WordPress goes turbo speed with Google Gears

WordPress.com is the latest Web service to get Google Gears support. Now users who log in to their dashboard will notice a new button in the top right-hand corner called "turbo." Clicking it will make use of Google's Gears (which is currently Firefox and IE-only), offloading some of the data from the cloud into your browser cache. In this case, it's the latest 200 files from your WordPress media library, the same files you access to stick into blog posts.

The new 'turbo' button.

A post on the official WordPress blog by creator Matt Mullenweg notes that the feature has been in development for more than a year and that bloggers are going to notice it the most when on a bad Internet connection. In practice, it should speed up writing a new post and make it faster to drop in photos you've already uploaded to the service's cloud storage.

One thing Gears is not being used for in this case is offline access, or a way to let you use the blog authoring tools while away from an Internet connection. Other tools that have taken advantage of Gears include Google Docs, Reader, Remember the Milk, and some Zoho apps. With Gears' recent movements toward providing more than just a cache, we're also seeing services like MySpace use it to speed up its inter-network messaging.

Update: I'm told this feature will be making its way into the next version of WordPress.org, also known as the hosted version of WordPress. You can read about some other things coming to that version (v2.6) here.

If you've got gears installed, hitting the new turbo button will give you this message. Enabling it allows you to get at your media library faster when you're on a bad connection.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[Papa G]

Cool, I never even noticed! I have had Google Gears for a while, and I just made three posts to my Wordpress blog! But wait...this is only for the wordpress.com service??? I have my own hosted one. How about those???

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Not seeing it on mine, but likely will be pushed out with the next release methinks. Will ping the WP folks and get back to you.

[Khurt]

You should probably update the article to mention that Google Gears is not available for Safari.


"Now users who log in to their dashboards using IE or Firefox......"

[Josh.Lowensohn]

I thought it was inferred ;)

You're right though--making a note.

[Khurt]