Do you blog? If you do, you must have been familiar with WordPress. Indeed, WordPress.com is one big cloud, and Jetpack can help you plug your WordPress powered site to the cloud. Is it any good?
Well, WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform and CMS on the web today. Come in two flavors – WordPress.com hosted and self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org) – WordPress is said to power over 56 million blogs, with half of them are hosted by WordPress.com (the rest is hosted on web hosting accounts with WordPress script installed on them.)
WordPress.com is the brainchild of Automattic, a developer of various web services, including WordPress, Jetpack, and many more.
With such big cloud, plugging into the cloud is a great way for WordPress-powered websites to use web services without using any resources on their part. More on this below…
What is Jetpack?
Jetpack will allow you to use cloud services offered by WordPress.com to “supercharge” your self-hosted WordPress site.
All you need to do is to download and install the WordPress plugin. You will immediately be able to use Jetpack’s web services in the cloud – for free (for now…)
That being said, Jetpack services will not use your web servers’ resources as you are literally plugging in to the cloud.
What services are included in Jetpack?
Installing a Jetpack plugin will allow you to access several web services – all 8 of them at once.
Here are the currently available services…
- WordPress.com Stats: Measuring your WP site statistics.
- Twitter Widget: Allowing you to display your Twitter updates on your site.
- Gravatar Hovercards: Shows “business cards” of your blog post commenters’ Gravatar.
- WP.me Shortlinks: Automatically shorten your blog post and page’s links for sharing purpose.
- Sharedaddy: Add social media sharing tools on your blog posts and pages.
- LaTeX: Allowing you to add complex mathematical equations on your blog posts.
- After the Deadline: Spell, style, and grammar checker in WordPress’ blog post and page writing tool.
- Shortcode Embeds: Easily embed videos and slides from YouTube, SlideShare and more.
- More coming up… There will be more web services added into Jetpack, and I’m sure that a couple will be available for a fee!
Verdicts…
WordPress.com has been offering cloud services for quite some time – what Jetpack does is by aggregating the services into one single cloud solution that blogs of any sizes can access – from the smallish Cloud Business Review to the huge CNN.
I think Jetpack is a great addition to any self-hosted WordPress sites. It simplifies your WP plugins management, as you only need to manage some functions from a single Jetpack WP plugin setting page.
I recommend you to give it a try and do let me know what you think by leaving your comment on this blog post!
