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New Theme: Fresh News
2011-04-26 19:15:00
We’re always amazed with the way you continually push the scope and depth of your blogs on WordPress.com. It only makes sense that you’d also want themes that can take that work and organize it in easily readable, neat layouts. Like our newest theme addition, Fresh News ! For the one time price of $45, Fresh News offers a solid design that can accommodate many different websites. From its feature post slider to the 18 color schemes, this magazine style theme is an elegant and feature rich way to display your content. The looks of Fresh News Developed by WooTheme s, Fresh News also makes use of two fully customizable navigational menus as well as several widget areas and layout options. If you love customization in your themes, you can’t go wrong with Fresh News. Of course, there is much more for you to explore and discover on the Theme Showcase.

New Theme: Mystique
2011-04-21 17:26:00
Example of Mystique's single page view. I think you’ll agree this theme has a certain mystique to it. This fun, colorful theme is flexible enough to fit any type of site — it’s simply loaded with options. A long-time favorite for self-hosted sites designed by digitalnature, Mystique is now available in your WordPress.com dashboard. What doesn’t this theme do? It offers layout choices of one, two, or three columns, six color schemes, four footer widget areas, and support for four post formats. Not to mention built-in links to your favorite social networks in the header, a unique custom widget with quick-switching tabs, and special treatment for a “featured” post at the top of the site. Read all about Mystique on the Theme Showcase — I think you’re going to really love this one.

New Theme: Tapestry
2011-04-14 17:20:00
We love blogging, and we know you do too, but we also have a special interest in making blogging lovely for your readers as well. It’s for that reason that we’ve taken a shine to Post Formats and themes that make good use of them. Theme s like today’s new premium theme, Tapestry, available for a one time price of $75. The Tapestry Theme The Tapestry theme accounts for all 10 Post Formats available. How? Tapestry designers, StudioPress describe it this way: “You take pictures, you write stories and opinions, you make videos, you link to cool stuff all the time. Tapestry takes everything you make online, and makes perfect, beautiful sense of it.” With 10 unique icons and a compact layout Tapestry lets you blog your heart out while keeping everything neatly organized. But that’s not all. Tapestry has options for selecting your layout, custom Widgets, a Custom Header, and a Custom Background. You can even control what content is shown in your blog arch...

Security Incident
2011-04-13 18:46:00
Tough note to communicate today: Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed. We have been diligently reviewing logs and records about the break-in to determine the extent of the information exposed, and re-securing avenues used to gain access. We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited. Based on what we’ve found, we don’t have any specific suggestions for our users beyond reiterating these security fundamentals: Use a strong password, meaning something random with numbers and punctuation. Use different passwords for different sites. If you have used the same password on different sites, switch it to something more secure. (Tools like 1Password, LastPass, and KeePass make it easy to keep track of differen...
More About: Security

New Theme: The Morning After
2011-04-08 22:40:00
Say hello to The Morning After, a classic and popular magazine-style theme that has withstood the test of time. Based on its great success for self-hosted sites we’re excited to bring it to you for the first time on WordPress.com. Example of The Morning After's front page. Introduced in 2007 by Arun Kale, The Morning After was a game-changer as the first magazine style theme for WordPress; it is still considered by many to be the top of its class. In June 2010 WooTheme s announced it was taking over the theme: Considering the significance of this theme, we jumped at the opportunity. We felt that [The Morning After] started so many things in the WordPress community… and we wanted to put our weight behind one of the “pillars” of that community. The Morning After sports a special home page template with featured posts, three available widget areas, and special styles for posts in the “Aside” format. Also included is an optional full-width page t...

