Having been overwhelmed with Olympic fever, it’s been awhile since I’ve made a post relating to WordPress, but the community is as active as ever, especially with the release of WordPress 2.6.1 and the final round of voting for the WordPress Plugin Competition.
This will, fortunately for you all, be a short post with what maybe a catchy title! The good book ‘how to write a good blog post’ sites teach us that a catchy title is very helpful in attracting the attention of browsers. Whether this will be one of the popular posts as a result remains to be seen, but there is a point to this post and the title: it turns out I have been spelling that special word wrong.
That word, of course, is:
WordPress
I’ve always spelt it as WordPress, and never thought more of it, so I was utterly mortified when I started reading Lorelle‘s excellent article Tips on Writing Good WordPress Tips. The first point she made (as convincingly as always) was that:
WordPress is a trademark and thus must be spelled appropriately.
That sentence came like a bolt from the heavens (or stepping on a garden rake) and I was left with a sinking feeling in my stomach – just hours before I had chided someone on the WordPress Forums about getting the name of a plugin wrong, and yet I was already making an even more fundamental mistake about something I read about almost everyday – WordPress!
That feeling of guilt happened to coincide with me reading a new post by Mark Ghosh on WLTC called Be Kind, Educate, (which is just as inspirational as Matt Mullenweg‘s Price of Freedom) where he analyses why there are so many fans of WordPress, and nature of the WP community. His last point, and the title of his article, credits Lorelle as an inspiration for his new pledge:
to be as kind as I can be … to educate everyone that cares to listen
So at the end of this post, not only am I going to spell WordPress correctly from now on, I am also going to endeavour to be a lot more patient and polite when I reply on the forums!
p/s: Apologies to anyone I’ve offended on the forums from before.
p/s2: I think I’ve patched up this site for WordPress, but if you spot any omissions, please let me know!