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Posterous Importer


Posterous is a blogging system that launched with an interesting twist — everything happens via email from signup to posting. Since the launch of our post by email features in addition to things like email comment replies and blog subscriptions we’ve been receiving more inquiries from people wanting to graduate from Posterous to a full blog with the features, flexibility, and reliability of WordPress.com.

It was actually easier than we thought: Posterous has a very nice API for reading from and writing to their service.

After logging into your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Tools -> Import.

Click on the Posterous importer.

Type in your Posterous host name, user name, and password and click the Submit button.

The importer will validate your user name and password. After starting the importer, you can sit back and watch the status counters tick away.

You can also safely leave the importer page or close your browser. The importer will keep running.

Currently, the importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

We will send you an email when the import finishes. Easy peasy!

There are a few things still on our roadmap, like more auto-post functionality, but don’t worry it’ll all be ready soon.


February 8, 2010 | 10:02 AM Comments  0 comments

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New Theme: Steira


Full of character yet minimal, we bring you the wonderful “Steira,” bursting at the seams with detail and functionality.

Steira in all its glory!

Recent Comments Widget for Steira

The sidebar is large in this theme giving you a lot of room to play.

Any widget will do, but the custom widgets are quite convenient and stylish. The “Recent Comments” widget is especially nice. It shows a dedication to your content while at the same time keeping the visual intensity that the rest of the theme boasts.

The "New" post.

There are a lot of subtle details in this theme. Most notably, your newest post shows up with a nice “New” label, giving your users a heads up.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen Steira before, it’s because you haven’t. It was designed by Made by Elephant for WordPress users.

The theme will soon be available in the Theme Repository over at WordPress.org and we’re extremely happy to be sharing it with you today.


February 8, 2010 | 4:02 AM Comments  0 comments

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Improved Polls and Ratings


We have made a couple of updates to the polls and ratings feature on WordPress.com that you may have already noticed.

Ratings on front page

There is now an option in the ratings settings to allow you to display your posts ratings on the front page.

Usage is very simple – pick whether you want the rating above or below the post, and save.

Your ratings will now appear on your blogs front page… nice!

Poll Options Menu

You may have noticed a new menu option under the polls menu – Options.

Here you can import another PollDaddy account if you wish to access another account from your WordPress dashboard.

Using the default poll settings, you can set your typical poll settings, like a custom style. Then with each new poll created, these default settings are loaded automatically, saving you time and hassle.

Expiration limit on block repeat voting

There is an additional setting in the poll editor that allows you to set a limit on how long to block repeat voters.

Just choose one of the block options, select how long you wish to block repeat voting and save your poll.

We have also made a few minor updates like adding support for right-to-left (RTL) languages, and tightening permissions. The WordPress.org plugin has also been updated with these changes and with a few additional ones detailed on the PollDaddy blog.

You can find out more details on the support page.


February 4, 2010 | 1:02 AM Comments  0 comments

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Post by Email Wrapup


Since our Post by Email feature opened last year the emails have been coming in fast and furious. Here’s a wrap-up of some of the latest improvements.

Bigger attachments
We like to see photos and video in your posts, so we’ve increased the size of emails that can be sent, now up to 50MB. Anything you can upload to WordPress.com can be sent in an email and will be neatly placed on your post.

Better image handling
In conjunction with this we’ve also improved our image handling so your photos look even better, particularly when teamed up with duotone, a great new photo theme.

Perfect for mobile photo blogging
If you have a camera-enabled mobile phone this makes for a very powerful photo blogging tool. If you need some inspiration check out Matt on his one-man-and-his-phone photo and video journey around the world. We’ll even geotag any posts, if sent from a GPS enabled phone.

Now with polls
Opinions are an important part of any blog and you can now create PollDaddy polls by email. Just include a special shortcode:

[poll]
Is Post by Email great?
* Absolutely
* Maybe
* I like eggs
[/poll]

We’ll do the rest so you end up with a poll like this:

View This Poll
trends

Tell Twitter and Yahoo
If you’re using our Publicize service to send updates to Twitter or Yahoo you can customize the message in your email, and enable or disable specific targets.

[publicize twitter]check out my latest post[/publicize]

Location enabled
Are you a keen trekker and have a Spot GPS device? Send your emails to WordPress.com and we’ll show them on a map so people can follow your journey.

Details, details, details
Don’t forget that you can also set the post title, tags, and category of any email:

[title Animals I like]
[tags lion,penguin,mole]
[category elephant]

You can find the full list of shortcodes on the Post by Email support page.

On a final open-source note, we’ll be releasing the code for Post by Email soon, so all you WordPress.org users can install it on your own self-hosted sites.


January 28, 2010 | 6:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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Vox Importer


Thinking of moving your blog from Vox.com to WordPress.com? You are not alone.

We’ve noticed that several people are dissatisfied with the service and want to move their blog elsewhere. A lot of people that we’ve heard from say they didn’t realize that there is no way to export from Vox and are looking for a solution.

Vox users have at least one option now: create a free blog here at WordPress.com, then import your Vox blog. (And never be locked in again — we make your data as free as possible.)

After logging into your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Tools -> Import.

Click on the Vox importer.

Type in your Vox host name, user name, and password and click the Submit button.

The importer will first validate your user name and password. After starting the importer, you can sit back and watch the status counters tick away.

You can also safely leave the importer page or close your browser. The importer will keep running.

Currently, the importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

We will send you an email when the import is finished. Easy peasy!


January 27, 2010 | 6:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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WordPress Personas for Firefox


Last week Mozilla released Firefox 3.6, the latest and greatest version of their open source Web browser. To mark the occasion, we worked with designer Chad Pugh to create a couple of brand new WordPress Personas for Firefox. Personas are like skins for your browser, and these designs are a great way to show off your WordPress colors.

The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of the great old-time printing presses. Get it here.

And the “Inkwell” Persona uses splashes of color to decorate a well-used piece of paper. Add it to your Firefox here.


January 25, 2010 | 5:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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New Theme: monochrome


Sleek, and bursting with elegance, I’m happy to bring you monochrome, another addition to the wonderful collection of themes available on WordPress.com. monochrome is a beautiful theme with wonderful details.

monochrome, the theme, in action.

The name comes from the theme’s monochromatic color palette. Beautiful and sleek, it’s the attention to detail that really makes this theme shine.

metadata, sub-menus, and the search Box

The headers and dates are uniquely styled. The menu shows sub pages, with a nice smooth animation as well. And don’t forget the custom search box widget styled up with rounded corners.

Want to check out monochrome? Just login to your WordPress.com blog and click on Appearance -> Themes in the sidebar. Preview the theme and if you like it, activate it.


January 19, 2010 | 12:01 PM Comments  0 comments

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My Tips on WordPress.com


Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus

From the time we started WordPress.com in 2005, we’ve focused on making it easy and rewarding to use so that anyone could get started with blogging. Along the way all of you who’ve been using WordPress.com and giving us your feedback have helped us figure out which features to roll out next. Thanks!

I took a look back at all the feature announcements we’ve made here, and it came to 370 posts, 82 in 2009 alone. That’s a lot of features. So in case you missed anything along the way here are some of my picks for cool things you can do with WordPress.com.

Create
We’ve set up lots of ways for you to write, post photos and videos, and generally add stuff to your blog, including mobile apps.

Personalize
You can also tweak how your blog looks, set the domain to be your own and pick your language.

Share and Read
We’ve built in some cool sharing and reading features so you can easily let people know about your new posts and also see what other people are blogging.

We’re working on much more for you in 2010. In the meantime check out Support for an updated list of features, and tips on making the most of your blog. Thanks for making WordPress.com amazing.


January 12, 2010 | 8:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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Two New Stats Things


Did you ever look at your stats chart and wonder which posts were published on a particular day? Now it’s easy to find out. Just move your mouse around the chart. (This only works for WordPress.com blogs right now.)

screenshot

Did you ever wonder how many hits your home page gets? Now it’s listed along with your posts. There is also a comprehensive report page reachable by clicking the little icon on the right. (This works for WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted blogs using the Stats plug-in. No upgrade is required.)

screenshot

I hope these little upgrades will help you prosper in the new year. :)


January 6, 2010 | 11:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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WordPress.com: Now on HootSuite


Last month we introduced new ways to post and keep up to date with WordPress.com blogs through the Twitter API. One of the coolest parts about this is you can make use of a growing number of microblogging apps to publish to your WordPress.com blog.

Today our friends at HootSuite announced their support of WordPress.com. HootSuite is an easy to use microblogging tool that lets you post updates to many different social networks. WordPress.com is the first blogging platform they’re officially supporting.

You can schedule and cross-post content to multiple WordPress.com blogs (posting to self-hosted WordPress blogs isn’t available yet). You can also set up a Home Feed for blogs you’re following, and reblog posts that you like. Check out the tutorial video HootSuite’s put together to see how easy it is to get going.

For even more apps, including iPhone, BlackBerry, and Firefox flavors, we created an apps for WordPress.com directory that we’ll keep updated with new ways to get your blog on. Enjoy!


January 6, 2010 | 7:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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Upcoming WordCamps


We’ve said it before, and we’ll probably say it again: attending a WordCamp is one of the most enjoyable ways to meet other WordPress users and learn new tricks that you can use on your site. There are a handful of WordCamps coming up in the next few months all over the world, including Atlanta, Boston, Toronto, Indonesia, Ireland, Greece, and Japan. For more information about these specific events, you can check out the post at WordPress.org or go to the WordCamp hub. Happiness Engineers from WordPress.com and other Automattic employees are often at WordCamps, so maybe we’ll see you there!


January 4, 2010 | 6:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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New Theme: Duotone


Happy Holidays! To spice up the coming weekend I’m here to present you with Duotone. Duotone is the successor to our highly popular photo blogging theme, Monotone. Duotone is very similar, but comes with lots of under the hood enhancements.

Duotone, a Photo-blogging Theme

Background color options

Along with an enhanced color algorithm that automatically picks the best colors to accent your image, Duotone carries some nice options for choosing a static color background.

Duotone also sports a nice widget area down at the bottom of the page. Perfect for three widgets of your choice.

And to appeal to the avid photographers, EXIF data is now shown for photographs if it exists.

We hope you enjoy Duotone!

Check out the demo over at http://duotonedemo.wordpress.com

Check out the widget areas and EXIF data!


December 24, 2009 | 4:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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WordPress Holiday Desktop Wallpapers


This year, we teamed up with San Francisco artist Coley Wopperer to spread some WordPress-themed holiday cheer. We thought it turned out so well, we wanted to share it with everyone as a collection of desktop wallpapers. Sure to bring a smile to your face, even if you’re staring at spreadsheets all day. Happy holidays from all of us at Automattic!

320×480 (for mobile devices)
1024×768
1600×1200
1920×1080
1920×1200
2560×1440
2560×1600

Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows.


December 22, 2009 | 10:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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Email Geolocation


If you haven’t already tried our post by email feature then it makes blog publishing as simple as sending an email. Configure your blog, write an email, and we’ll do the rest. You can add photos and videos in your email and they’ll all be included, regardless of whether you send them from your home computer, your office, or a cellphone.

Last month we introduced a great geotagging feature that allows you to identify where you’re located when writing a post. This has now been linked in with post by email so you can send a photo, via email, from any GPS-enabled device and we’ll use that information to automatically set the location of your blog post. If you have an iPhone, for example, then take a photo, email it, and you’re all set.

As we roll out more geotagging features you’ll be able to use this information to show friends where you’ve eaten, to show places you’ve visited on vacation, or if you’re forgetful, to remind yourself where you’ve been.

Naturally you may not want your location to be public and the geo information will only be used if your personal profile allows it. Additionally, you can include the [geotag on] and [geotag off] shortcodes in your email to override your profile defaults.

Full details of all post by email shortcodes can be found on the support page. This includes how to include category and tags.


December 21, 2009 | 12:12 PM Comments  0 comments

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Support Holiday Hours


Happy holidays from the WordPress.com Happiness Team! We’re working hard getting ready for the holidays and sheltering from the snow.

We will be closing support for one week in order to spend time with our families whilst trying not to overcook the turkey, coping with relatives, and staying sane.

Support will be unavailable from 2pm EST on December 24th to 5am EST on January 2nd.

If you’re stuck, we have some great documentation, videos, and of course the wonderful volunteers over in the forums.

We will, however, be around in the forums as usual in case of any problems or urgent questions. We will also be working on documentation and generally improving WordPress.com support over the break. Stay happy!


December 18, 2009 | 2:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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Post and Read via Twitter API


The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging. We’ve seen ongoing growth at WordPress.com as people started using Twitter, and we expect that to continue.