Twitter Blackbird Pie Just Got Even Sweeter
2011-03-30 23:11:00
Last November we launched Twitter Blackbird Pie, a quick and easy way to reproduce beautiful,  full-fledged tweets — not just static screenshots of tweets — in your posts, pages, and even comments. Today we are happy to announce that we’ve made it even easier for you to interact with tweets on WordPress.com.  Thanks to the new set of tools that Twitter just announced, you can now reply to, retweet, or favorite content without ever leaving the page you’re on. Try it out on the tweet below! @wordpressdotcomWordPress.com Twitter Blackbird Pie Just Got Even Sweeter http://wp.me/pf2B5-1JQ March 30, 2011 9:12 pm via WordPress.comReplyRetweetFavorite This improvement takes effect immediately for all tweets on WordPress.com, so there’s no action necessary on your part. Enjoy! Bonus Tip: Drive Traffic to Your Twitter Account To gain additional exposure on Twitter, add your account as a verified external service in your public profile under Users -> My Profile in...

New Theme: Basic Maths
2011-03-30 20:21:00
Reminiscent of primordial grid designs used in different print mediums, Basic Maths is one of the most elegant, and smartly-designed themes we’ve ever seen. We are thrilled to have it now available for WordPress.com sites as a Premium Theme . One particular thing of note about Basic Maths, is that it comes with custom support direct from us, the Theme Team at Automattic, for the one-time price of $75. Basic Maths, a grid based theme. Apart from a thoughtful design, Basic Maths also offers some cool features, including the possibility to choose custom colors for links and other visual elements, helping you make this theme feel more personal to your site. If you want to make a statement about how important your content is, Basic Maths could be the answer. You can check more about the theme, designed and developed by Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole, on the Theme Showcase. We hope you like it.

Automattic’s Worldwide WP 5k
2011-03-29 19:54:00
As Scott mentioned in his How is WordPress.com Made? post, at Automattic we work from all over the world, and we use internal blogs for socializing and exchanging non-work ideas in addition to making WordPress.com and our other products more awesome. One of the things we’re really concerned about is staying healthy – we even have an entire blog dedicated to fitness. We had a great idea: Get all 80 Automatticians from 62 cities to run/walk a 5k on the same day! This way we can get some exercise together as a company even though we’re apart (though we won’t rule out a softball or Texas scramble at our next meetup). We want to invite you to join us, WordPress.com users (and self-hosted WP users, too!), in the Worldwide WP 5k – the 5k blogged around the world! The date is approaching, so read on to find out how to participate. WHAT IT IS: A 5k run/walk (approximately 3.1 miles). You can run, walk, or skip. It’s up to you. There’s no time limit and the...

New Theme: Rusty Grunge
2011-03-25 17:46:00
It is time to introduce a new free theme which goes by the appropriately evocative name of Rusty Grunge . It goes without saying, this theme has all the rusty and grungy elements needed to appeal to all those who embrace grunginess in themes. It has a light content area over a dark background, and some color splashes around on its design. The Rusty Grunge Theme The theme comes equipped with options for Custom Background, Menus, Post Formats, and Header Image. It also bears two distinct widget areas, making this theme not only grungy but also highly customizable. As usual, find more about what it has to offer on the Theme Showcase. Designed by Chris Wallace, Rusty Grunge is also available for self-hosted WordPress.org sites via the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Wow Your iPad Readers
2011-03-23 21:43:00
With the launch of Apple’s iPad we have seen the future of computing and it is touch. Nothing matches the visceral feel of navigating your digital world with your hands. The past four months we’ve been working closely with Onswipe to bring your iPad visitors our vision of what a blog can look like re-imagined for a touch experience. Our iPad-optimized view is app-like in its functionality, but pure HTML5 goodness on the backend: it supports touch interactions, swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad. Like when we launched our smartphone-optimized WP-Touch integration in 2009 (now responsible for over 150 million page views a month) this is immediately available and active on the over 18 million blogs on WordPress.com. There are some fun options to play with too. If you browse to Appearance -> iPad in your Dashboard you can: Have the theme use an image from your recent posts as a cover. Upload a logo to showcase your brand or personality on the cover....
More About: Readers

