Alternate Post title: Why I LOVE Worpress, Reason #101

A few weeks back, my whole site suddenly disappeared off my live server, causing me to panic, but there wasn’t much I could do (with my limited knowledge of these things) except make it worse.

So I left it to smarter people than myself to take care of it for me. As I mentioned in a post last week, My good friends Rob and Gwyn each stepped in to help with various fixes, and most of my site was back online without too much interruption. Except that my SEO-friendly post slugs weren’t working. Gwyn managed to find a way to get the posts live using the truncated numerical post slugs, which was for me a suitable fix for the meantime. I was just waiting until a reader came along and expressed frustration over following one of my dead links, and that would be enough to motivate me to find a fix for it.

Well, today I got that email. It came from a reader, but not just any reader. It was Lloyd Budd, who is an acquaintance of mine (he ferries over to Vancouver from Victoria for all of the best tech events), a Facebook friend (of course!) and an employee of Wordpress. Lloyd expressed concern over my predicament and offered to help. “You are talking to WordPress…if you want me to go in fix it just let me know.” Reading that back, it makes me laugh to myself a bit, but that the time I was just thinking “Please, please let it work!”

So here we are, just minutes after that email exchange, and everything is fixed. “How’s that?” read Lloyd’s email just minutes after his offer. Needless to say, I was “chuffed,” as Rob would say.

Admittedly, not everyone can get that kind of personal service from the Wordpress community, but it’s a reminder to me of just how great Wordpress is; for usability, functionality and in the case of the Wordpress Forums, for support too. Incidentally, that’s the link you should follow to get help for your own issues in WP. Terrific people like Lloyd are standing by waiting to answer your questions, or already have. Search and ye shall find.

At the risk of offending all of my friends in the Drupal community (yes, this means you, Lyal), I’ll say once again what I’ve been saying all along: Wordpress is my favorite blogging platform. Download the code now and start building your building your blog from scratch, or jump on over to Wordpress.com to launch a free site in minutes.