If you’ve been using pingomatic to notify the world of when you’ve updated your blog, you may have noticed that the service seems much faster lately. It’s not your imagination. On September 6th, they upgraded the service, saying:

“our good friends at Textdrive moved us to their new datacenter and to hardware that is significantly better. We’re doing about double the number of requests we used to and there has been no downtime since the move. (All the old downtime was caused by the service overloading the resources available.) It’s going to be even better soon, as we have an exciting partner announcement coming up”

Pretty cool! Can’t wait to hear the upcoming announcement and additional planned improvements!

Tech Wench has created a great cheat sheet with the bare minimum of what you need to know in order to create a new wordpress theme. Thanks, tech wench.

Speaking of WordPress themes, I’ve been updating my comprehensive list of wordpress 1.5 themes and it now links to a whopping 330+ wordpress themes!! Theme designers in the wp community have been busy - and we thank you for your efforts and generousity!

Update: the theme list is now 695+ themes and growing!

I’ve come across what I think might be the first (p)review of the much awaited wordpress.com

From what I’ve read, wordpress.com is, more or less, a hosted version of WordPress that could give TypePad even more of a run for it’s money

more: a WYSIWYG editor (a huge deal for those less technically inclined and lacking in HTML knowledge), a new backend with a blue-themed template that is “WAY better than the standard 1.5 one”, recent wordpress.com posts (competes directly with TypePad’s “Recently Updated Weblogs” and would be a welcome addition to WordPress), resizeable text box for writing posts, etc

less: users can’t edit templates, not many plugins come preinstalled and you can’t use any that aren’t already there

Accounts are currently strictly invitaion only, and I actually just entered a contest to win a wp.com invite (which hopefully I can get so I can check it out and write my own review for you guys here at How to Blog!)