September 2010
3 posts
I’m proud to introduce you to Fusion, our newest theme. The versatility of this theme makes it great for a variety of uses including technical blogs, long-form writing, posting code samples, and displaying large images. You can use Fusion just like any other WordPress.com theme or, if you prefer a wide layout, this theme is ready to accommodate.
Example of Fusion’s out-of-the-box layout and...
If you use the new Internet Explorer 9 beta (IE9) on Windows 7 and have a blog on WordPress.com, you should definitely check out some cool new features.
First, not only do the charts on your stats page load faster — thanks to new canvas element support in IE9 — but each WordPress.com site also includes a high-res icon for your browser, taskbar, or shortcuts. Once you start using IE9, you’ll find...
Have you ever read one of your old posts and thought something was different? Maybe a few words were changed, the formatting was different, or an entire paragraph was missing. You poured your heart and soul into the post and didn’t know someone changed it after you hit publish. If this sounds familiar, you probably have a multi-author blog.
Today we’re launching a feature called Email Post...
August 2010
7 posts
Ever wish you had a blogging assistant who helped you write posts that are full of great links, photos, and tags? Wish no more: We’ve partnered with the folks at Zemanta to give you a hand at quickly jazzing up your posts.
Once you’ve activated Zemanta, you’ll see several new widgets on your edit screen that let you quickly add recommended links, photos, tags, and articles. With just a few clicks...
Are you tired of clutter? Are you looking for a theme that puts the focus on your content and gets out of the way? Meet Oulipo, our newest theme. Oulipo’s clean, grid-based design and elegant typography make it perfect for a one-page announcement site, a photoblog, a journal… or anything else you choose to showcase.
Example showing Oulipo’s light color scheme and beautifully simple...
For those of you who have been dreaming of an easier way for your readers to share your posts on Twitter, that day has come. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added an official Tweet Button as an option for all WordPress.com blogs.
How it works: When one of your readers hits the Tweet Button, they will be shown a popup that includes a shortened link to your post. Readers can add in a quick...
I’m really excited about today’s new theme, Coraline. It’s a familiar-looking theme packed with upgrades that will make your blog more customizable and more fun.
The Coraline Theme
As you might have guessed, this will be a replacement for the Cutline theme, which we’re phasing out. Since Coraline replaces Cutline this means we get to add some exciting new features that I think you’ll...
“The song tells the preposterous, yet moving, tale of a young man’s quest for...”
– A Boy Named Sue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
We, the crowd, can ruin anything.
(via indefensible)
Starting today you’ll notice a new feature at the bottom of all WordPress.com blog posts. We’ve enabled a “Like” button, which, when clicked, shows a Gravatar image for all the bloggers who like a post.
When you “like” a post two core things happen. First, the blog post’s author sees your “like” and can click-through to your Gravatar profile. Second, clicking “like” saves the post in your...
Earlier this year, we unveiled the new Twenty Ten default theme. Every blog using the theme was automatically set with the header image shown below.
But, because there are actually seven other equally lovely header images in Twenty Ten, we have now randomized the default header image for each blog. If you use Twenty Ten, you may see a brand-new image starting today.
If you have uploaded a...
July 2010
1 post
Keep your private details secure
One of the requirements of owning a domain is that you must give your contact details when registering that domain.
Internet regulations require that your name, address, email, and phone number be accessible 24/7 to anybody who wants to see them just by looking up your domain. This rule was created to make it easy to contact a domain owner in case of...
June 2010
5 posts
Our newest theme is Andrea, a gorgeously minimal two-column theme with an unusual blue color scheme.
Click to view slideshow.
Though the design may seem simple on the surface, once you try it you will appreciate its flexibility. I love Andrea both for its elegance and for its level of customization, and I think you will, too.
This theme includes two layout choices. The default layout is wide,...
Based on your feedback, you are loving the Custom Menu feature we launched two weeks ago. It’s natural to want that feature enabled for your favorite theme, too. We’re working on adding it to all WordPress.com themes.
In the meantime, you can find themes with Custom Menu support in Appearance→Themes by choosing Custom Menu from the Feature Filters menu.
