work properly.
Thanks to Mr. Brown, there's now an Italian translation available! Translations are also available for German, Polish, and Spanish:
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/subscribe2/i18n/