Money, money, money

I am reminded of Freud's comment that people are much better at remembering that people owe them money than they are at remembering when they owe people money 😉

If you have a WordPress.com blog, then you know what the new admin sidebar looks like. If you don’t have a WordPress.com blog, then let me explain that the admin sidebar is what blog owners see when they are behind the scenes, writing articles, uploading images, etc.

Even for WordPress.com blog owners though, perhaps you wonder what the admin sidebars in WordPress.Org sites look like?

WordPress.org sites are the self-hosted version of WordPress, rather than the version that is hosted on the servers of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.

In fact the changes to WordPress.org sites reflect the changes to WordPress.com sites – except that with WordPress.com sites blog owners no longer have the opportunity to see what the admin sidebar used to look like because the changes have been made now.

With WordPress.org sites it is for the blog owner to update the code to the latest version.

Side By Side
So I took this screen grab of one of my WordPress.org sites that I had upgraded to WP 3.2, showing it next to another site that I have not yet upgraded.

What do you think? Which sidebar do you prefer, the old or the new?

Personally, I think the new sidebar – the one on the right here – looks cramped compared to the old version.

These are photos that I took with my iPhone and then put through the Instragr.am app before uploading them to Instragr.am

Of course, the photos are still on the iPhone in the camera roll, so it was just a case of downloading them to the computer and then uploading them here.

It would be nice to show them off from the Instragr.am site with some kind of plug-in, but whereas there may be options for the self-hosted variety of WordPress, there is nothing (yet) for WordPress.com sites.

Today I received an email from the people behind WordPress.com because I have a WordPress.com blog using the Custom CSS upgrade.

Today WP launched a new service called Custom Design that replaces the existing Custom CSS upgrade, and they say that they think I’m really going to like it.

So I took a look at the new features in Custom Design by visiting Appearance > Custom Design in my dashboard and the first thing I saw was a message that said:

We’ve automatically upgraded this blog to Custom Design, at no extra cost, based on your current Custom CSS upgrade.

Getting back to the email, WP say that they’ve automatically upgraded my blog to the new Custom Design package — normally a $30 upgrade and that I now have full access to the new features, including all the fonts from Typekit, at no extra charge, based on my existing subscription.

And they go on to say that their way of saying thank you for me being their customer, they’ve also applied a coupon to my account so that I’ll receive a 50% discount on my next automatic renewal for the Custom Design upgrade, a $15 savings.

The thing is that I don’t recall how much I paid for access to the CSS last time around. I don’t think it was anywhere near $30.00 though.

Why I Bought The CSS Upgrade Last November
I did it so that I could play around with the CSS – I saw it as a good sandbox where I could play around and always get back ‘home’ at the click of a button.

And it has been fun.

I have already added a bit of CSS via the new interface, and my impression is that it is more or less the same as the old interface – just a bit prettier. So that is a bit of a let-down, really.

But the font interface with Typekit integration is great – a real fun playground for typography lovers and very, very easy to use.

So all in all, a big positive yes to the new upgrade.

Read this post from TimeThief for the opinion of some people on the change of font in the Admin panel in WordPress.com, which is where I am typing now. The font in this panel is now Consolas. I don’t know what it was before.

Apple Mail allows me to choose the font I wish to use as my default font. I have had it set to Consolas for a while now – so you can guess that I like the font.

However, I have it set to point size 14, which is a lot bigger than the default size in this Admin panel. I am OK with the font, but I can see that some people might think it is a bit on the small side of being comfortable.

Some people think it is quite simply an ugly font.

Personally, I think the rather crowded appearance and small font size of the Dashboard sidebar here in the Admin panel is more of backwards move by the WordPress people.

Ah well.

The Admin Panel

For those who don’t have WordPress.com blogs, this is what the first section of the Sidebar of the Admin panel looks like.

Pretty small font, eh?

And the full Sidebar stretches all the way down the left side of the Admin panel, with lots more headings and words to make sense of and to click (or not).

All in all it seems to be the exact opposite of the move towards larger font sizes in blogs.

A Photograph
Here is a photograph to make up for the rest of this post if you are not interested in fonts. I tool the photo with the camera on my iPhone and then filtered it with the Earlybird filter in Instagram.

You can follow my Instagram feed here.