Of course one of the coolest things about Twitter right now is the client applications, particularly the mobile/iPhone ones. I use Tweetie 2 on my iPhone every day. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get all your blog subscriptions and post to your WordPress.com blog from apps like Tweetie? Well here’s an early Christmas present…

We’ve enabled posting to and reading of WordPress.com blogs via the Twitter API. Any app that allows you to set a custom API URL will work. This project came out of our Quebec meetup and was developed by Team 55 (Andy, Terry, and Raphael).

For this walkthrough we’ll use Tweetie 2. To get started, launch Tweetie 2 and click the “Accounts” button. Then press the “+” button to add your WordPress.com account. Enter your WordPress.com username and password, and click on the gear icon under the password field.

For API Root, enter: https://twitter-api.wordpress.com/ and then click the Add Account button. (No search API… yet!) Save this account and after your information is verified you can start posting to your WordPress.com blog from Tweetie 2. (There’s more detailed info about setting up your WordPress.com profile to work with the Twitter API in our Support doc.)

Here’s what it looks like when I read WordPress.com blogs I’ve subscribed to in Tweetie.

You can write a status update and post to your WordPress.com blog and also have it displayed in the blog reading view.

If you’ve enabled geotagging for your posts, the geolocation data gets exposed as well. You can change what blog the posts go to under your profile.

APIs are Biz Dev 2.0, as Caterina Fake put it, our ability to connect Tweetie 2 to WordPress.com proves this out. We didn’t have to talk to Loren Brichter because he built custom API support into Tweetie 2 — thanks Loren! (As an aside, I’d love to see custom API support added to TweetDeck and Seesmic, my two favorite desktop Twitter clients.)

There are still some rough spots around the edges but the core posting and reading bits of the API are solid and the rest is coming soon. I see the Twitter API as one of the new de facto standards that as many applications should support as possible. (Amazon S3 API too, why don’t all cloud storage providers use that?) We’ll be open sourcing the server as a WordPress MU plugin, so that other people can take advantage of our work and benefit their readers and communities.


December 12, 2009 | 1:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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November Wrap-Up


Before we get to the stats, I should mention that at the top of my thankful-for list this Thanksgiving was our growing group of Automatticians. These are the folks who bring you the awesome features and improvements that you see here every month.

Last month we launched geolocation for profiles and posts, introduced a new P2, opened up our new translation platform, GlotPress, and launched email subscriptions. We also announced proofreading support in the HTML editor, rolled out some improvements to rssCloud, launched a video contest, and had a Black Friday sale on our upgrades.

Now to the stats:

  • 509,048 blogs were created.
  • 6,380,052 posts were published.
  • 483,127 new users joined.
  • 7,245,509 file uploads.
  • 4,728 gigabytes of new files.
  • 865 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 1,720,604 comments.
  • 7,516,584 logins.
  • 1,390,120,928 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,491,289,510 on self-hosted blogs (2,881,410,438 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 2,385,255 active blogs and 25,596,165 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,526,632,774 words.

More stuff:

There were more than 222 million unique visitors to WordPress.com in November, according to Quantcast.

The current top three languages on WordPress.com, excluding English, are Spanish (7.6%), Portuguese (4.6%), and Indonesian (4.5%).

We made speed improvements, UI enhancements, and added video library support to WordPress for BlackBerry.

WordCamp New York had a whopping 700+ attendees. Other WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, and WordCamp Bangkok.

Upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Peru and WordCamp Orlando.


December 8, 2009 | 3:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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A Little Snow for the Holidays


I’ve seen my fair share of snow growing up in northern Michigan. The sun was shining today, but there is a good chance we’ll have snow on the ground by the end of the week. My favorite things about snow have always been making snowmen, building snow forts, and having snowball fights.

Many of you don’t get a chance to experience the fluffy white stuff, so we’re bringing snow to WordPress.com like we’ve done the last two years. What do you like about snow?

To make it snow on your blog:

  1. Go to your dashboard.
  2. Navigate to Appearance -> Extras.
  3. Check the box next to “Show falling snow on this blog.”

If you used snow last year it is automatically turned back on. If you want to turn it off, follow the steps above but uncheck the box.

Older computers may run slow or stop responding due to snow. Use the following links if you run into a problem (the options below only affect your user account):

Prevent Snow
Allow Snow


December 2, 2009 | 6:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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Better Source Code Posting


For the coders among you, you may already know that posting source code is really easy here on WordPress.com thanks to the sourcecode shortcode. You just wrap your code in [sourcecode] and you’re good to go — no code escaping or anything.

If you are one of those code posters, or are looking to become one, then you’ll be happy to know that we’ve updated the feature allowing more flexibility as well as adding support for additional coding languages like Bash and SVN diff.

See for yourself — here’s some HTML with a little bit of PHP:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>WordPress.com Code Example</title> </head> <body> <h1>WordPress.com Code Example</h1> <p><?php echo 'Hello World!'; ?></p> <p>This line is highlighted.</p> <p>This line is very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long.</p> <divhttp://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/">in-depth support document.

This feature was implemented using Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter package. It’s also available as a plugin for WordPress.org users.


December 2, 2009 | 3:12 AM Comments  0 comments

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Black Friday 20 hour 20% off sale now on!


In the US there are some strange traditions, and one of them is the day after Thanksgiving when people line up from 3 or 4 in the morning to be the first people in a store when it opens to get some item for a really good price. This is ostensibly to get a head start on Christmas shopping.

We’ve decided to replicate this experience but without the cold, the early morning, or the scramble to get to the door first.

Right now you can get 20% off on all upgrades purchased on the Upgrades page on your blog. This is our Black Friday sale and must end in 20 hours time!

For example, you can get VideoPress for only $47.98, register a domain and map it for $11.98. Custom CSS costs $11.98 right now.

20% off everything, only for the next 20 hours. Check out the list of available upgrades to see what’s on offer then visit your Dashboard and click “Upgrades”.

This is the first sale we’ve ever had, and might be the only one.


November 27, 2009 | 11:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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Video Contest Extended!


Earlier this week, we launched a WordPress.com Video Contest all about giving thanks. No matter where on Earth you are, we invited you to submit a 30-second video all about the things that bring you joy. And it’s still on!

The new deadline for submissions is midnight Pacific time (UTC-8) on December 4, giving you an extra week to show us your awesome vids.

Remember, the winner of the contest wins a Flip Mino HD video camera, plus a one-year subscription to VideoPress!

To submit your entry, just post your video to your blog with the tag ThanksgivingContest09.


November 27, 2009 | 6:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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Blog Subscriptions


widget

There are many ways of reading WordPress.com blogs and we’ve now added another: email subscriptions.

This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.

If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.

All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.

Day trip — Inbox

HTML formatting will be used in emails, where possible, to retain the flavor of your post. This includes your images, making for attractive email photo galleries. Subscribers can also choose to receive emails in plain text, should they not have access to an HTML enabled mail client.

You can select to have an email sent each time a post is made, or to receive a daily or weekly digest of all the posts. Perfect for catching up on your reading at the weekend.

Want to keep up-to-date with all the latest WordPress.com developments? Subscribe to this very blog and get all future announcements delivered to your inbox. It really does only take a few seconds and you’ll find the form just after this text. Want to keep up-to-date without using email? Have posts sent direct to your Jabber-supporting instant messenger client, or try Readomattic to keep a list of your favourites. Remember that you can also subscribe to an individual post by checking the ‘notify me of follow-up comments via email’ when making a comment.

We’ve got a lot more plans for email so stay tuned!

Full details of the subscription feature can be found on the subscriptions support page.


November 25, 2009 | 2:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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Email Subscriptions


widget

There are many ways of reading WordPress.com blogs and we’ve now added another: blog subscriptions.

This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.

If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.

All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.

Day trip — Inbox

HTML formatting will be used in emails, where possible, to retain the flavor of your post. This includes your images, making for attractive email photo galleries. Subscribers can also choose to receive emails in plain text, should they not have access to an HTML enabled mail client.

You can select to have an email sent each time a post is made, or to receive a daily or weekly digest of all the posts. Perfect for catching up on your reading at the weekend.

Want to keep up-to-date with all the latest WordPress.com developments? Subscribe to this very blog and get all future announcements delivered to your inbox. It really does only take a few seconds and you’ll find the form just after this text. Want to keep up-to-date without using email? Have posts sent direct to your Jabber-supporting instant messenger client, or try Readomattic to keep a list of your favourites. Remember that you can also subscribe to an individual post by checking the ‘notify me of follow-up comments via email’ when making a comment.

We’ve got a lot more plans for email so stay tuned!

Full details of the subscription feature can be found on the subscriptions support page.


November 25, 2009 | 2:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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WordPress.com Video Contest: Giving Thanks


Announcing our first-ever video contest, brought to you by turkey, stuffing, and that gelatinous stuff that grandma calls cranberry sauce. Yes, that’s U.S. Thanksgiving. Appropriate to the occasion, the topic is giving thanks.

While it’s inspired by the holiday, it’s in no way limited to residents of the U.S. Whether you’re in Jacksonville, Jakarta or Johannesburg, you’re invited to take stock of all that you’re thankful for, and share it with the WordPress community through video.

To enter the contest, embed your video in a blog post tagged with ThanksgivingContest09, any time between November 23 and 27. We’ll announce the winners the following week.

We’re looking for creative interpretations on the topic, not confessional-style orated lists. Maybe it’s a montage of tiny moments that fill you with joy, a mini-documentary of your family traditions, or a strange stop-motion adventure about the things you treasure most. Check out our announcement video for even more ideas:

While there’s no limit to the ways you can express yourself, we do have two requests:

  • Keep it rated G (obviously).
  • Keep it under 30 seconds. It sounds short but, trust us, you can fit a lot of amazing things into that timeframe.

Videos that don’t meet those two requirements will be disqualified.

The first place winner will receive a one-year subscription to the VideoPress upgrade (or an additional year, for those who already have it), along with a sleek new Flip Mino HD camera!

For the runners-up, there’s lovely WordPress apparel and mugs, plus a very special WordPress Moleskine notebook, not available in our online shop.

The contest ends at midnight Pacific time (UTC -8) on November 27. To translate that to your timezone, you can calculate it on The World Clock.

If you aren’t sure how to embed video on WordPress.com, check out our handy Support resources. You can even upload videos straight to your Media Library, with the VideoPress upgrade.

All best to our contestants. We look forward to seeing what your brainy brains come up with!



November 20, 2009 | 12:11 PM Comments  0 comments

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A New Translation Platform


The full translation of WordPress.com is an ongoing process, of which you are a great part and whom we thank for the patience and assistance. Thanks to you, WordPress.com is now available in 60+ languages (and, yes, before you ask, esperanto, too). As you know, any text that shows up on your dashboard, widgets or (most) themes can be shown in one of the supported languages, by specifying a different language in the Language Settings of your blog’s dashboard.

Up to now the platform used for translation was simple and worked, but not only did it lack features that have been requested over time, but also made the approval and deploy process slow at times. Given the accelerated pace at which new features have been rolling out, we have been working on a new and improved translation platform that will make life easier for all involved.

Enter GlotPress, the new open source GPL project from Automattic, that is now the engine behind WordPress.com translations. Here are the most important changes:

  • Filters for everything,
  • Pagination! (no more filtering through thousands of strings),
  • Faster, optimized process of string validation and deployment,
  • Much easier to add new languages.

In the future we will bring in other cool stuff like keyboard shortcuts, more social functions (user profiles, comments, tags). We are pushing GlotPress live without them, because we were so impatient to deliver something better than the old system, that we focused on the most important features only.

Smoother sailing with GlotPress

Be sure to read the support pages on internationalization and on GlotPress, then dive into your language’s strings to make sure WordPress.com displays your language the way it should.

A few notes:

  • Translations were generally approved by one of us at Automattic, but we can only validate so much as we don’t speak all the languages (we try, though!), so that we now support “validator” profiles on GlotPress, for those users who want to help out in semantic and consistency validation (and not just technical). If you feel this is something you might want to sink your teeth into, please drop us a line in the forums.
  • Remember that for the 10 or so most spoken languages, we import those language communities’ translations directly, overwriting existing strings, at every new release. We strongly encourage you to get in touch with the .org translators for your particular idiom.
  • If you are a programmer and wish to contribute to the GlotPress code self, there’s a Trac for the project, where you can browse the code and contribute with patches and additions.

November 19, 2009 | 8:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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A New P2


The New P2

For those of you who haven’t yet tried it, P2 is an awesome micro blogging theme with quick front end posting, live ajax updating, and inline threaded comments. It already packs a big punch.

So how can an already great theme be taken to the next level? That was the task of Team 34 at this year’s Automattic retreat.

One of the first areas we thought could be improved was the ease of customization. Most people like to add their own personal touch to a theme, currently P2 is hard to customize beyond the standard design. We’ve added new options to allow you to hide the sidebar and even set a unique header image. All these options allow you to personalize your own P2 to match your tastes.

