How many people accept payments for online support?

I provide support online in my own time in various places after working fulltime as a Senior Technical Consultant (Mainly for Java, Oracle and VB stuff) so I don’t have any financial problems and hence never think of actually accepting or asking for any payment for helping someone out as it actually makes me feel good helping people out and as corny as it sounds that is payment enough for me.

However I’m interested in finding out how many people do actually charge for such support? Like issues with a WordPress plugin or some layout fixes, that kind of thing.

The WordPress.org forums are hard work!

My hats off to Podz, Lorelle, MacManX and all the rest of the regulars that help out at the WordPress.org forums, it is exhausting work trying to keep up with all the posts there!

WPMU and Dreamhost

Although Dreamhost is listed in the hosting section of WordPress.org the code base for WordPress MU is a different beast and has other requirements so unless you know PHP intimately then I suggest you don’t try to install WPMU at Dreamhost at this stage.

The same goes for any other host that runs PHP as CGI instead of an Apache module.

A good alternative is A Small Orange, I am not affiliated with them in anyway and that link isn’t even a referral link, I’m just a very satisfied customer and am happy to pimp them for free from time to time!

Should WordPress MU cater to all users?

Not that I have any say in this at all but I’ve been wondering lately whether a decent amount of technical knowledge should be a pre-requisite for maintaining a WordPress MU site or not? Should anyone be able to install & setup WordPress MU?

I guess that should be an eventual goal of the project but I don’t think it is close to that goal, so at the moment I know it is harsh but unless you know what you are doing then WordPress MU isn’t for you just yet. For example if you don’t know what a .htacccess file is, how to create a MySQL Database or at least basic PHP then you are going to have a very steep learning curve with WPMU.

Hopefully it will be more user friendly going forward for admins but for now it is more usable for those that have a blog setup under WPMU and not for those maintaining WPMU itself.

New post preview

Just saw this this and then promptly tried it out here, what it does is load the post fully themed in an iframe or similar below your post after you save a draft of it so you can see *exactly* how it is going to look, no more guess work on whether you got your styling right or not when doing something like posting an image! Sweet!

What I plan for this blog

I thought about this for a while and I think I will use it to share my experiences with providing voluntary technical support online in the various forums I participate in. I will also post related things like anything nifty I manage to do with the software I use, moving that stuff from my personal blog to here and leave my personal blog just for personal stuff.