Wordpress and Wrestling on the iPhone

So here I am, in bed. Writing this post on my iPhone using the new Wordpress iPhone application.

It may seem out of place reading a post about the iPhone on a female fighting site, but let me explain.

Those that know me, know that I have always been a bit of a geek. When I was not training to wrestle or spending long weekends on the road at house shows, I was making a living designing online software systems and solutions.

I was a computer science major and moved to San Francisco in 1991 to work for Lucasfilm Games. It was there that I launched one of the world’s first entertainment-based websites in 1993, LucasArts.com. From there, it has been a blur of websites, wrestling, code and clotheslines for the past 15 years.

Don’t think it was easy, far from it. Technology and wrasslin’ can make for some interesting bedfellows. I recall a time during my wrestling training when I would show up at Lucas and sit in marketing meetings with my still bloody elbows soaking through my dress shirt. Of course, at the time none of my co-workers knew of my secret passion, nor did they understand why this 23 year old super-programmer was having so many back issues and covered in bruises.

Remeber the movie, Fight Club? Yeah, so do I, because for several years, I lived it.

Eventually, I stopped hiding my actions and embraced my passion for wrestling. It was then that I was able to really combine my two careers and make things happen.

Two major highlights of my web/wrestling background are ClickWrestle and Online World of Wrestling.

I take a great deal of pride in ClickWrestle, which I built in 2001 after the dot com bust. ClickWrestle has over 1300 wrestling matches available to download and we’re adding new matches and features non-stop. As any programmer would tell you, maintaining a VOD site takes a lot of hard work and for us to maintain the largest independent wrestling VOD site in the world takes countless man-hours of writing code and transcoding videos. Don’t be fooled, it takes more than words to run a site like ClickWrestle.com.

Down the line we acquired Obsessed With Wrestling, the world’s largest site for pro wrestling information and brought Brad Dykens on to the team. OWW was renamed Online World of Wrestling and has taken over as the single place for all wrestling history. With an average of 5 Million pageviews a month, I am very excited as OWW prepares for it’s 7th and biggest year yet.

I believe that technology is great and it has allowed me to do things in the wrestling business that I would have never anticipated. I hope you enjoy my posts about the latest devices and software tools and how I am using them in the wrestling business.

So back to the iPhone. Wordpress and Drupal are my favorite CMS tools right now. I have launched and maintain several Wordpress sites for my partners in the wrestling business and the latest version of ClickWrestle is powered by Drupal.

Tonight the Wordpress iPhone app was released that allows WP authors to publish to their site from anywhere using the slick iPhone interface. I think this will really be a wonderful tool for those wrestling webmasters that can use it. Wrestling is a “time to launch” game. News becomes old fast and this is just another way technology can help keep content fresh and up to date.

As a promoter, I can tell you first hand that the last thing I am thinking about on show day is posting to my site via my phone, but I expect that to change. Afterall, the name of the game is promoting, right? So expect to see more spontaneous postings here and we’ll see if we can bridge the gap between occasional long posts and hourly short twitters.

Additionally, our own Cheerleader Melissa just relaunched her website using Wordpress and we know how much she loves her iPhone. Our goal over the next week is to get her on the technology train as well. Melissa spends so much time on the road, it’s hard for her to find time to post, but now I think she’ll have something to do in all those lonely hotel rooms.

Thanks for reading the longest post I’ve ever written on a phone in bed.

Jason Deadrich
I am Jack’s iPhone