We’ve also introduced post types into P2. Now you can post different types of content and have them formatted and displayed in a way that fits the content beautifully. There are settings for standard posts, single images and galleries, as well as links and quotes. Selecting which post type to use is as simple as clicking the correct tab above the post box.

We also decided to go a step further and rework P2 so that it could easily be used as a parent theme and extended with child themes. This will allow theme designers to create awesome new theme designs without having to duplicate all of the existing P2 features. We’ve streamlined the HTML of the theme so that it is much more flexible for creating new designs using CSS. We’ve also added a large number of template based hooks that will allow plugin developers to hook into the theme and output extended functionality.

The new P2 theme is now live on WordPress.com, and soon to be available for download from the WordPress.org theme repository.


November 18, 2009 | 9:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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A Blog Near You


During the Automattic company meetup, Team 21* holed up in a cottage outside Québec to create a new set of features for a blog near you (literally!). Have you ever wondered where in the world a blog post was written? Where a commenter was located? If there were other WordPress.com bloggers near you? If so, hold on to your hat, because you’re going to love the geotagging and geolocation features we’re introducing.

Starting today, when you log in to write a post, you have the option of identifying your location. For browsers that support it, we can get this information automatically through the magic of 21st century technology and you just have to double-check to make sure the location is correct. You can also enter your location manually. This feature is opt-in, meaning that if you don’t want anyone to know where you were when you wrote a post, that’s okay.

Enter an address, click the map, or auto detect your location

In addition to geotagging posts, you can also geotag your profile. Interested in reading blogs by other people in your area? A quick search will find them, and in the future could even be used to organize local WordPress.com user meetups.

Right now, we’re only collecting and exposing geodata for posts and profiles. Geotagged posts get marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds.

This is all machine readable data: hidden from display. What good is it if it’s hidden? It tells search engines where your posts are located, and with browser plugins like Operator and Geo, you can view geo information on any web page (not just WordPress.com geotagged posts).

The machine readable data is cool and geeky, but what about something for us humans? Right now, we don’t display geo data anywhere in a human readable way. Don’t worry, though. We’ll be launching theme integration, various maps, widgets, and shortcodes soon.

This is just the beginning. Building on this platform, we’ll gradually roll out more geotagging features, such as showing the location of your commenters, the location of poll votes, a live map view of blog updates on WordPress.com, or an annual report showing you where your posts were written and where your comments came from — kind of a blogger’s version of the Dopplr annual travel report.

For now, we’re pretty psyched about the geotagging and (the upcoming) search of posts and profiles and hope you’ll all give this new feature a try! If there are other geotagging features you’d like to see built on this foundation, suggest them in the comments!

For more information, check out the Geotagging support page.

Note: We’re holding off on launching the geo search feature until we start getting some data (from you!). So start geotagging :)

*Team 21 consisted of Jane, Jon, Mike and Stephane.


November 12, 2009 | 6:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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WordCamp NYC This Weekend!


WordCampNYC shirt

This weekend, November 14-15, a whole bunch of the friendly faces from Automattic and WordPress.com will be in New York City to attend WordCamp NYC. If you’re a NYC area local (and really, with Acela service being what it is, doesn’t that almost mean anywhere from Boston to D.C.?), we hope you’ll join us at what’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting WordCamps of all time.

(Okay, I’m one of the organizers, so of course *I* think it will be awesome, but in this case, I’m right!)

What’s so great about this WordCamp? Allow me to tell you:

  • 8 tracks of content, to cover every WordPress-lover’s area of interest/expertise*
  • Over 50 confirmed speakers for Saturday’s sessions
  • Sunday morning unconference
  • Sunday afternoon “Best of WordCamp NYC” Ignite-style recap
  • Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com
  • Theme/Plugin Competition, Project Runway style
  • Fantastic shirts
  • Yummy lunch on Saturday
  • Door prize raffle
  • Genius Bar to help people with their WordPress woes (meet the Happiness Engineers in person!)
  • Hacker Room for hardcore developers who want to contribute to the open source project

We’re being hosted by Baruch College, a great venue in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. We will not be streaming WordCamp NYC online due to bandwidth limitations, but we hope to post videos from the event on WordPress.tv after it’s over.

It’s like 2 days of WordPress Paradise for less than going out to dinner (thanks to generous sponsors like Microsoft, Media Temple and other great companies). Over 550 people have already signed up. What are you waiting for? Get your ticket now and come meet us there!

*Tracks are: Newbies, Bloggers, CMS, Beginning Developer, Advanced Developer, BuddyPress/MU, Academic, and Open Source Community.


November 10, 2009 | 9:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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Happy Birthday Firefox


FirefoxNovember 9th 2009 is Firefox’s fifth birthday. Firefox and WordPress have grown up next to each other so we’ve always felt a brethren spirit with their team as we work toward the same goal, making the web a better place, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Just out of curiosity, I wondered how Firefox was doing in our browser stats compared to the posts I did in 2008 and 2007.

  1. Firefox — 45.7%
  2. Internet Explorer — 38.7%
  3. Safari — 8.75%
  4. Chrome — 5.2%

This is the first time I’ve ever seen Firefox pass IE in market share for a mainstream audience like WordPress.com has.

As you can see, competition in the browser market is still alive and well. Of everything available, Firefox still continues to be my primary browser for every day usage. (And Thunderbird for my email.)

Take a few minutes and wish them a happy birthday.

(The statistics were tabulated from server access logs and include WordPress.com users as well as visitors, as we no longer run Google Analytics across WordPress.com.)


November 9, 2009 | 1:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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rssCloud Update


Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.

Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.

An issue that was specific to WordPress.com also came up. Under certain conditions it was possible to get a cached version of an RSS feed that didn’t have the most recent post in it, even after receiving a rssCloud ping that the feed had been updated. Now we make sure the feed cache is updated before sending out an update ping.

Enough of the technical bits, how about some stats! More than 135,000 blogs hosted on WordPress.com have at least one rssCloud notification registration. During the first week of October WordPress.com sent an average of 83,000 update pings per day. Today we average more than 105,000 update pings per day.

We’re just at the beginning of the trend towards push notifications, keep an eye out for more announcements in this area.


November 5, 2009 | 11:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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rssCloud Update


Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.

Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.

An issue that was specific to WordPress.com also came up. Under certain conditions it was possible to get a cached version of an RSS feed that didn’t have the most recent post in it, even after receiving a rssCloud ping that the feed had been updated. Now we make sure the feed cache is updated before sending out an update ping.

Enough of the technical bits, how about some stats! More than 135,000 blogs hosted on WordPress.com have at least one rssCloud notification registration. During the first week of October WordPress.com sent an average of 83,000 update pings per day. Today we average more than 105,000 update pings per day.

We’re just at the beginning of the trend towards push notifications, keep an eye out for more announcements in this area.


November 5, 2009 | 11:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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rssCloud Update


Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.

Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.

An issue that was specific to WordPress.com also came up. Under certain conditions it was possible to get a cached version of an RSS feed that didn’t have the most recent post in it, even after receiving a rssCloud ping that the feed had been updated. Now we make sure the feed cache is updated before sending out an update ping.

Enough of the technical bits, how about some stats! More than 135,000 blogs hosted on WordPress.com have at least one rssCloud notification registration. During the first week of October WordPress.com sent an average of 83,000 update pings per day. Today we average more than 105,000 update pings per day.

We’re just at the beginning of the trend towards push notifications, keep an eye out for more announcements in this area.


November 5, 2009 | 11:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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October Wrap-Up


October was another busy and productive month. We released Publicize for Yahoo! Updates and Twitter, and upgraded the Theme Viewer for WordPress.com. Coming out of the Automattic team meetup in Québec City, we launched new image templates and mobile themes, and open sourced our After the Deadline proofreader. We also shipped WordPress 2 for iPhone and added support to VideoPress for Ogg, an open video format.

Many of us will be heading out to the Big Apple this month for WordCamp New York, and we hope to see you there!

Here are the stats for October:

  • 467,107 blogs were created.
  • 6,690,017 posts were published.
  • 494,186 new users joined.
  • 7,623,730 file uploads.
  • 4,986 gigabytes of new files.
  • 842 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 9,281,146 comments.
  • 7,856,864 logins.
  • 1,405,459,558 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,474,457,685 on self-hosted blogs (2,879,917,243 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 2,509,895 active blogs and 25,386,866 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,600,608,549 words.

More good stuff:

Almost 100 of you heeded the call to get creative with the WordPress logo.

There were 23,458,553 mobile views last month.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched Investor.gov on WordPress.com VIP.

WordPress was cited as one of the leading open source content management systems in the 2009 Open Source CMS Report.

Wired magazine’s digital presence is now run entirely on WordPress.

October WordCamps: WordCamp Spain, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Kyoto, and WordCamp Netherlands.

WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, WordCamp New York, WordCamp Bangkok, WordCamp Mexico, and WordCamp Peru.


November 4, 2009 | 11:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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Proofreading support for the HTML Editor


When we announced After the Deadline, the proofreading tool used on WordPress.com, many of you asked us to add proofreading to the HTML Editor.

The HTML Editor lets you edit the HTML in your posts and pages directly. It is also very lightweight.

We’ve been hard at work and now you can check your spelling, style, and grammar from the HTML Editor. Here is a screenshot:

AtD checks spelling, style, and grammar in the HTML Editor too

The proofreader for the HTML Editor has the same features as the one for the Visual Editor.

Click proofread to check your post for errors.

Click edittext to resume editing your post.

You can learn more about the proofreading feature on our support page.

For self-hosted blogs, the After the Deadline WordPress.org plugin has this new feature as well.


November 3, 2009 | 2:11 AM Comments  0 comments

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Vote on the WordPress Logo Entries


Last week you had fun with the WordPress logo. We received nearly 100 entries and many of you have been patiently waiting for news. You don’t have to wait any longer. Here are our favorites split into 5 categories. Cast your votes to pick the final winners. Voting will close on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 12pm EST. Click an image to see the large version displayed in the user’s blog post.

Brownie Bites

Brownie Bites

Needle Cushion

Needle Cushion

View This Poll
survey software


Anime

Anime

Superman

Superman

View This Poll
trends


Multiple Choice

Multiple Choice

Scrabble

Scrabble

View This Poll
poll


Hollywood

Hollywood

Starry Night

Starry Night

View This Poll
polls


Balloon

Balloon

Beach

Beach

View This Poll
surveys



October 23, 2009 | 8:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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VideoPress supports Ogg


As strong believers in open source technology, we were excited when Firefox started supporting the new HTML video tag this past summer. It has the potential to transform the future of online video.

While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video can be played directly on browsers that  support HTML 5, such as Firefox 3.5 and Chrome. Watch this video in Firefox 3.5.

*You can embed HD-quality videos into your blog using VideoPress.


October 21, 2009 | 6:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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The Hero Is In Your Pocket


As technology advances, mobile devices are playing a bigger role in our lives. Thousands of you have been using the iPhone and Blackberry applications to post and edit content for your blog, and over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices. New smartphones do a great job with most web sites, but older phones have many problems and may not display anything at all.

Today we’re launching a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone.

The first theme is a modification of WPtouch and will be displayed to phones with modern web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones. The second theme was developed from an older version of the WordPress Mobile Edition and will be displayed to all other mobile devices.

iphone-wptouchwp-mobile

Mobile visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives. They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading. If you are using a custom header image, it will be scaled to size and displayed at the top of your blog. When viewing your blog on other phones, the focus will be on loading the blog quickly while displaying the important information about your content.

If you would like to disable mobile themes on your blog, go to Appearance->Extras in the Dashboard and uncheck Display a mobile theme when this blog is viewed with a mobile browser. For more details, be sure to check out the Mobile Themes support page.


October 20, 2009 | 10:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Display Your Photos In Style


Our team loves photography and we hope you do too. While taking countless photos in Quebec, we thought it would be an appropriate time to update the image templates for all of the WordPress.com themes.

If you are using galleries or inserting one image at a time into your posts, you can take advantage of the updated image templates. Make sure to click the Post URL button in the Link URL area when inserting your images or configuring a gallery. When you do this, the images will then link to the image attachment page.

When viewing an image attachment page:

  • The image will automatically be displayed to fit the content width of the theme.
  • If set, a caption and description will display beneath the image.
  • Small thumbnails with links to the previous and next image are shown.
  • If the image is part of a gallery, the title will provide a link back to the gallery permalink URL.
Redoable Lite Image Template

Redoable Lite Image Template

White as Milk Image Template

White as Milk Image Template


October 18, 2009 | 6:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Publicize: Twitter


We dig Twitter over here at WordPress.com (check us out at @wordpressdotcom). With the launch of our newest Publicize feature, we dig it even more since you can now tweet your WordPress.com posts automatically.

