Last Saturday night many of the Irish blogging community got together in The Cork International Airport Hotel for the Irish Blog Awards. I was there with my wife Jacinta, it was a great night and I was delighted to see so many WordPress powered blogs. Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs were represented again and again among the top bloggers in Ireland.
I had planned on writing a post analysing the breakdown of WordPress vs Blogspot vs MT vs everyone else but lucky for me, Cathal Garvey already did the hard work!
He has some very interesting stats on version numbers, and I’m shocked that “Best Technology Blog” (sponsored by Bitbuzz) has the worst record for upgrading WordPress. Hopefully this attention will encourage those bloggers to upgrade.
WordPress is the most popular blogging software among the Blog Awards nominees and Blacknight is by far the most popular hosting service. I don’t think you can get a better recommendation than that for either WordPress or Blacknight.
BTW – That’s Grandad in the photo above. Go read his blog, Head Rambles. You’ll love it!
PS. Here are the results of the Awards, read more by Red Mum, Robert, Niall and Jason who reminds us we should vote for the excellent Cork International Airport Hotel. TheChrisD has a massive post listing everyone in his feedreader who posted about the Awards, a few pics, and some of the videos shown on the night.
I’ll be uploading photos from the night in a post here and to Pixie later.
PPS. Alan Burke got in touch and asked me to give Drupalcamp Galway a plug. He added, “Maybe we could convert a few WordPress users 
” but of course that’ll never happen!
On Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th of April 2009 in Galway, 2 groups of Drupal developers will work on building 2 real working Drupal sites for 2 good causes. They will have 24 hours to complete their website. We are calling organizations, charities and NGOs from Ireland to submit their site proposal. Any organisation can register as long as they are not-for-profit and do not have a Drupal site already running. (A few static HTML pages is the limit for being accepted).
Sounds like a great idea and a worthy one too.
12 Comments
Sarsura (6 comments.) on February 23, 2009 at 12:32 pm.
its very important to keep a blog updated (software).. i cannot understand why so many delay those updates when wordpress releases a update.
Tom (1 comments.) on February 26, 2009 at 4:09 am.
I would say it’s because WordPress never used to include a “self-updating” feature. Thus, WordPress bloggers had to manually download a ZIP file, extract it, and use an FTP program to update their blog.
Now that WordPress can perform an update through the back-end, I’m sure that there will be a large decrease in users that delay updating.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on February 26, 2009 at 10:15 am.
The irony being that the blogs that didn’t update were those of the tech bloggers who you’d think would be on top of this sort of thing
Michele (1 comments.) on February 23, 2009 at 12:51 pm.
Thanks for the mention
Michele
Suyash Ramineni (1 comments.) on February 23, 2009 at 1:51 pm.
66 % Irish bloggers using wordpress. That’s great news. Also the Read Write Web France is using wordpress. This indicates that the work done by WordPress developement community has really benifited many bloggers. Cheers to all developers. Hey plugin(GPL) developers and theme(GPL) designers thanx to you guys..
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Hikari (2 comments.) on February 24, 2009 at 12:24 am.
WordPress is THA BEST!!
Jerry (1 comments.) on February 24, 2009 at 4:25 am.
I blog in WordPress, but I didn’t realize that overwhelming number of people who prefer the platform.
hadise (1 comments.) on February 24, 2009 at 11:17 pm.
This is very good news.
Wordpress is the best. (..and budypress and mu are ready for big projects)
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Dankoozy (34 comments.) on February 28, 2009 at 1:56 pm.
How many of those wordpress blogs are hosted on wordpress.com? its good to see ye’r kicking google’s ad-supported ass in a time when moving all your stuff to google seems to be the fashionable thing to do
mike (1 comments.) on March 2, 2009 at 4:12 pm.
I love wordpress , it is best then blogger.