Well, hello there, faithful readers. It has been a while since I published anything on here and the sole reason simply was that there was fuck all to write about. Seriously, I truly think the last thing worthy to grace these walls was that post on my new Android HTC Desire. But, dire times have come to an end, because today I’m going to tell you all about Jetpack.
What is it? It’s a plugin that will supercharge your WordPress installation. Now, I’m not talking about your WordPress.com account, because that one is hosted and if you’re using it, you’ll already be using the goodness that comes with Jetpack. No, I’m talking about your self-hosted WordPress.org installations. While these provide the freedom to do whatever you want with your blogging CMS, they lack the constant updates to its functionality. Sure, there are new versions once in a while, but you won’t wake up one day, wondering why the shizzle your blogging system is suddenly sporting a Gravatar hover card (which is something that appears when you hover over the names of people who have commented and who happen to have an account with Gravatar). And in case you missed it, that is just one of the features of Jetpack. Because Jetpack is, in case you missed that too, a plugin that contains a slew of features that replace a few plugins you might have had to install separately.
These include, but are not limited to, a sharing feature, which lets you add Facebook, Twitter and whatnot sharing buttons to your posts. A URL-shortening plugin, which automatically shortens the URLs of your blogposts to a wp.me-URL. A stats feature, which replaces the old wp-stats plugin. And last but not least “After the deadline”, which is a plugin most helpful to slobs like me who couldn’t be arsed to spell-check their articles, let alone check them on stylistic and grammatical errors. That plugin will do all that for you.
So go ahead, check out Jetpack, have fun and most importantly, don’t forget that while blogging may be fun, there’s a whole world out there where the fact that you’ve had over a thousand page-views today doesn’t mean jack-shit.