Publicize - Twitter

You can stick with the default, automatically generated tweet, or customize it to your heart’s content.

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Twitter account.

Just like the Yahoo! Updates Publicize feature, these connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Twitter accounts separately.

More details can be found on the Publicize support page.


October 8, 2009 | 1:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Support Hours and WordPress Logo Fun


As Matt mentioned in the September Wrap-Up, the Automattic crew is heading to Québec City to work on some top-secret projects. It worked well when we closed the email support system for our London Support meetup, so we’ve decided to do it again.

Support will be unavailable from 10 a.m. EST on Friday, October 9 to 4 a.m. EST on Monday, October 19.

Of course, our team will still be monitoring servers and services while we’re out to keep you blogging smoothly and safely. In the meantime, we encourage you to read through the Support docs and make use of the WordPress.com forums (which are full of friendly users like you) if you need a little help.

wp-wheelWhile we’re away, we’ll be running a contest to see who can use the WordPress logo in the most creative way. Take advantage of your camera, graphics applications, crayons, and anything else you have at your disposal. Create a post on your WordPress.com blog, upload your image or images, and leave a comment here with the URL of your post. Please make sure to leave the URL to your post in the comment text or the entry will not be accepted.

wp-milkWe’ll get you started by providing some official WordPress logos, but the rest is up to you. I’m sure you can do better than the photos I’ve included here. We’ll keep an eye on submissions and post some of them to the @wordpressdotcom Twitter account during the week.

The deadline for submissions will be 4 p.m. EST on Monday, October 19.

We’ll create categories based on the best submissions and run polls to let you select the winners. Prizes will include WordPress.com upgrades, swag, and maybe other surprises. Good luck!


October 7, 2009 | 9:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Access to Premium Images


We all love adding great images to our blog posts, and today we’ve enabled a new WordPress.com Shortcode that adds millions of available premium images to the mix, all for free.

The Shortcode is for a service called PicApp, which offers up to the minute sports, news, and celebrity images from some of the top photographers and agencies throughout the world.

Looking for that shot of Eli Manning of the NY Giants throwing a perfect pass during this weekend’s NFL game ? A search for “Giants” brings up a few good ones:

What about a photo for your political post about Obama:

Or do you need a recent photo of Stella McCartney from this week’s fashion show in Paris?:

To add these and other great images, just locate the “For WordPress.com” Shortcode when viewing an image on PicApp and paste it into your post:
PicApp-WPCOM-Shortcode-640

Here is also a brief video overview of how it all works:

The related-images strip you see embedded at the bottom of each photo links to pages on PicApp.com that help support the photographers and agencies involved with these images. For more details on the related-images strip, modifying the image size, and how to copy the WordPress.com Shortcode, please read the documentation in our support area.

And for self-hosted WordPress sites, be sure to grab the plugin at WordPress.org.



October 6, 2009 | 10:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Free Access to Premium Images


We all love adding great images to our blog posts, and today we’ve enabled a new WordPress.com Shortcode that adds millions of available premium images to the mix, all for free.

The Shortcode is for a service called PicApp, which offers up to the minute sports, news, and celebrity images from some of the top photographers and agencies throughout the world.

Looking for that shot of Eli Manning of the NY Giants throwing a perfect pass during this weekend’s NFL game ? A search for “Giants” brings up a few good ones:

What about a photo for your political post about Obama:

Or do you need a recent photo from Stella McCartney’s fashion show in Paris this week?:

To add these and other great images, just locate the “For WordPress.com” Shortcode when viewing an image on PicApp and paste it into your post:
PicApp-WPCOM-Shortcode-640

Here is also a brief video overview of how it all works:

The related-images strip you see embedded at the bottom of each photo links to pages on PicApp.com that help support the photographers and agencies involved with these images. For more details on the related-images strip, modifying the image size, and how to copy the WordPress.com Shortcode, please read the documentation in our support area.

And for self-hosted WordPress sites, be sure to grab the plugin at WordPress.org.



October 6, 2009 | 10:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Theme Viewer


We know you love themes and we know you like to try new ones. With our new super-charged theme viewer this is now even easier than before.

overview-1

The new theme viewer let’s you quickly step through themes without reloading the page. You can search for specific words (for example, ‘orange’), and you can filter by requirements (for example, ‘two columns’).

filters

Still not sure what to pick? The random feature will select 15 themes at random, which may help jog your inspiration. Want to pick something that few others are using? You can also view themes in order of their popularity. Join in with everyone else or be independant, the choice is a few clicks away.

Still can’t find a theme to your liking? Don’t forget our Sandbox theme. It’s a simple and clean theme that is designed to be used with the CSS upgrade to give you control over how your blog looks (check out this site for Sandbox examples). If you’re not too sure about using CSS then our recently introduced CSS revisions feature will give you the reassurance that if something goes wrong you can quickly jump back to an earlier version.

If you haven’t changed your theme in a while then give the new theme viewer a try – you may discover a whole new look!

Full details about the theme viewer can be found on the theme viewer support page.


October 5, 2009 | 10:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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Publicize: Yahoo! Updates


You can now send your WordPress.com posts to your Yahoo! Profile via the Yahoo! Updates service.

Yahoo! Update

Check out that cute WordPress icon!

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Yahoo! account.

These connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Yahoo! accounts separately.

More details can be found on the Publicize support page.

Yahoo! Updates is the prestigious first of a series of Publicize features we’ll be launching or highlighting over the coming months.


October 1, 2009 | 6:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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September Wrap-Up


September was a big month for us. We acquired proofreading service After the Deadline, and launched it as a feature on WordPress.com. We implemented RSS Cloud and custom CSS revisions. The Happiness Engineers rolled out two new widgets: the RSS Links widget and the Image Widget, along with other improvements. We also launched a new theme: DePo Square.

Next month the Automattic crew is heading to Quebec City for our biannual meetup. This is our time for working on special projects, like comment reply by e-mail, blavatars, and the original Prologue. More surprises are on the way.

On to the stats for September:

  • 448,025 blogs were created.
  • 6,325,895 posts were published.
  • 481,505 new users joined.
  • 7,113,257 file uploads.
  • 5,384 gigabytes of new files.
  • 816 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 8,845,411 comments.
  • 7,827,502 logins.
  • 1,317,218,759 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,350,080,907 on self-hosted blogs (2,667,299,666 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 2,244,794 active blogs and 23,395,291 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,510,819,760 words.

More neat stuff:

300,037 of you made use of After the Deadline.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle and the University of British Columbia are using WordPress.

Student Life relaunched on WordPress MU.

The NASA Glenn Research Center launched a resource guide for WordPress development.

September WordCamps: WordCamp Los Angeles, WordCamp Romania, WordCamp Portland, WordCamp Philippines, WordCamp Seattle, and WordCamp Birmingham.

WordCamps in October: WordCamp Spain, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Kyoto, and WordCamp Netherlands.


October 1, 2009 | 1:10 AM Comments  0 comments

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New Theme: DePo Square


Today we’re bringing you yet another theme designed by Derek Powazek: DePo Square.

DePo Square

This theme looks great! Minimal, simple, yet unique. But, it doesn’t stop with great design. This theme comes with a seriously cool feature: post types.

Map your categories to one of five pre-defined post types — Status, Quote, Link, or Quickie — and your content will be displayed in a format special to those types.

Just select your category mappings by visiting the “Current Theme Options” under “Apperance”. No CSS or other formatting is necessary. However, if you have the CSS Upgrade you can definitely tweak those styles to your heart’s content.

You can set your widgets at the top of your blog, including special widgets just for your statuses and Flickr stream. The DePo Square Flickr Widget is formatted just right for this design.

Some Links

A "Link" Post Type

Mapping Categories

Mapping Categories


September 30, 2009 | 6:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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The Image Widget, Plus News from Support


Last month, the Support team (also known as Happiness Engineers) got together to brainstorm new ways of providing you with the features and resources you need.

Out of that meetup came a number of improvements and features, like the RSS Links Widget, introduced earlier this month. Another is the Image Widget, launching today.

In the past, it was necessary to use HTML in a text widget to display images in your sidebar. Now all you have to do is plop a URL in the image widget. The rest is done for you. If you’d like to set a title, alternate text, and image size, it’ll do that, too.

image-widget-example

And there’s more cool stuff coming your way:

We’ve made some improvements to the Support contact form, and a better search for Support is in the works. We’ve made some internal changes, too, that will help our growing team answer your questions even more efficiently.

There’s now a Hugs page to display some of the positive feedback we receive from those of you who write in to Support. It brightens our day to hear that we’ve helped out, so we’re sharing a bit of that love. :)

Maybe most excitingly, we’re going to start providing Support in other languages — a much-requested feature. The first of these will be French, with several others to follow. We’ll post announcements here when each is launched.


September 29, 2009 | 11:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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Imaginative CSS


I’m constantly finding sites on WordPress.com that leave me happily surprised. I ran across Wir sprechen Online a few weeks ago and just kept coming back to it. For both the content and the design.

Wir sprechen Online

Wir sprechen Online is a P2 powered blog written in both German and English with content ranging from tech tid-bits to personal posts. Aside from the great content, I love how the site has taken advantage of the CSS Upgrade. The customized header, tweaked colors, and other nice little edits have really given the page a face of its own. It never fails to impress me what a little CSS can do – a little goes a long way.


September 29, 2009 | 2:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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Custom CSS Revisions


Customizing your theme just got easier! The Custom CSS Upgrade now provides the ability to save revisions of your code and uses the same engine that WordPress uses for post revisions.

If you currently have the CSS upgrade, you can see this in action by logging in to your WordPress admin and going to Appearance->Edit CSS. Click the “Save Stylesheet” button. You should now see the CSS Revisions box below the preview and save buttons. Note: the revisions box will appear on the CSS editing screen only after you have saved at least one revision of the CSS.
revision-metabox

If you click on one of the links in the CSS Revisions box, you will be able to visually compare different versions of your CSS.
revision-diff-cropped

If you’ve ever considered the CSS upgrade, now’s a great time to take the leap. With this new CSS revisions feature, you’ll be able to make changes to the look of your theme without worrying about losing earlier versions, and can see how CSS changes will affect your blog’s appearance. To get the upgrade and start editing your theme’s CSS today, just log in to your WordPress.com Dashboard and click on Upgrades in the upper left menu.

*Not sure what we’re talking about? Here’s a short description of what you can and can’t do with CSS on WordPress.com.


September 28, 2009 | 3:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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RSS Links Widget


Hard at WorkThe Happiness Engineers had a great time in London last week. We worked on some cool projects and came up with a lot of great ideas. We’ll bring more updates to you over the coming weeks and months.

One of the items we worked on is a widget we call RSS Links, which allows you to display text and/or image links to the comment and post feeds of your blog.

rss-links-widget-sidebar

No need to mess around with HTML in a text widget. Go to Appearance->Widgets in your Dashboard, add the RSS Links widget, configure, and save. For a full explanation of the options, head over to the RSS Links Widget Support document.

We’ve got another highly requested widget in the works. Stay tuned. :-)


September 9, 2009 | 10:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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After the Deadline Live for WP.com


Last week you guys published 1.4 million new blog posts, but you only ran the spell checker about 204 thousand times. Ahem. The two possible explanations for this are that we’re all perfect writers or that we just forget to run the spell checker. I’m in the latter camp.

I don’t blame you — spell checkers are usually pretty lame. They are bad with most proper nouns and usually my problem isn’t spelling (which my browser catches), but grammar and style.

It’s amazing to me how hard it is to edit one’s own writing. I can read something I’ve written ten times, even speak it out loud, and miss obvious errors and mistakes that an editor (often Jane) spots on their first pass. And what if Jane isn’t around?

Now there’s a solution for everybody. It’s already live on your blog, and it’s from a company called After the Deadline. Here’s a video to introduce you to it:

When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used, and it was by one guy building this thing that solves a problem other folks have teams of PhDs trying to solve. I reached out to Raphael (the one guy) to see how we could get this technology in front of WordPress users and ended up doing a deal for Automattic to buy his entire company.

The other cool thing about this new technology is that it’s getting better every day — Raphael is constantly adding new rules and heuristics, and the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter.

At its core WordPress has always been about writing — that’s why we put so much effort into things like the visual editor, revisions, and auto-save, so you never lose your work. Now you have another arrow in your quiver to help you present the best possible face to your readers and the world.