New Theme: Liquorice
2011-03-17 18:40:00
Add a dash of color to your site with Liquorice, a wonderful new theme now available on WordPress.com. Gorgeous textures and smooth-as-silk typography make this a striking backdrop for your content. This theme’s design is light and airy without being too plain or minimalistic; it’s a great fit for any type of site. Liquorice features custom subscribe icons for RSS, Twitter, and Facebook for your site header and built-in support for the bold and adventurous Lobster typeface. If you choose to enable Lobster via Appearance → Typekit Fonts you’ll add an extra touch of retro feel to your site. Lobster’s bold, calligraphic strokes make it perfect for calling out titles and headings. Make this theme your own with the custom background feature, custom header image, and custom menu. Learn all about Liquorice on the Theme Showcase. Designed by Nudge Design, Liquorice is also available for self-hosted WordPress.org sites via the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Guided Transfers to .org
2011-03-11 16:39:00
When we launched Jetpack a few days ago Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg said to Techcrunch, “If you’re on WordPress you’re part of the family, it shouldn’t matter if we host you or not.” Today we’re taking that a step further: we’ll actually help you move from WordPress.com to .org. We’re launching a new upgrade called Guided Transfer where for a $99 one-time fee we’ll handle every detail and tech thingamajig involved in moving your content, theme, domain, and more to any one of the recommended hosts we’ve vetted. (And of course your new site will be Jetpack-powered.) Of course we love having you here with us at WordPress.com, but we understand that there are situations where a self-hosted WordPress.org site may be a better choice. What’s included: Install the WordPress software at the recommended host of your choice. Transfer over your entire WordPress.com site. Install and configure Jetpack and a few other plugi...
More About: Transfers

Boost your self-hosted WordPress with Jetpack
2011-03-09 18:00:00
WordPress.com has grown into one of the most amazing cloud architectures in the world. This has enabled blogs hosted here to have features unavailable on self-hosted WordPress installs. This makes us sad, since here at WordPress.com we want every WordPress install everywhere to be amazing. In this spirit, we have great news. We are now making the power of WordPress.com available to almost all WordPress blogs, regardless of where they are hosted. With Jetpack, a new plugin from Automattic, people not on WordPress.com can now access features that depend on WordPress.com. Jetpack also provides convenience features that don’t use the cloud, but are now easier to install, or were unavailable as plugins before. To start, go to http://jetpack.me and read the backstory from Matt on why Jetpack is so important for WordPress. (Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs. We checked with them first and we’re mutually cool on th...
More About: Wordpress

VideoPress now on iPhone, iPad, and HTML5 browsers
2011-03-09 04:14:00
Back in the middle of 2009, we launched our very own HD video service called VideoPress. Since then we’ve made a bunch of improvements including the ability to natively share videos in Facebook. Today we are happy to announce a new set of capabilities that we’ve all been eager to see. Starting right now, all those great videos you’ve created and will be embedding in your WordPress.com site will play back on mobile and touch devices including iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and the new Nokia phones. Our engineer Mike demonstrates Flash performance on Mobile Safari VideoPress also now supports Apple’s AirPlay streaming technology to share video between supporting locally networked devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV. Videos with associated transcripts, such as WordPress TV, include WebVTT <track> data for display by supporting browsers. But that’s not all. If you are running any of the new browsers such as Chrome 3.0+, Firefox...
More About: Browsers , Iphone

Some Turbulence
2011-03-08 17:50:00
You’ve probably noticed that the ride has been a bit bumpy on WP.com the past week with a widely covered DDoS attack last week and then another interruption a few hours ago from an unrelated network maintenance issue. Our core mission is enabling the world to publish, and anything that affects the availability of your site or dashboard impedes that. Anything less than 100% availability drives us to work harder. Rest assured that behind-the-scenes here at Automattic we’re learning as much as we can from these incidents so we’re even better prepared and more able to adapt next time something unexpected comes our way. (We weather DDoS attacks every day on WP.com and 99.9% of them have no user impact.) In a previous post I wrote about downtime I ended with the sentence, “For those following along at home, we’re now powered by 152 physical processors, 511 gigabytes of memory (RAM), 174 hard disks with several terabytes of storage, and we’re adding ...