Custom Menu filter enabled in...
Today’s new theme is dirty and grungy-looking—but that’s just what makes it so good! Let’s take a look at Greyzed.
The Greyzed Theme
While Greyzed might look rough it’s been carefully designed and it isn’t short on features. Starting at the top, it has a really sharp drop-down menu ready for our new menus feature. Visit Appearance → Menus and you can order the links here any way you...
Back in March when we announced Gravatar-powered profiles on WordPress.com, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve...
Have you ever come across a blog post that you enjoyed so much you wanted to easily share it with the readers of your own blog? Sure, you can copy and paste the link and perhaps even a snippet of text with your own comments, but overall it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. We wanted to change this and make sharing other posts with your readers as easy as posting to your blog.
Today we’re...
May 2010
11 posts
Have you been hearing a bunch of hubbub around the web lately about the upcoming release of WordPress version 3.0? I know I have, and it’s always fun to hear what people are saying when we get close to a release over at WordPress.org. Here on WordPress.com, though, you never have to wait! We merge in the new features as they’re ready, so every one of you gets early access to features that only...
When Neil Pasricha started his WordPress.com blog, 1,000 Awesome Things, he decided to highlight one awesome thing each weekday to help him keep a positive outlook.
That was three years ago, and now, the awesomeness just keep rolling on in for Neil: He has not only become a successful blogger and earned three Webby awards, he also can consider himself a critically acclaimed author. “The Book of...
On WordPress.com, you start with a standard WordPress.com domain name for your blog which looks something like this – example.wordpress.com. You then have the option of upgrading to a custom mapped domain such as example.com.
The good news is by setting example.com as your primary domain, all your visitors who try to access your old example.wordpress.com links automatically get redirected to the...
Today we are pleased to introduce Paperpunch, a clean and versatile theme featuring a subtle, textured background and hand-crafted icons.
To go along with a widget-ready sidebar, Paperpunch offers no fewer than four columns at the bottom of the page to display many more widgets.
If you want to customize the look a bit, use the Custom Background option found in your Dashboard under Appearance →...
Do you use a contact form on your site? If so, you’ll enjoy today’s update. Our [contact-form] shortcode has always been boring. It never had any configuration options and didn’t work in widgets. Today we’re giving the shortcode a makeover.
The old shortcode would send an e-mail message to the author of the post or page. Now you can send the message to any e-mail address you wish. You can even...
Today’s new theme is Notepad. A richly styled and beautiful, personal theme inspired by iPhone’s Notes application.
The Notepad Theme
With Notepad you have the option of displaying expertly designed icons that link to your profile on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. Simply add the appropriate URL in Appearance > Theme Options. There’s even an optional RSS feed icon that fits in perfectly.
The...
Is your Media Library feeling crowded? I’m betting our new space upgrade levels might help.
Based on feedback we received from our users, we decided to add two new space upgrade options: 50GB and 100GB.
To access either of these upgrade levels, go to your blog’s dashboard and click on Upgrades. Select the space upgrade that you want to purchase. It’s super simple. Price information is included...
Meet our newest super-clean theme, Enterprise—perfect for bloggers wanting a more corporate look for their blog.
The Enterprise Theme
One of my favorite Enterprise features is the prominent two-level navigation with drop-down menus and, in the second level, up to 10 of your most-used categories.
The two-level Enterprise menu
And for enterprising folks that want the extra room, this theme...
We were thrilled to see several WordPress.com blogs — Eat Like a Girl, James Ramsden, Inspector Gadget, and Stilletoed Socialist — make the list of The Times article “40 bloggers who really count.”
On Eat Like a Girl, The Times noted the blog’s unique approach to cooking, stating “if you’re after a recipe for slow-roast wild boar belly, look no further.” The newspaper also praised fellow food...
Bueno is a stylish and fun theme featuring a custom header, custom background, and multiple fresh color schemes.
Click to view slideshow.
Bueno’s rainbow of alternate color schemes, default dotted background pattern, and fun chunky typefaces make this a great theme for any type of blog. The optional custom header and custom background features will help you customize this design and really make...