As the video above shows, you can enable and customize the way After the Deadline analyzes your posts by adjusting the new Proofreading settings in your profile, and then use the new feature by clicking on the icon in the Visual Editor toolbar that has ABC and a green checkmark on it. After the Deadline will analyze your post as you write it and highlight potential errors with an underline (red for spelling, green for grammar, blue for style), similar to grammar and spell checkers in word processing software. Clicking on a highlighted word or phrase will reveal the suggested correction, tell you why it’s suspected to be an error, and allow you to accept or ignore it.

You can read more about the story behind Automattic acquiring After the Deadline on the official AtD blog.

This feature is English-only for now (give us a little time) and available for WordPress.org as a plugin.



September 8, 2009 | 4:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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RSS in the Clouds


Pretty clouds

Clouds from my trip to WordCamp Dallas

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a way for people to subscribe to updates to your blog using a client like Google Reader or Bloglines. You may not know what RSS is but chances are people are using it to read your blog. We track over 50,000,000 posts read via RSS every week. (Around a 18% addition to our on-site views!)

Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud, which is basically a way for people to get push notification that your feed has updated.

Why is this important? Right now how most people interact with feeds is by checking that it updated every now and then, usually about once an hour. Can you imagine waiting an hour to get your emails? (The world would probably be more productive.) RSS Cloud is an extra element in your RSS feed that allows subscribers to say “Hey, let me know as soon as you’ve updated, kthx.”

WordPress.com has always supported update pings through Ping-o-Matic so folks like Google Reader can get your posts as soon as they’re posted, but getting every ping in the world is a lot of work so not that many people subscribe to Ping-o-Matic. RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.

What does this mean to you? Well probably not too much yet, there’s only one reader so far (River2) that supports RSS cloud, but we expect there to be more in the future. We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible, making blogging a more real-time experience. Since RSS Cloud is so easy to add to RSS, it seemed like a good place to start.

You can read a bit more about this on Dave Winer’s blog, ReadWriteWeb, and Techcrunch. If this sort of thing gets your motor running there will be a RSS Cloud meetup in Berkeley this Wednesday, which I’ll be at assuming the Bay Bridge cooperates.

P.S. Happy Labor day!


September 7, 2009 | 6:09 AM Comments  0 comments

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August Wrap-Up


I’m back in San Francisco after a trip to London for the Happiness Engineer meetup. It’s serious business, but the group has managed to have a little fun along the way.

londoneyegroup

Our developers have been hard at work, too. In August, we launched the SoundCloud shortcode and WP.me, a URL shortener for WordPress blogs. And at your request, we introduced two new themes: iNove and Sandbox 1.6.1.

Here are last month’s stats:

426,047 blogs were created.
4,560,168 posts were published.
455,423 new users joined.
6,658,426 file uploads.
3990 gigabytes of new files.
787 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
8,379,530 comments.
7,498,064 logins.
2,153,498 active blogs and 22,855,350 active posts, where “active” means they had a human visitor.
1,267,201,336 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,296,959,079 on self-hosted blogs (2,564,160,415 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
1,567,468,503 words.

Other cool stuff:

You published 11,425 posts to your blogs using the Beta WordPress for BlackBerry app.

Brazil’s Culture Ministry chose BuddyPress as their platform for public debate. The vehicle security service OnStar is using WordPress MU, bbPress and Gravatars on their new community site.

WordCamps in August: WordCamp New Zealand and WordCamp Huntsville.

Upcoming WordCamps in September: WordCamp Los Angeles, WordCamp Romania, WordCamp Philippines, WordCamp Portland, WordCamp Seattle, and WordCamp Birmingham.


September 4, 2009 | 12:09 PM Comments  0 comments

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Support Hours and Updates


In the coming week, the Support crew (seen among the lovely faces here) will be meeting in London to brainstorm new ways of providing you with the resources you need. While us Happiness Engineers are putting our heads together to churn out some big ideas, we’ll be closing our email support system.

Support will be unavailable from 10 a.m. EST on Friday, August 28 to 4 a.m. EST on Monday, September 7.

Of course, our team will still be monitoring servers and services while we’re out to keep you blogging smoothly and safely. In the meantime, we encourage you to read through the Support pages and make use of the forums, which are full of helpful users like you.


August 26, 2009 | 4:08 AM Comments  0 comments

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New Theme: Sandbox 1.6.1


Sandbox 1.6.1 is now available to all WordPress.com blogs.

Alongside Sandbox 1.6.1 you’ll also find the older Sandbox versions. We’ve left them intact. If you’ve been using them, don’t worry, they haven’t changed. However, we do urge you to check out 1.6.1.

Sandbox is a skeleton theme for WordPress. Though you can use it by itself, it’s mainly intended for dressing up with a custom Custom CSS Stylesheet upgrade. Sandbox provides all the HTML markup, with a rich semantic structure, and all sorts of microformats and standards built in. You provide the stylesheet, which controls the appearance: layout, colors, fonts and so forth.

If you’re using an older version of Sandbox and are unsure whether Sandbox 1.6.1 is a good upgrade, or whether Sandbox 1.6.1 will work with your current custom stylesheet, here’s how you can try it out:

  1. Visit Appearance/Themes then find Sandbox 1.6.1.
  2. Click Preview.
  3. If all looks good, activate the theme.

We hope you enjoy this great update to a very powerful and popular theme!


August 20, 2009 | 2:08 AM Comments  0 comments

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WP.me — shorten your links


shortlink

Check out this address:

http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten

If you visit it, you’ll end up right back here. The nice thing about it is that it’s a short link, about  70% smaller than the permalink for this post. URL shorteners are nothing new, Tiny URL has been around for 100 years, but WP.me is different in a few ways.

  • WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
  • Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
  • These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
  • It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
  • The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
  • WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

I think a few of these points are worth following up on. While URL shorteners have had some incredible usage tied to the growth (and constraints) of Twitter, I question their sustainability as a business. This point was underscored a few days ago when a popular one, tr.im, announced they were going to shut down at the end of the year.

Their story had a happy ending in that someone came in and saved them, but it was hard not to think of what would have happened if all their links stopped redirecting one day: part of the web would go dark. I also worry that because shorteners are essentially open proxies of HTTP they’ll be exploited by spammers and malware distributors to the point where businesses, anti-phishing, and anti-virus services will be forced to block them.

WordPress links have the structure they do, which is longer, because they’re meant to be permanent and portable. (And of course friendly to search engines.) Even if you weren’t using WordPress, the links contain no arbitrary IDs or other platform-specific implementation cruft so they should be trivial to serve from any system, even if you don’t use WordPress in the future. But if all the links to you use a shorter version, that sort of defeats the point!

But as Dave Winer articulated, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a shortener ourselves, and here we are. :) People are already using it.

How can you use it?

There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasure.

If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.com, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.

Our thanks also go out to our friends at GoDaddy and in Montenegro for help with the domain.


August 14, 2009 | 2:08 AM Comments  0 comments

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SoundCloud


We are big fans of SoundCloud, a really useful service that is part Flickr for music, part professional music collaboration hub. Artists such as Beck, Moby and Sonic Youth now use the service to distribute tracks through their blogs and connect with their fans.

We’ve received many requests from WordPress.com bloggers that they would like us to work with SoundCloud to enable this service, and today we have some good news for you! You can now easily embed the SoundCloud player on your WordPress.com blog.

To embed SoundCloud groups or member track playlists or a single track in your blog, explore the SoundCloud website or use the search feature to find a sound that you like.

Once you’ve located a song that you want to embed, copy the URL of that song from your browser’s address bar to your clipboard or click on the “Share” icon and locate the “WordPress” button:

soundcloud

soundcloud-2

Your shortcode should now look similar to this this:

[soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/meat-katie/meat-katie-vs-friends-of-mine-are-you-looking"]

You can then paste this code into your post, and it will display the player::

You can also customize the player size, embed sets and groups, and decide if you want comments within the player turned on or off. For details check out the documentation in our support area.

For those of you on a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SoundCloud Shortcode plugin.


August 13, 2009 | 12:08 PM Comments  0 comments

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New Theme: iNove


iNove by mg12 is one of the top themes used for self-hosted WordPress blogs, and a commonly requested addition to our offerings here on WordPress.com. We’re always doing what we can to bring you the cool new stuff you want, so now you’ve got it, too! iNove for WordPress.com:

inove

Some handy features of this theme:

  • Display pages or categories in the menu below your header.
  • Display your page hierarchy in your menu on hover.
  • Options to show a notice, banner, and special showcase widget to registered users, visitors, or commentators. You control your message.
  • The ability to hide and show authors, categories, and tags on posts.
  • Remove your sidebar with a single click.

You’ll find all of these settings under Appearance > Current Theme Options in your dashboard after you’ve activated iNove.

To do that, go to Appearance > Themes in your dashboard, find iNove (they’re in alpha order), and click Preview to see how it will look on your blog. If you dig it, click Activate and it’s yours.

This one not quite for you? Keep an eye on the news blog for more themes, coming soon :)


August 13, 2009 | 7:08 AM Comments  0 comments

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July Wrap-Up


We kicked off July with an open vote on new media features. Thanks to all of you who voted and submitted comments. Your feedback determines the future of WordPress.

Later in the month we introduced PollDaddy ratings and polls, the Gravatar widget, and the archives shortcode (one of many you can check out here).

Here are July’s stats:

  • 394,609 blogs were created.
  • 5,666,839 posts were published.
  • 418,946 new users joined.
  • 6,594,795 file uploads.
  • 3,762 gigabytes of new files.
  • 839 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 7,890,707 comments.
  • 6,681,646 logins.
  • 1,253,217,900 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,289,187,116 on self-hosted blogs (2,542,405,016
    total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 2,146,576 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,419,364,230 words.

Plus:

5,035 posts via the new WordPress for BlackBerry Public Beta.

WNET.ORG published a whitepaper about their experience launching multiple sites with WordPress MU.

Telegraph blogs relaunched using WordPress MU; FADER relaunched using WordPress; and Tasty Kitchen launched a community site on the BuddyPress platform.

WordCamps in July: WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp UK.

WordCamps coming up in August: WordCamp New Zealand and WordCamp Huntsville.


August 5, 2009 | 2:08 AM Comments  0 comments

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Archives Shortcode


You publish a lot of quality content (trust us, we know). And so we understand that making it easily accessible to your faithful readers is very important for you as a blogger. Sure, our Categories, Tag Cloud, and Archives widgets do their parts, but we’ve come up with an extra little something that you may care to use.

Enter our newest shortcode[archives].

This little guy will allow you to quickly and easily add a post index to anywhere on your blog (page, post, or text widget). Use the shortcode as is, and it will output a listing of all posts ever published on your blog. But it’s your show, so you get to decide what and how the shortcode generates your post index using a variety of options. Check out a number of examples of the shortcode being used here.

Ever want to see your weekly archives displayed in a drop-down menu? Now you can. Here’s ours:


Enjoy!


July 30, 2009 | 9:07 AM Comments  0 comments

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Gravatar Widget


gravatar widget display

Say goodbye to messing around with HTML in a Text widget just to get an “About Me” in your sidebar. With the new Gravatar widget it only takes a few seconds to achieve this and stamp your blog as your own!

If you’re not familiar with a Gravatar it’s a graphical representation used to identify yourself, an avatar, in WordPress blogs and other sites.  It’s already built in to your WordPress.com account and can be found on your profile page.

This Gravatar widget allows you to quickly and simply add a Gravatar onto your blog.  You can select the Gravatar image, size, and even add a description about yourself or your blog. If you have multiple authors you can add several widgets – there’s no limit.

Setup is easy – go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, drag the Gravatar widget from Available Widgets into the desired sidebar, and choose your settings.

gravatar widget config

You can choose the Gravatar of an existing blog author from the dropdown menu, or enter a custom email address if necessary.

You can choose one of four sizes for the Gravatar image itself, all of which fit easily into the sidebars of WordPress.com widget-enabled themes.

You can align the image to the left, right, or center, deciding how the text flows around the Gravatar.

Choose the URL you want the image to link to, if you want it to link to an “About Me” page or some other place, or leave this field blank if you don’t want the image to link anywhere.

Finally, enter the text you want to display below the image.  Include HTML too, if you want. Click Save and you’re finished!

And if you feel like it’s time for a new Gravatar remember that you can always modify your Gravatar from your profile page by uploading a new image or even using your webcam.

So what are you waiting for?


Step-by-step instructions for the Gravatar widget can be found on the Gravatar widget support page.


July 23, 2009 | 5:07 AM Comments  0 comments

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Vote for Media Features


Here at WordPress.com, we always run the most recent version of the WordPress open source software. In addition, we do custom development so that we can offer features not included in the open source core product (like VideoPress, built-in polls, etc.). Because WordPress.com gets new features implemented as they are developed, we don’t usually talk too much about big version releases. For example, WordPress 2.8 was released recently, but we didn’t announce it here because WordPress.com blogs had already been running the new features (like the new widgets administration panel) before the big open source release occurred.