WordPress Takes SXSW
2011-03-04 21:17:00
Next week a bunch of us from Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, will be attending South by Southwest Interactive. It’s one of our favorite events of the year, and we hope to see many of you there in person. This year WordPress and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg will be interviewed by John Battelle live onstage at 3:30pm on Friday, March 11. Matt will be talking about “The Future of WordPress” — more details here. The WordPress community will also be staffing a WordPress Genius Bar at the SXSW trade show, where we’ll answer your toughest WordPress questions and give away great swag. We’ll be at booth 829, right across from the SXsaloon. Come join us next week for Matt’s talk and at the WordPress Genius Bar — it’ll be another homecoming for WordPress, which was born in Texas.
More About: Wordpress

More Choices With More Premium Themes
2011-03-02 17:01:00
There’s only one thing more exciting than an amazing new WordPress theme available for your site and that’s even more amazing new WordPress themes. With that in mind, I’m excited to announce that today we have three new Premium Themes ready for you! Each one features custom support direct from the theme providers themselves and, of course, stunning designs and cool features. Let’s get right to them and check them out. First of all, we’re happy to introduce a beautiful and fresh new theme from popular theme provider, StudioPress. It’s called, Pretty Young Thing, and I think you’ll find that it lives up to its name. Underneath the pretty surface is StudioPress’ customizable Genesis framework. It’s available now for the one-time price of $75. The Pretty Young Thing Theme From WooThemes, designers of the Headlines theme, comes the appropriately named, Crisp. A handsome and sharp-looking theme designed specifically for Tumblelogging. ...

New Theme: Choco
2011-02-25 18:35:00
Say hello to our newest theme, Choco. If I had to sum this theme up in just one word, it’d be stylish. With dark colors and stitched borders Choco will give your site a classy, contemporary feel. It is well-suited for any site but works especially well for journal-style blogs: the traditional two-column layout with a right sidebar frames your stories in familiar—yet beautiful—style. Choco is chock-full of style. Choose from three color schemes and further customize the look with your own background, menu, and sidebar widgets. Learn more about Choco on the Theme Showcase. Designed by CSSMayo, Choco is now available for WordPress.com, and for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

How is WordPress.com made?
2011-02-17 18:44:00
One of my favorite shows is How It’s Made . I love seeing how things I use every day are actually created. In that spirit, here at Automattic we’ve thought about sharing more about how we work and think. For starters, here’s a recap on a few things. Where are we? Everywhere. People are surprised to learn we are a distributed company. Most of our employees live in different cities and countries around the world. We have a headquarters in San Francisco, but most of our employees are elsewhere. This means we are working round the clock and we’re informed by many cultures, places, and cuisines (we like food). How do we work? Toni, our CEO, has written about the advantages of distributed work before. We are a publishing and services company, and we passionately believe in the power of blogs as group communication tools. We use a WordPress theme called P2 for much of our internal communication, and they function as a combination of specifications, bug reports, br...
More About: Wordpress

New Theme: Duster
2011-02-15 22:41:00
I am rather pleased to announce the birth of a new Automattic theme designed and developed by the Theme Team. It goes by the name of Duster and is quite an interesting theme — if I may say so myself. Apart from the custom possibilities you’re already acquainted with in most of our themes — features like custom backgrounds, headers, and menus — Duster is also equipped with a unique Showcase Page Template that can propel your site up to a new level. Showing how Duster looks. With the help of the Showcase Template you can make your front page display an introductory text message, a featured post with an image —big or small, your call— at the top, a recent post column showing the latest post and a list of other recent posts below, and a sidebar with a custom widget that displays your Aside or Link posts. It also has several details hidden all around, like a responsive and fluid design to accommodate smaller views. We hope you like it and create beautiful sites with its h...