Vostok is an elegant one-column theme sporting a dark background and light text that is readable and easy on the eyes. The minimal layout is perfect for publishing your personal lifestream in a clutter-free layout.
Vostok’s layout is simple and clutter-free.
Options include a custom header image, custom background image and color, and a full navigation menu in the header. For a completely...
April 2010
4 posts
Each weekday, we select about ten new blog posts for the Freshly Pressed section of the WordPress.com homepage. These posts represent how WordPress can be used to entertain, enlighten, or inspire.
Getting promoted to Freshly Pressed is a major traffic win because WordPress.com receives a high volume of page views. And, we have a feed set up so people can subscribe to Freshly Pressed. Why do we do...
Sometimes you want your blog to look a little more structured. To help with that, I’m happy to introduce to you today the Structure theme: a multi-column theme with featured images, an alternate dark color scheme, and customization options.
The Structure theme highlights the latest post from your choice of featured category
Structure highlights your latest post—from a featured category of your...
Over the weekend, we turned on a new theme called Twenty Ten. Twenty Ten is a big deal for us — it’s our first update to the “default” theme (the one you see when you start a new blog) on WordPress.com. Our goal with Twenty Ten was to create something stylish, customizable, simple, and most of all, readable. Since every new WordPress.com user will be seeing Twenty Ten, we wanted to design an...
Next Saturday, May 1, the WordPress community of bloggers, developers, designers and friends will gather in San Francisco for the 4th annual WordCamp SF.
If you’ve ever wondered what WordCamp was all about, the San Francisco event is the mothership, produced under the direction of WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg.
There are traditions. Each WordCamp SF, Matt reports on...
March 2010
2 posts
Titan is a fantastic theme, now available on WordPress.com. It’s a highly readable, clean theme, with lots of options: four widget areas, a customizable header, and more.
Behold Titan!
An enticing color scheme and loads of customization make Titan a wonderful theme for you blog. To start things off the header has some nice social networking and RSS links, making it easy for users to keep up...
From the tongue twisting name department we welcome PubSubHubbub, or as some people have shortened it to: PuSH. Like rssCloud, PuSH is a way for services that subscribe to updates from your blog (think Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes) to get updates even faster. In a nutshell, instead of having to periodically ask your blog if there are any updates they can now register to automatically...
February 2010
10 posts
You can now send your WordPress.com posts to Facebook.
Joining our Yahoo and Twitter features is our latest in WordPress.com’s Publicize family: Facebook.
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 Facebook account.
These...
Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.
What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we...
We’re often asked when we plan to make our intelligent proofreading technology available for more languages.
We’ve been hard at work and today we’re announcing After the Deadline proofreading for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
These languages feature After the Deadline’s smart contextual spell checking. We’re also using a great open source project called Language Tool to check French...
Here at WordPress.com we like to keep stats on the various features and resources available to our users. So as part of the release for rssCloud on WordPress.com I added internal stats to see how it was being used. It tracks things like the number of subscription requests and the number of sent notifications (pings) that get processed each day.
That’s where the numbers for my rssCloud Update post...
February has been a great month for mobile blogging on WordPress.com. In just the past week, WordPress apps for Android and BlackBerry made their official debuts, and the iPhone app reached version 2.2. No other blogging service has this kind of app support across these three smartphone platforms — we checked!
Power and control, on the go
While each of these mobile apps is unique, they share a...
Publishing your blog on WordPress.com lets you focus on your content while we sweat the technical stuff, including helping your content reach a larger audience.
Last week WordPress.com turned on sitemap pings for our millions of hosted blogs. Now, immediately after you publish or delete a page or post*, your WordPress.com blog sends a ping to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Ask. These immediate...
I’m happy to present to you, “Motion,” a dashing new theme inspired by movement and film. Bursting with style and options, Motion is a clean, colorful, and charismatic new theme.
Motion, a colorful and clean theme.
Motion combines color and clean lines to give your content character without hindering consumption. Aside from great design, the theme features some pretty interesting features. The...
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...
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...
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...
January 2010
4 posts
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.
...
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...
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...
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...
December 2009
5 posts
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...
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...
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...