The open source project is getting started on development of version 2.9, which is expected to launch toward the end of this year. The reason I think it’s worth posting about this here on WordPress.com is that the focus of the 2.9 development is going to be improved media features, and improved media management is one of the most frequently requested things in the support forums, support emails, comments and at WordCamps.

There have been many suggestions for how to improve our media functions, so many that we can’t build all of them at once. For the next couple of days, there is a survey you can take to vote on which media features are the most important to you. This will help us prioritize the development. Are you dying for photo albums? A redesigned uploader? The ability to crop, resize or rotate your images? There are 11 proposed media features listed in the survey for you to rank in order of priority.

Descriptions of each proposed feature are provided at the beginning of the voting survey, so you’ll be sure to know what each what means. Only the first question (pick your top choice) is mandatory. This survey isn’t very long. Question two lets you assign a general high/low priority to each of the 11 feature suggestions, while question 3 asks you to rank the 11 features in order of priority from 1-11. A text box or two allow you to make additional suggestions, and that’s it. The survey is anonymous, and will be open until Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:59 PM UTC.

Vote now!


July 8, 2009 | 9:07 AM Comments  0 comments

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National Blog Posting Month


Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to take a swing at churning out a 50,000-word novel on your blogs in only one month — some with great success!

There’s also NaBloPoMo, which has nothing to do with post-modernism, but with blogging! It stands for National Blog Posting Month.

It’s an even more fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you. And maybe the best part is that it starts whenever you want it to! The only objective is to post every day for a month. So why not begin with July? To make it official, sign up here. It’s open to anyone with a blog, anywhere in the world.

The NaBloPoMo team provides a theme for each month, which isn’t mandatory, but is a nice way to gain inspiration that can kick off your daily updates.

Not into that? Then we suggest sticking to the stuff you’ve been blogging about all along — the things you experience and love — with the added caveat of keeping it on the regular.

If you run out of steam, you can always find ways to blog about the dozens of weird celebrations and holidays that take place in July, in addition to Independence Day in the U.S. — like Ice Cream Soda Day, Video Games Day, or Bugs Bunny’s Birthday.

To plug the WordPress community into your endeavor, we suggest using NaBloPoMo09 as a tag on each post you publish to your blog. They’ll show up on the tag results page, which is also a great place to get inspired by your fellow bloggers.

A note: Please refrain from commenting with questions about NaBloPoMo in response to this post. It’s not a WordPress project. Instead, check out their FAQ to learn more about its objectives and requirements.

Happy (daily) blogging!


July 2, 2009 | 4:07 AM Comments  0 comments

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June Wrap-Up


Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to WordPress.com quickly and easily. And we introduced the SocialVibe widget, which helps you earn donations for the charity of your choice. July will bring more feature updates, and more of the themes and customizations you’ve been asking for. We’re listening.

Here are the stats for June:

  • 388,580 blogs were created.
  • 5,845,417 posts were published.
  • 411,540 new users joined.
  • 5,800,941 file uploads.
  • 3,633 gigabytes of new files.
  • 810 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 8,330,617 comments.
  • 6,841,633 logins.
  • 1,245,935,191 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,245,882,985 on self-hosted blogs (2,491,818,176 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 2,153,176 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,447,021,840 words.

Plus:

You published 37,894 posts using the WordPress for iPhone app.

The new GigaOM Pro launched, powered by BuddyPress.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brasil, and WordCamp Dallas.

WordCamps coming up in July: WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp UK.


July 2, 2009 | 1:07 AM Comments  0 comments

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SocialVibe


You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.

We’ve teamed up with SocialVibe, and now by adding the SocialVibe widget to your blog, you are able to earn donations for the charity of your choice by getting sponsored by a brand that appeals to you.

Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a difference. That impact is immediately visible on your badge, i..e., ‘My blog has provided 63 cups of clean water for people in need.’

The money donated comes from your brand, so you and your readers never have to pay a dime.
In addition to earning donations, you’ll also get feedback from your charity about the difference they’re making thanks to you. By clicking the charity logo in the badge, you can find information about your cause and view real-time goal progress.

Setup is easy and only takes a few clicks – just go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, add the SocialVibe widget and pick a cause and a charity. For more details you can find documentation in our support area. If you change your mind about your sponsor or cause, you can easily make adjustments by visiting your widget dashboard.

If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SocialVibe plugin.

With SocialVibe, our community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world.


June 15, 2009 | 12:06 PM Comments  0 comments

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May Wrap-Up


Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

May was a fun month for us. We rolled out a ton of new features: the ability to add YouTube videos and polls to comments, stats in your time zone, the VideoPress upgrade (with HD!), post by email, new stats charts, comment search, improved comment reply by email, and VideoPress.com.

May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly) everything ran on schedule, and nothing went wrong! A round of applause is due to our sponsors, speakers, and everyone who attended for helping to make WordCamp such a smooth success. Thanks for making it all possible.

For post-event coverage of WordCamp, check out the updated site for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

And now, the stats for May:

  • 387,416 blogs were created.
  • 411,704 new users joined.
  • 5,504,742 file uploads.
  • 3,333 gigabytes of new files.
  • 826 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 8,625,931 comments.
  • 6,914,546 logins.
  • 1,243,177,638 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,207,143,849 on self-hosted blogs (2,450,321,487 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 2,105,723 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,728,890,160 words.

Plus:

There were 12,123 post-by-email posts since the release of that feature on May 12.

Video uploads are on the rise after the release of the VideoPress upgrade: 5,587.

WordCamps in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Milan, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp San Francisco.

WordCamp San Francisco had 739 pre-event registrations (a huge jump from 427 last year), and 789 actual attendees from 32 countries — plus 15 speakers, six sponsors, and lots of volunteers.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brazil, WordCamp Dallas.

Health.com has launched the Ask the Natural Living Experts forum hosted on the new TalkPress VIP service.


June 14, 2009 | 10:06 AM Comments  0 comments

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Yahoo! App and 360 Importer


We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com :)

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.


June 5, 2009 | 6:06 AM Comments  0 comments

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Announcing VideoPress.com


The tasty new logo

The tasty new logo

We’ve been busy lately here at WordPress.com — we’ve had an announcement of a new or updated feature for you every day this week. Today, you’re getting a two-fer!

Earlier this week, we announced VideoPress, the great new video feature for WordPress.com. Now VideoPress has its own home on the web at VideoPress.com. We’ve also got a great video introduction created by our company auteur Michael Pick, so be sure to head over and check it out. We’ll be continuing to add features to VideoPress, including support for WordPress.org users, so stay tuned to VideoPress for all the latest.

P.S. If you’re a design geek like me, you might be interested to know that the VideoPress logo (as well as all of VideoPress.com) is set in the beautiful Museo family of typefaces, designed by your fellow WordPress.com bloggers at the exljbris Font Foundry (exljbris.wordpress.com).


May 15, 2009 | 6:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Comment Reply via Email Improvements


Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month we’ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

  • Better detection of email auto responders / vacation messages
  • Added a reminder to the bottom of comment notification emails about the reply via email feature
  • Vastly improved support for non-English character sets
  • Fixed a problem that some iPhone users were seeing
  • Improved email address parsing for Blackberry users
  • Fixed cases where signature blocks weren’t being properly removed
  • Better paragraph formatting when parsing comments

And many little tweaks to deal with the oddities of various email clients. You’d be amazed how many email clients have their own little quirky ways of doing things.

For users who don’t include quoted reply text in your emails I do want to point out that you’ll need to end your email comment reply with !END on a line by itself. We’ll detect this in place of quoted reply text and use everything above the !END line as the new comment. This is mentioned on the comment reply via email support page but I wanted to bring specific attention to this to avoid any confusion.

We want to make comment reply via email 100% for every user, so if you have any problems with it at all please contact support. Or, if you just want to hi, that’s okay too :-)


May 15, 2009 | 4:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Comment Search


You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day.

And have you ever had one of those blog posts that was good, but the real action was in the comments? The blog post is only half the story, it’s the feedback from everyone else that fills in the rest. To make it easier to find the second half of these stories we’ve added comment search to WordPress.com search.

Select the comments options from the WordPress.com search page and we’ll hunt through the millions of comments that have been added to WordPress.com blogs to find what you are looking for. To reduce the comment inferiority complex you get many of the same features and options as post search: sorting by relevance (the default) or most recent, limit results by blog (like site:gigamom.com) and an easy way to subscribe to new matches via an RSS feed ( the Follow this search via RSS link at the bottom of the sidebar).

Comment search, because it was about time comments got a bit more respect.


May 14, 2009 | 2:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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New stats charts


If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

Picture 24

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that).

All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And we’re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer – so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask.

And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.


May 13, 2009 | 7:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Post by Email


Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

My Blogs

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

email

You can send email from any email client, whether in a browser, on your desktop, or from your cell phone, and as much formatting will be retained as possible.

Attachments are not left out, and your images will be included and automatically converted into thumbnails.  If you include multiple images they’ll be converted into an attractive gallery.  Now you can take photos anywhere and have them appear on your blog in moments.

iphone holiday

If you’ve purchased the Space Upgrade then MP3 attachments will be displayed using our audio player. If you’ve purchased the VideoPress upgrade then you can also include videos.

There really is no easier way to get media onto your blog.

holiday snaps

If this hasn’t whetted your appetite, here’s a quick run-down of Post by Email features:

  • Transcoding of any video files supported by the WordPress video player (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, and m4v).
  • Automatic removal of standard signature blocks, with support for manual removal of other signatures.
  • Add your email addresses directly into your address book using downloadable vCards. (You don’t even need to remember the address!)
  • Automatic notification of a published email post.
  • Conversion of YouTube URLs into embedded videos.

For advanced users wanting that little bit extra, full control of your post is possible through special shortcodes, with details provided on the Post by Email support page.

It’s time to start emailing again!



May 12, 2009 | 1:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Get HD WordPress Video with VideoPress


You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.

I don’t just mean the cool content from WordPress.tv, but the video player and video/audio quality itself.

We’ve rewritten how videos work here on WordPress.com from the ground-up and taken inspiration from the great products at Vimeo and Smugmug, and are pleased to formally offer our video upgrade to everyone. Here’s a sample of what it can do especially for those sweltering in the heat right now:

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

The video feature was part of the space upgrade previously and for those that helped us test it we have now extended a one-year free video upgrade. We just want to make sure existing video users can continue to use it without any hassle. For new users, the video upgrade costs about 5 bucks a month.

As an added bonus, each video has stats attached to it so you can see how often they’re being viewed, and more stats are coming.

If you’d like to geek out, here’s some technical information about the encoding of videos and such, and the entire VideoPress WordPress video player and transcoder is under the GPL and open to the world.

In the future we’ll be working on giving your viewers more options for streaming and downloading videos, better and more in-depth stats, more player customization, and a way for WordPress.org users to use and embed the new player easier.



May 11, 2009 | 4:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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April Wrap-Up


In April we introduced Instant Findability, TED video embeds, a springtime theme, a cool new domain, and reply-by-email for comments, now open to all. A pretty busy month, with more awesome features on the way, plus WordCamp San Francisco, on May 30.

If you’re in town or want a reason to be, be sure to register soon. We’ve got a great speaker line-up, free WordPress schwag to give away, and, of course, a BBQ lunch.

Here are the stats for April:

  • 370,053 blogs were created.
  • 401,320 new users joined.
  • 5,206,156 file uploads.
  • 3,050 gigabytes of new files.
  • 775 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
  • 8,691,962 comments.
  • 6,991,335 logins.
  • 1,162,296,607 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,130,311,791 on self-hosted blogs (2,292,608,398 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
  • 1,904,262 active blogs and 19,665,407 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
  • 1,569,961,240 words.

Other cool stuff:

After tallying the community vote, the judges panel (Derek Powazek, Matt Thomas, and myself) selected two winning designs for the I <3 Blogging design contest. You can now buy “Dandy(lion) Blogging” by el_square and “I Love Blogging (and Pixel Art)” by Robert Podgórski in the Infectious store as vinyl stickers for your laptop, iPod or iPhone. Congrats to the winners and all who submitted their work.

Though we released comment reply via email late in the month (April 23), you’re already making great use of it. 1,029 replies to comments via email just in the final week.

Video uploads using the WordPress player are on the rise, too: 5,290 in April. If you haven’t already checked it out, head to WordPress.tv to see what your videos could look like in the WordPress player (and to learn a bit, too). If you like what you see, you can purchase the Space Upgrade to get uploading.

We launched BuddyPress 1.0, a collection of plugins that transform a vanilla WordPress MU install into a social network.

WIRED.com migrated its blogs to WordPress, and Intruders.tv relaunched their channels using WordPress MU.

