How Do You MU?

I recently tried BubbleShare, and am impressed by how quick and easy it is to create and share online photo albums. I also recently saw this thread on the WPMU forums. James kicked off the thread with an interesting post on which plugins he currently has running at edublogs (yes, this very host). He concluded the post with a plugin wishlist, which he in turn concluded with: “A flickr plugin that works (believe me I’ve tried but failed).”

These two trains of thought collide head-on at the BubbleShare Add Album to My Blog Junction. I’ll just paste in the BubbleShare-provided code, and…

it still doesn’t work, perhaps for the same reasons Flickr plugins are tough. I write still because I’m retrying this, following the comment from Albert of Bubbleshare. I wondered if switching off the rich text editor would help, but I’ve forgotten where it is I have to go to switch that off.

By the way, this is the album I tried to insert into this post. I was originally going to grab some of the photos tagged WordPress from Flickr. I was surprised to find that most of them are under copyright, rather than under Creative Commons. I don’t regard that as a big deal, but it seems a little strange when photos associated with free/open source software are under copyright.

Matt remarks that WordPress.com is about to hit 100,000 blogs. I suspect that makes it the largest WPMU host. Whether it is or not, the number is impressive, in terms of the number of people who have signed up (demand) and of the scalability of the software (supply). Congrats to Matt, Donncha, et al.

Matt’s remark is an aside (strictly speaking, an aside within an aside), in the context of the new Next Blog feature of WordPress.com. I don’t care for that feature. Although I’m as big a fan of serendipity as the next blogger, it’s highly unlikely to take me to a blog I’m interested in.

It reminds me of the similar “feature” of Blogspot. In fact, the whole bar at the top WordPress.com reminds me to the bar at the top of my old blog. If I wanted Blogger-like things, I’d have stayed with Blogger. Having said that, it’s not as bad as the BloggerBar, since the bar is only visible to those currently signed in to their WP.com account.