Are you well-versed in comment etiquette?
2011-02-15 20:16:00
Which comment would you rather receive? “Great post! Check out my blog at someblog.wordpress.com.” or “Well said! I know exactly what you mean about X, and I’m glad that I’m not the only one who thinks so. I would even say that A, B, C! Your candor is greatly appreciated.” The second one, of course. Why? For one thing, it follows the etiquette guidelines below. But even more importantly, it was written with the intent to forge a relationship, not to self promote. Relationship building is a much more effective and rewarding strategy for attracting new visitors to your site than spamming, so if you’re interested in boosting your readership, keep the following tips in mind when you leave comments on others’ posts: 1. Be specific. Personalized comments show authors that you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say, and that you actually took the time to read what they wrote. This doesn’t mean you need to write...
More About: Etiquette , Comment

Want more traffic? Publicize now makes it easy
2011-02-04 21:59:00
We’ve made some big user experience improvements to how the traffic building feature called Publicize works.  This feature allows you to connect your WordPress.com blog to your account on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, broadcasting your posts to your friends automatically for you. In the past it took a few steps to figure out how to get going. Now it’s just a click away. Starting today, when you publish a post, you’ll see a mention of the Publicize feature. If you click Turn on the publicize feature, it will take you to the Sharing Settings page in your Dashboard. Here you can configure any of the Publicize services you like. Pick one or more of the services you want to turn on. It’s required that you already have an account with each service you want to use, as you’ll be sent to the service and asked to log in to connect your WordPress.com blog. Then, as seen above on the Edit Post page, WordPress.com will let you choose whi...
More About: Traffic

Stand out from the Crowd With a Premium Theme
2011-02-03 16:04:00
You love themes, I love themes, we all love themes. With millions of sites running on the state-of-the-art WordPress software and over a half-billion people visiting the Automattic network every month, there is a now a need more than ever for unique themes. Theme s that make your site, your content, and your voice stand out from the crowd. Along with this extraordinary growth we’ve been thrilled to watch a thriving marketplace of commercial themes drive innovation and quality in theme design while producing an amazing variety of theme choices for self-hosted WordPress sites. Now we want to bring the same level of theme choices to the WordPress.com community—it’s time to give you a chance at not only more themes, but a chance to showcase your site with beautiful designs that will blow you away with their style and quality. I am proud to introduce the very first two premium themes on WordPress.com: Headlines and Shelf. Example of the news-oriented Headlines front page lay...
More About: The Crowd

Want to share Learn WordPress.com?
2011-01-14 18:41:00
Learn WordPress.com is a step-by-step tutorial that includes lessons on how to start a blog, customize your site, and connect with other bloggers in the WordPress.com community. It’s a great resource for anyone who: Wants to create a blog but isn’t quite sure where to start Needs help choosing a blog topic Wants to better understand how blogging works Is interested in attracting more blog visitors Sound like someone you know? Now you can share the Learn WordPress.com guide via email, Facebook, and Twitter using the buttons at the bottom of each chapter: You can also print out hard copies of each section by clicking the Print button: But it’s a bit of a pain to go through each section, so we have a brand new feature that gives you all of the pages in one giant page, so you can print out the entire thing — today it’s about 66 pages. Click here for a printer-friendly version of the entire Learn WordPress.com tutorial. Congratulations to all of you...
More About: Wordpress , Share , Learn