WordCamp Central was redesigned, and now has an awesome map that displays WordCamps around the world.

There were six WordCamps in April: WordCamp China, WordCamp Hong Kong, WordCamp NOLA, WordCamp Tokyo, WordCamp Nigeria, and WordCamp Reno-Tahoe.

Coming up in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp Milan, and WordCamp San Francisco.


May 8, 2009 | 9:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Stats in your time zone


When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!

I swear it was Matt’s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Matt’s.

And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blog’s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4).

The best part is that any time you change your blog’s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. I’ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.


May 8, 2009 | 1:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Add YouTube and Polls to Comments


Some of you may have noticed we’ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment.

Although shortcodes are great and we’ll continue to support and encourage them for comments the simplest possible interface seemed to be just a URL.

The URL is all you’ll need to include a YouTube video or PollDaddy poll. To try it out copy and paste the permalink for a video or a poll on PollDaddy Answers and put it on its own line in a comment, like enter enter http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1598108/ enter enter. You’ll now have a poll embedded in the comment just like this:

View Poll

(By the way, I have a Kindle 2 and it’s the bestest thing since sliced beer.)

Of course if someone leaves a video or poll you don’t like it’s just like them leaving something else you don’t like, you can always delete it or edit it to remove the offending link.

As you and your audience start to play with this it should spice up comments a bit, and based on your feedback we may expand this to encompass other shortcodes and embeds in the future.

Keep commentin’. :)


May 7, 2009 | 2:05 AM Comments  0 comments

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Vou gravar o som do mar para meu pai
Translations available in: Portuguese (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | English | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

I go to record the sound of the sea for my father
Automatically translated into English thanks to WorldLingo
Recently it stows in Rio De Janeiro for III the World-wide Congress of Confrontation of the Sexual Exploration of Children and Adolescents, it does not arrive well to be my militancy, but already it has a reasonable amount of moons that I act with the question of the youthful participation, and thus we try with the young space.

In these amounts of moons, some element already I learned to coexist and to evaluate, and say that it is always good for participating of events of this transport, the chance to perceive that a real action and concrete only exists through the local actions, and that in this great net (and we are not speaking of the Internet or big to brother) we obtain yes to change something, fact rare of if perceiving, and that it can very yes be potencializado, independent of cultures.

But this text is not on the youthful participation in a space of these (but it can turn a good one chats, later)? it is a text on nuancias! Nuancias that makes me to remember because I act with this subject (and maturely I perceive to each day that I leave the house? of the young? e I enter in? with and for the young).

More than what to create a space of public politics and expression, I find important to come back our vision (and I can say that to the times this in the peripheral part) so that impact we are really carrying through with the people who thus circulate for our cycle of life, what she is for a young that never left its city and to witness this exchange of learning? How it comes back? That fruits are generated the short ones, medium and long run (and in this item carefully I say that we necessarily do not speak to act with the subject of sexual exploration)? That responsibilities we assume and we generate? After all of accounts, what accurately another possible world is this?

It always said that the life can be compared with a long metragem, long metragem generated for diverse shortnesss metragens, and as the word says? SHORTNESS! To tan, to enjoy, to use to advantage! E in this direction that also comes the nuancias.

E two facts had marked me very? The first one of a young (and that the sincronicidade allowed that was the first one to know), that completed its 15 years in full event, shy, but likeable, pure and incrivelmente generous way, it was made use to bank of the pocket a party not to pass blank the date, almost giving up the idea of the same one, was encouraged by its new friends (and many marked programs had left of side already), it it deserved, he was sincere the feeling of all for it, perhaps one of the parties more sincere than already I witnessed? it was not an act of pure festança, was to allow that it perceived that he was not alone in a so special cycle in its life.

As the fact occurred in the same night, a young (of wide smile), visited the beach for the first time in the life, its contact slow and deliciously was tried, and was thus, to the few, educadamente asking for permission for Gaia, stepping on and feeling the sand between its feet, as well as the water that slowly went freezing the same ones, and that later it was tried by the palate (it was necessary to perceive if she was really salty)? e was going, felt the body direction entering and soul with the vastness of the beach, too easely enthusiastic individual, and finally comes plus a generosity act? he wanted to record the sound of the sea to show for the father, little mattered if the father already had seen the sea or not, but yes the fact of being able to share the direction and feeling of a moment!

They are these nuancias that we must be peripherally open to perceive, and that the times a simple act between commas valley more than a congress in itself, and we will be safe while we will have people worried in making a simple and sincere party or that they prefer to presentear with things more real than an object bought in finishes tent of souvenirs.

December 12, 2008 | 8:17 AM Comments  1 comments

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bikesom


Bikesom | São Luís do Maranhão - janeiro de 2008

Ilustração em illustrator


August 14, 2008 | 9:08 AM Comments  0 comments



um pôster para a letra A


Últimos registros de cartaz artesanal perdido (leia-se assaltado)…

Um pôster para a letra A
workshop com Cláudio Ferlauto


August 8, 2008 | 9:08 AM Comments  0 comments



Paradise in me!


Para a revista chinesa O2 Magazine.


July 20, 2008 | 9:07 AM Comments  0 comments



global warming


Poster “global warming” do designer, ilustrador e diretor de arte Karlis Dovnorovics.

fonte: http://collecta.blogspot.com/


July 18, 2008 | 10:07 AM Comments  0 comments



uma [di]gestão…


“O mundo está numa condição estranha. Nossas florestas estão morrendo. A gente faz o que pode para evitar, mas a destruição aumenta. A poluição atmosférica, o buraco na camada de ozônio. Montanhas de plástico e borracha. Dióxido de carbono. Aquecimento da Terra. A gente faz o que pode para evitar, mas o problema é cada vez maior. O design deveria ser chamado para onde há questões sérias a pensar, mas é encorajado a produzir embalagens cada vez mais bonitas, coloridas e atrativas, e a incorporar a moda da vez. Quanto pior o mundo fica, mais bonitinho ele fica. O design está se degenerando em promoção de vendas”

Otl Aicher (inicio da década de 60)


July 16, 2008 | 9:07 AM Comments  0 comments



O amor… não tem preço [Hors de prix]


Filme frances com Audrey Tatou e Gad Elmaleh (esse com destaque especial pela atuação), de história simples mas com comédia inteligente e leve, com sacadas dignas do genial Peter Selers, vale a risada e a trilha sonora!

Destaque especial para a animação de entrada do filme, com a delicadeza e ritmo da década de 70.


July 3, 2008 | 9:07 AM Comments  0 comments



::campanha wwf::


Imagem wwf


July 1, 2008 | 11:07 AM Comments  0 comments



Lançamentos do livro GEO Juvenil Brasil em São Paulo


Publicação socioambiental mobilizou 150 organizações e 15 mil jovens durante 4 anos. Agora os resultados serão disseminados por todo o país

Da Redação [30/06/2008]

Capa GeoO GEO Juvenil Brasil, relatório da situação ambiental do país sob a perspectiva das juventudes, é resultado de processos de mobilização envolvendo 15 mil jovens durante quatro anos. Algumas recomendações presentes no livro são a procura por fontes limpas e renováveis de energia, atenção à produção de lixo no meio urbano e necessidade de controle da expansão da fronteira agrícola na Amazônia. São apresentadas atividades, dados e metodologias em 10 temáticas socioambientais, com Áreas Urbanas, Terra e Alimentos, Atmosfera e Mudanças Climáticas e Legislação Ambiental.

A publicação oferece ainda contatos de organizações, metodologias de educação ambiental, análise e contextualização das impressões dos jovens, além de documentos e Cartas de Encontros que refletem a riqueza do momento.

É realizado pela organização de juventude Grupo Interagir com o apoio do Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente - PNUMA e outras 8 instituições-parceiras. A impressão e os lançamentos da publicação contam com o apoio da Caixa Econômica Federal.

O projeto surge a partir de metodologia juvenil aplicada ao relatório do GEO Global e adaptada ao Brasil. O GEO: Perspectivas do Meio Ambiente Global, publicado desde 1997 pelo PNUMA, é um informe bienal que oferece informações para gestores tomarem decisões sobre o meio ambiente. Em 2001, é publicado o GEO Juvenil América Latina e Caribe com a colaboração de 50 mil jovens de 28 países. O GEO Juvenil Brasil é o 12° relatório da série lançada na região.

“Faz acreditar que a crise ambiental tem solução, assim a então ministra do Meio Ambiente Marina Silva descreve o processo do GEO Juvenil Brasil na carta de apresentação do livro.

Para ela, a saída está na capacidade humana de se perceber responsável pela crise e agir. Neste espírito, 60 jovens focais interligaram o país em uma rede de mobilização social. O processo do GEO Juvenil Brasil não termina com a publicação, pois a rede criada gera novas possibilidades e potencializa o movimento jovem pelo meio ambiente.

O livro se assemelha a um roteiro de viagem pelas cinco regiões brasileiras e o leitor pode decidir a ordem do passeio. Existem ligações internas entre os capítulos. Na barra lateral do relatório, há indicações para outras páginas que aprofundam o tema. As informações podem colaborar para o controle social das atividades de governo, empresas e terceiro setor. Também auxiliam o processo de decisão de representantes públicos.

O Grupo Interagir, instituição executora do projeto, é uma organização juvenil sediada no Distrito Federal. Mais de 150 entidades foram co-parceiras do grupo no processo do GEO Juvenil Brasil.

Desde 2000, o Grupo Interagir desenvolve ações regionais e nacionais com a missão de fomentar e articular o protagonismo juvenil. Com foco na participação social, o grupo propõe aos jovens uma atuação criativa, construtiva e responsável na solução de problemas reais da sociedade.

O evento nacional aconteceu no Centro Cultural da Caixa Econômica Federal, dia 3 de junho em Brasília. Haverá também lançamentos locais em todas as Unidades da Federação, com a participação de jovens e organizações que contribuíram com a publicação. Os primeiros eventos locais foram no dia 4 de junho, em Fortaleza e Natal, seguidos de outros 20 estados.

Em São Paulo o lançamento será na UMAPAZ - Universidade Livre do Meio Ambiente e Cultura de Paz, no dia 12 de julho. O evento se inicia às 14h, com a abertura. Às 14h30 serão realizadas oficinas e às 15h40 rola um show de samba rock com o Poesia Samba Soul. Para conferir a programação completa, acesse o site do Geo Juvenil Brasil: www.geojuvenil.org.br.

TÁ NA MÃO

Lançamento Local do GEO Juvenil Brasil
Local: UMAPAZ - Universidade Livre do Meio Ambiente e Cultura de Paz
Endereço: Av VI Centenário, 1268 - portão 7A do Parque do Ibirapuera - São Paulo (SP)
Data: 12 de julho de 2008, sábado
Horário: das 14h às 18h
Programação completa: www.geojuvenil.org.br


June 30, 2008 | 11:06 AM Comments  0 comments



Todos os sons...
Translations available in: Portuguese (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | English | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

All the sounds…
Automatically translated into English thanks to WorldLingo
Workshop of Xilogravura - 28.06.2008

June 29, 2008 | 9:22 PM Comments  0 comments



Paul Rand - um documentário


Reparem na música de fundo…


June 29, 2008 | 9:06 AM Comments  0 comments



Paul Rand – um documentário


Reparem na música de fundo…


June 29, 2008 | 9:06 AM Comments  0 comments

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Todos os sons…


Oficina de Xilogravura - Sesc Pompéia 28.06.2008


June 29, 2008 | 5:06 AM Comments  0 comments



Todos os sentidos abertos para o mundo
Translations available in: Portuguese (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | English | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

All the directions opened for the world
Automatically translated into English thanks to WorldLingo
Some time you already slept in the bus, and finished losing the point? Or it was for
an unknown place? It can until being the house of some friend whom never it visited…
Normally when these things happen, our body is in attention state
, we are intent to that is our return, wants to observe each
millimeter of the space, to even know our limitations and in locating them. Our
body all reacts and transmits clearly the state that we are.

In part, we enter in this frequency for receiving many information visual.
When we read a book, we keep the information and we feed the brain,
exactly happens when? we read? the images our return.

This type of reaction is more clearly when is in a new environment, but and
when we are in a routine environment, that always we frequent? In this in case that,
already we are conditional, and although in very using them of the visual perception, badly
we obtain to remember the color of the house of the neighbor, that is, we see, but we do not observe…
A minimum change passes unobserved.

We need to observe plus ours entorno, and above all to perceive that stimulatons
this in the ones backwards, not only visual, but in all the directions and expressions; that sounds,
cheiros, thermal sensations… It thinks about the word? rose. What it remembers to you? That
emotions rescues you? Moves where part of its memory? For some it can be
only one color, others one I smell, or until the day that was asked for in marriage, who
knows the first kiss, or the day that pierced the finger in the thorn, or of its drawings
in the infancy garden… Each one brings a history, and this history that goes to constitute
its perceptions.

