Backburnin’, backburnin’, backburnin’ for you

I got something interesting in my e-mail this morning:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away you entered your email address on http://wordpress.com/ to get a blog.

We’re now inviting small groups to use WordPress.com and your email address was selected today!

Now, as an avid WordPress fan, I’ve been following the progress of WordPress.com and thought about signing up for the waiting list. But for the life of me, I can’t remember actually doing it. I guess I must have, though, because otherwise, we wouldn’t be here, now, would we?

I hesitated before entering my e-mail address because the WordPress guys have been playing up WordPress.com as a bit of an exclusive club. They’re only giving users one invite each, which they encourage lucky recipients to use on someone who will make the most use out of his or her hypothetical WP.com blog. Already having my own WordPress blog, and making tentative plans to start a new WordPress blog after my wedding, I didn’t really think I’d have much use for this hosted solution. But ultimately, I just couldn’t resist the urge to see what was behind the scenes. I mean, I guess I couldn’t resist. I can’t actually recall the moment at which WP.com’s potential awesomeness broke through my resistance.

So here’s my new blog, aptly named “The Backburner” because that’s where it’s destined to go. After I thought about a name all day, my near-future wife Melissa came up with it in about two seconds. I’ll probably drop in here from time to time and I’ll try to maintain it as a secondary blog even after I have the post-wedding deal up and running. I’ve never been a two-blog man, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. (Besides, uh, the back burner.)

By the way, the WP.com control panel is indeed quite cool! It’s incredibly easy to use, the interface has been streamlined and improved from the latest you-install-it version of WordPress, and the WYSIWYG compose field works great. Even the colors are nicer than bland WordPress gray, and dig those awesome fade effects. The real drawback is that it’s not possible to customize — well, much of anything, really. You can select a theme, but you can’t do anything to it, and if you’ve seen my wedlog, you know I like to do plenty to it. But it probably already stacks up favorably to any of your major free hosted services. And seeing how it’s so new, I find it hard to believe they won’t be adding new features with time.