New Theme: Clean Home
2011-01-14 16:44:00
Are you the type of person who enjoys simple and uncluttered looks on a theme? Clean Home , our new addition, is a crisp and structured theme wielding a traditional two column layout with two widgets areas. Example of Clean Home's look and feel. But don’t let Clean Home’s simple looks deceive you since it hides some great functionality to help you personalize how your site looks. It also comes with four color schemes, including a “snowy” and a “sunny” look —so both northern and southern hemisphere people out there can rejoice. Go discover more about Clean Home at our Theme Showcase! Designed by Mid Mo Design Clean Home is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Theme Updates for Custom Menus and More
2011-01-06 15:00:00
Last year we—the Theme Team—were quite busy, not only offering you 29 great new themes, but also improving the themes you already love and use on your WordPress.com sites. In case you haven’t looked closely at your theme in a while we’d like to point out several recent improvements. Custom Menus 61 of our themes now support Custom Menus—we’ve enabled it for all themes that previously supported top-level navigation with pages. For themes without top-level navigation support you can still create Custom Menus and add them as widgets to your sidebar. Read the Custom Menus support page to learn how to get the most out of this feature. And More… In addition to Custom Menus we also enabled Custom Background support for 72 themes, added Post Formats support to a few themes, and updated all themes to use the standard WordPress comment form. The comment form changes—though invisible to you—pave the way for cool new social features involving comments on Word...
More About: Updates

Challenge for 2011: Want to blog more often?
2010-12-30 23:48:00
There is a saying among writers: to write more, write more. The hardest part of blogging isn’t the tools – it’s what goes on between your ears. Many people start blogs with excitement, but lose courage when facing the blank post page, or chicken out before hitting publish. Here at WordPress.com, we know. And we’re here to help. Announcing DailyPost.WordPress.com Starting today, you can go to dailypost.wordpress.com for inspiration, encouragement and advice about blogging. We’ll be posting every day so you can get regular boosts of motivation to blog more often. The Post Every Day challenge Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing. As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns: Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011 Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog a...
More About: Blog , Challenge

Tips for a new year of blogging
2010-12-22 17:00:00
The holidays make for a crazy time of year. You’re spending time with family, traveling, maybe enjoying some winter weather. All of this can help you create wonderful blog posts. Here are a couple tips on how to let your blog shine as you head into the new year. Blogging made easy Press This is a great way to simplify your blogging experience. It lets you grab content from any blog post, article, website, or photo you find on the web. If you can you see it in your browser, you can use Press This to blog about it on WordPress.com! It will automatically insert an image, quote, video, or link on any website directly into your blog post as well as include a link back to the source. No more having to copy and paste 5 different things. With Press This you can share great content quickly. Drag the bookmarklet (the link that says “Press This”) from the Tools page of your WordPress.com Dashboard into your browser’s bookmarks bar to get started. This adds a handy l...
More About: New Year , Tips

Not Just A Contact Form
2010-12-21 19:11:00
The short version of this story is that the contact form on WordPress.com has been upgraded. But that leaves out so many of the juicy details A couple of months ago we took a step back to look at what sort of things the contact form needed and what it could be. While this is still technically a contact form, it is now so much more. First up, the new interface. Typing in the shortcode still works fine, but we wanted to provide a graphical way for people to manage the form. To do this you click on the ‘Add a custom form’ button: Add a new form That will bring up our new custom form builder: Form Builder The form builder gives you a simple, but powerful, set of controls on how your form will look and behave.  Common changes you can do that we think you’ll find handy: Add and remove fields Re-order the field list (drag and drop) Select from several types of fields (text, drop down, checkbox, radio button, textarea, etc.) Mark fields as required Enter a specific...
More About: Contact

Holiday Wallpaper from WordPress.com
2010-12-21 15:00:00
Last year we started a little tradition, commissioning an illustration to give away as desktop wallpaper during the holidays. This year, Spanish artist Gary Fernández has created a wintry forest scene filled with curious characters who have great taste in blogging platforms. Friends in the southern hemisphere, we love you too, but if you haven’t already noticed, we really have a thing for snow. We hope you enjoy — and happy holidays from all of us at Automattic! Large (2560×1440) Small (1280×720) For Smartphones (640×960) For Tablets (1024×1024) A tip: Choose an image larger than your screen size, and set the position to “center” or “fill screen” (not “stretch”). For smartphones and tablets, we recommend only using the background image on your lock screen, so it doesn’t interfere with your icons. Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows. If you were ...
More About: Wordpress , Holiday , Wallpaper