May 24, 2008 | 8:15 PM Comments  1 comments

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Tempo

Teste! Siriema Virtual

August 8, 2006 | 4:25 PM Comments  3 comments

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Inspiradores I
Translations available in: Portuguese (original) | Turkish | Arabic

Não esperem um grande texto, como disse a pouco a uma grande e especial amiga, esperem algo sincero nesse curto, bobo, mal dito e simples texto...

Ultimamente tenho tido diversas idéias, mas é complexo, dificil colocar no papel, palavras formadas por letras, composições de um todo que sinto estar vazio, queria ser como os escritores, cronistas, inspiradores que tanto adimiro e que transportam verdadeiros sonhos em letras, e quer algo mais complexo que trasportar sonhos em formas definidas?

Fico assim perdido no meio de Tom's, Vinicius, Luísas, Camilas, Clarisses, Chicos, Gaimans, Ruben's, Paulos, Fernandos, Caeiros, Ricardos, dentre outras Pessoa's que nem sei citar...

Uma vez me disseram que escrevemos o que lemos... e acabo lembrando da história que me contaram um dia desses, sobre uma bailarina brasileira famosa (sempre fui pessimo com nomes) que após pergunatrem o que ela quer dizer com sua dança, respondeu: "Se soubesse dizer, não precisava dançar..."

March 9, 2006 | 11:11 PM Comments  2 comments

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Quando você conheceu o mundo?

Somos muitas vezes bombardeados com a pergunta “O que você faz?”... Creio que nunca tive (se é que algum dia terei) uma resposta exata, normalmente digo que sou um picareta, espera resposta melhor? Sou um designer digital diplomado (e assim os outros esperam) aliais devo dizer já pra começo de conversa que nunca me acertei com a mídia digital, prefiro a mídia impressa, atuo com processos de aprendizagem, meio ambiente, protagonismo juvenil, e outras coisas que nem saberia como citar, e para evitar todo o processo de criar uma pré-imagem estabelecida pelo meu diploma, encurto o caminho e já admito, sou um picareta e nada mais...

Mas outro dia uma pergunta (citada por uma nova grande Mestre) ficou batendo em minha cabeça, “Quando você conheceu o mundo?” Achei realmente uma pergunta muito completa, e que permite muitas possibilidades, afinal de que mundo está se falando? É mais que permitir um como você está nesse exato momento... ou apenas o que você faz... conhecer o mundo é um ponto importante pra definir o que você faz, como faz e principalmente porque faz, é perceber como se relaciona e o que pode fazer daquele ponto em diante, o que você acredita... realmente essa é uma ótima pergunta, deveria estar no local do campo de profissão daquelas tão infinitas fichas que preenchemos.

De minha parte a resposta é tão complexa quanto a pergunta, mas sem sombra de dúvidas mais prazerosa do que responder o que faço, acredito que já conheci várias vezes o mundo, um primeiro estalo foi fundamental, mas a cada passo permitir perceber que esse mundo era maior, e sim que ele tinha defeitos que deveria corrigir em meu interior, cada etapa uma nova aprendizagem, tornando mais convicto do que quero realizar, e talvez ai esteja a mágica da pergunta, ela se permite ser mutável, atemporal e refletir a cada resposta.

Hoje novamente estou conhecendo o mundo (ou seria uma parte inexplorada?), essa nova Mestre chama-se Camila (e como o Mateus, me disse uma vez, citar os nomes dos mestres faz trazer sua energia para perto), ela esta permitindo que eu me conheça melhor, que explore e cuide do meu didentro, que me permita dormir, ler, se divertir, e as vezes parar, e assim estou di-gerindo, a esse anjo que apareceu em minha vida só tenho a agradecer, e a essa pergunta carregar, refletir e passar a diante... E sobre o que sou... hoje sou uma pessoa mais contente consigo mesmo :)

November 25, 2005 | 8:41 PM Comments  9 comments

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Refletir

“O mundo está numa condição estranha. Nossas florestas estão morrendo. A gente faz o que pode para evitar, mas a destruição aumenta. A poluição atmosférica, o buraco na camada de ozônio. Montanhas de plástico e borracha. Dióxido de carbono. Aquecimento da Terra. A gente faz o que pode para evitar, mas o problema é cada vez maior. O design deveria ser chamado para onde há questões sérias a pensar, mas é encorajado a produzir embalagens cada vez mais bonitas, coloridas e atrativas, e a incorporar a moda da vez. Quanto pior o mundo fica, mais bonitinho ele fica. O design está se degenerando em promoção de vendas”

Otl Aicher (inicio da década de 60)

Cada vez mais repenso minha "profissão"... tenho certeza do amor que tenho pelo design gráfico, fico feliz com isso, e cada dia mais penso nas possibilidades que alcançarei com essa maravilhosa ferramenta... tbem tenho medo do que vejo e do que pode se tornar... e mais uma vez repenso a "profissão"...

Espero realmente acreditar que a luta que tenho faz diferença... espero não me assuatar com o reflexo de mim mesmo, as vezes acho que falo pro vento, mas se é pro vento sera que alguém sente uma brisa?...

Fica a pergunta... O design está se degenerando em promoção de vendas?

E vamos a luta...

August 31, 2005 | 9:49 PM Comments  0 comments

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Apanhador de Sonhos no Campo de Centeio

Esse pequeno trecho foi narrado por um personagem no livro "Nove Estórias" de J. D. Salinger (sim o mesmo autor de O Apanhador no Campo de Centeio), e gostaria muito de compartilhar com vocês, e quem sabe gerar alguma discussão, alguém se habilita? :) Espero que todos tenham a chance de criar e descobrir seu próprio mundo ;)

“Não sei exatamente o que eu iria fazer, mas tenho certeza de que não começaria com os assuntos que as escolas ensinam primeiramente; acho que, de início, reuniria todas as crianças e mostraria a elas como se pensa. Procuraria ensina-las a descobrir quem são elas, e não apenas o nome que têm e coisas desse tipo... Acho que, antes mesmo disso, faria com que elas se esvaziassem do que tivessem aprendido com todo mundo, por exemplo, não diria que a grama é verde – cores não passam de nomes. Se você diz ás crianças que a grama é verde, isso faz com que elas comecem a achar a grama vai ter esse aspecto, ou seja o aspecto que você determinou a ela, em vez de algum outro que pode ser tão bom ou até melhor. Assim faria questão de que as crianças começassem a ver as coisas de modo certo, pessoal e não daquele pelo qual os outros as vêem”

August 18, 2005 | 11:30 AM Comments  0 comments

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O tempo

"quem tem olhos pra ver o tempo soprando sulcos na pele soprando
sulcos na pele soprando sulcos?
o tempo andou riscando meu rosto
com uma navalha fina
sem raiva nem rancor
o tempo riscou meu rosto
com calma
(eu parei de lutar contra o tempo
ando exercendo instantes
acho que ganhei presença)
acho que a vida anda passando a mão em mim.
a vida anda passando a mão em mim.
acho que a vida anda passando.
a vida anda passando.
acho que a vida anda.
a vida anda em mim.
acho que há vida em mim.
a vida em mim anda passando.
acho que a vida anda passando a mão em mim
e por falar em sexo quem anda me comendo
é o tempo
na verdade faz tempo mas eu escondia
porque ele me pegava à força e por trás
um dia resolvi encará-lo de frente e disse: tempo
se você tem que me comer
que seja com o meu consentimento
e me olhando nos olhos
acho que ganhei o tempo
de lá pra cá ele tem sido bom comigo
dizem que ando até remoçando"

Viviane Mosi

June 16, 2005 | 9:47 AM Comments  0 comments

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Trilhas Urbanas

São Paulo, São Paulo

"É sempre lindo andar
Na cidade de São Paulo...

Premeditando o Breque

May 13, 2005 | 11:19 AM Comments  0 comments

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Dizem que sou louco...

"Mas louco é quem me diz, e não é feliz! não é feliz..."

Eita vida louca... ontem comecei a dar oficinas em um projeto que estou participando... dentre os participantes havia uma pessoa (que não me conhecia) que lia cartas... pedi para fazer as minhas... ele, que afirmava ser muito ligado ao misticismo, e diz possuir o dom realmente me deixou de boca aberta, serei sincero em dizer que não etendo nada disso... mas me fez refletir...

Como não fiz pergunta, o resultado foi o meu estado atual, a carta principal que saiu foi o louco, e por mais que me identifique com isso :0) a coisa é um pouco maior... Isso quer dizer que sou uma pessoa que não tem medo de encarar as coisas, que sigo em frente no que acredito, de forma emprendedora... junto com as outras cartas a coisa foi ficando mais incrivel, segundo ele tenho muita fé no que acredito, e apesar de muitas pessoas proximas serem contra, sigo de forma muito destemida para meus sonhos, com uma energia muito grande... mas que deveria equilibrar esse forte espirito com meu corpo, que no momento não esta aguentando, sou uma pessoa criativa, que se adapta facil, que consegue fazer multiplas coisas com uma facil aprendizagem, que me dedico demais ao outros, mais do que em mim, e que deveria acreditar muito nisso, porque isso me guiaria e teria retorno...

Estou realmente em uma fase louca de reflexão... e como ele mesmo disse, percebia o quanto eu ficava leve ao ouvir as palavras dele... incrivel esse mundo ne?!? Espero que sejam realmente bons sinais de que tudo (que já esta indo bem) vai melhorar :)... eita inferno astral bom esse!!!


April 4, 2005 | 3:36 PM Comments  0 comments

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"Só acredito naquilo que posso tocar. Não acredito por exemplo, em Luiza Brunet." Luis Fernando Verissimo

Será que só podemos tocar com as mãos?!... tenho diversos sonhos, e vejo diversas maneiras de toca-los...

Mas acima de tudo fica o gosto bom, gosto de satisfaçào (seria o gosto mais importante que o tocar?!)

Nessa ultima semana, muitos sonhos se tocaram, o sonho de mais uma vez ver o sorriso de uma grande amiga (toca-se vendo?!), o sonho de reecontrar tantas outras pessoas queridas, o sonho de ir em um bom evento, o sonho de satisfaçào d eum bom trabalho, de poder passar o pouco q sei e receber o grande q não sei... o sonho de poder sempre rir....

Eita energia boa estou, muita coisa boa rolando, ta tudo dando certo dentro do possivel, mtos sonhos se tocando e vendo os sonhos dos outros...

Mais uma vez só tenho a agradecer, aos bons, velhos e aos novos amigos... aos sorrisos multiplicados... aos sonhos compartilhados e conquistados...

Siquelela

March 29, 2005 | 2:35 PM Comments  0 comments

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Massao SImão URGENTE!!!

Esse eh um texto em resposta a foto minha que minha prima postou no flog dela, e na qual curti tanto o texto q decidi registrar aqui rsrsrsrsrs

http://www.flogao.com.br/megumichan/foto/5470255

"Buemba! Buemba! Massao Simão urgente! O braço armada da gandaia nacional. Ai, minha Santa Periquita não é que o texto da prima saiu melhor que a encomenda?!

Aliais eita foto zen, zen facilidade nenhuma de postá-la, falando nela, foi uma QUEIMADA, a Mika leva mais tempo pra apertar o botão da câmera do que o Bush para pensar, MUY amiga ela, moti (aliais nunca escrevi essa palavra, japoneses de plantão, esta certa?!) pelando, boca queimando e Mika enrolando... Assim tudo termina em pizza! Rarará, nois sofre mais nois goza!

Justiça seja feita, uMASSAOdades é credito do multinstrumentista (q mais parece um duende da floresta) Rangel, que numa escala Sampa Babylon, Brasília e Porto Alegre saiu com nada menos que pelos menos uns 50 verbetes com a palavra Massao, vai fazer trocadilho na terra do Lula... Rarará! E não é que fizemos mesmo!

Antes que tudo vire Tucanês, lembre-se: “Sempre rir! Sempre rir! Pra viver é melhor sempre rir!” Bozo! Pelo menos isso não tucanaram! Rarará! E já dizia o filosofo (se é que era isso, agora não lembro se era filosofo ou algum cara que fez alguma teoria que está em alguma pagina do livro da escola) Arquimedes “Brincar é condição fundamental para ser sério!” Rarará! Nois sofre mais nois goza!

Em terra de tupiniquim e tudo mundo querendo falar só japonês, vai entender a globalização, É isso daí priminha, valeu pela homenagem! Mas fico com o zulu que é mais sonoro: Ngi ya ku thanda!!! Que para bom entendedor, nenhuma dessas palavras basta! Rarará"

February 23, 2005 | 5:56 PM Comments  1 comments

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