Click here to check if anything new just came in.
January 27 2012
Chrome Users: Try the WordPress.com Extension
Want to receive WordPress.com notifications instantly, even when you’re not on WordPress.com?
Add the new WordPress.com extension for Chrome and as soon as you get a new follower or a new like on one of your posts, a notification will appear in your browser:
Simply click the icon to view your latest WordPress.com notifications:
Start following new blogs without visiting WordPress.com
The Chrome extension also makes it easy to follow sites from your WordPress.com account by displaying a Follow button whenever you’re browsing a site that has an RSS feed.
Clicking the Follow button will add new posts from the website to your reader, and send you an email each time an update is published. (You can change your default email settings if you like.)
When you visit a WordPress.com site, you’ll notice that the extension icon will turn blue, but keep in mind that you can follow blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, and other services, too.
Quickly post cool stuff you find while browsing the web
Press This is a lightning-fast way to publish content on your blog without ever visiting WordPress.com. Click the WordPress.com extension, then select Press This whenever you find something on the web that you’d like to share on your blog, and a pop-up editor will appear:
Select the blog you’d like to post to, then hit publish to share a link to the site. Your blog will be updated, and you can continue browsing the web from wherever you left off.
If you’d like to publish an excerpt of text along with the link to the site, simply highlight the material with your cursor before clicking Press This:
And it will appear in the editor for you to publish along with the link:
We hope this makes it easier for you to share cool stuff on your blog quickly! If there’s anything you’d like to see in future versions of the extension, be sure to let us know.
January 26 2012
Your Stats Have a New Home
Are you addicted to checking your site stats? You are not alone. The stats dashboard has always been one of the most popular admin screens. It’s gratifying to know that people are visiting your place online.
With the WordPress.com front page evolving into a one-stop shop for posting, exploring, following and reading blogs, it seemed natural to put your blog stats there, too.
You’ll still find your stats in the dashboard for a while, but the My Stats tab on the WordPress.com home page will soon be their permanent home. We hope this makes it easier for you to keep tabs on your traffic!
If you’d like to attract more visitors to your site, check out these great resources on boosting your blog readership:
(Note to Jetpack users: Your stats will still be available in your wp-admin dashboard. However, you may still enjoy viewing your stats on WordPress.com.)
January 22 2012
Reblogging is Back!
As we mentioned last week, you can like and reblog posts directly from your reader, which displays a stream of all the updates published on all the blogs you follow from your WordPress.com account.
We’ve also brought the reblog button back to the toolbar that appears at the top of the screen when you’re logged into WordPress.com. Note that you’ll only see the like and reblog options while you’re looking at individual posts.
For example, you’ll see this on the left side of your toolbar while viewing http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs:
And your toolbar will look like this while you’re browsing the home page of en.blog.wordpress.com:
How does reblogging work?
Reblogging is a quick way to share posts published by other WordPress.com users on your own blog. People have been reblogging others’ posts since blogging started, but our new reblogging system enables authors to retain greater control over their content.
When a post is reblogged, it shows up with a link back to the blog it came from, the first image in the post, an excerpt of the post’s introduction (if it contains text), and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains. It also shows any comments left by the person who reblogged the post:
Reblogs published on blogs you follow will also appear in your reader:
What happens when my posts get reblogged?
An excerpt of your post will be published on the reblogger’s site (with a link back to your original post), and you’ll receive a reblog notification in the post comments (you might need to approve it first):
You’ll also receive an email notification of the reblog.
Do I get credit when someone else reblogs one of my posts?
Absolutely! All reblogs contain a link back to your original post, so the more people reblog your posts, the more likely it is that you’ll attract new visitors (and perhaps new followers, too!).
What happens if I reblog a reblog?
If, for example, Stephane reblogs a WordPress.com announcement on his site and Lori reblogs Stephane’s reblog, Lori only re-publishes any comments Stephane made about the announcement. If Lori wants to share the original announcement, she should reblog the post from en.blog.wordpress.com, not from Stephane’s reblog. But if Stephane leaves a really clever comment, Lori might want to share it by reblogging his reblog on her site.
Can I edit a post I’ve reblogged?
You can go back and edit the comments you left when you reblogged a post, but you cannot edit any parts of the original post excerpt (including the post title). If you like, you can add categories or tags to the post. Reblogs show up under Posts → All Posts in your dashboard, and they can be edited the same way you edit your own posts.
January 20 2012
New Theme: Newsy
It’s been an extra big week in the news ’round these parts, so much so that the launch announcement of our latest premium theme seems like an extra extra good way to headline our Friday.
Newsy is a versatile business and news-friendly theme that offers up to ten different layouts, four footer columns, custom link and accent colors, and a custom site header. Brand and content-focused editorial teams will love publishing with this theme.
Newsy: Home Page
Designed by Themify, Newsy comes with an impressive set of Theme Options that afford you a great deal of flexibility with how you choose to display your website. Easily control your site’s sidebar positions, home page and archive page post layouts, and navigation bar search box visibility.
You also have the ability to change your site-wide link and accent colors. A few quick adjustments via the options panel will truly have the effect of individualizing your site and making it stand out from the crowd.
Newsy: Accent and Link Color Examples
Up to ten different layouts in Newsy can be achieved by simply altering your widgets and Theme Options. A wide sidebar, narrow sidebar, and two mini sidebars come rolled into Newsy, as well as additional post display and sidebar alignment options.
Newsy: Wide Sidebar Left, Narrow Sidebar Right Option
All of this is controlled either from within Appearance → Widgets or Appearance → Theme Options. The goal with Newsy is maximum flexibility without the headache of manually configuring a thousand theme options. In this case we really can say that less—well, fewer (options)—is more. 
Newsy is a premium upgrade for your blog at $85 for a lifetime subscription. Read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.
Read All Your Favorite Blogs in One Place
If you feel like it’s a chore to keep up with all your favorite blogs, you can now read posts from all the blogs you follow (even the ones that aren’t on WordPress.com!) in one convenient place on the WordPress.com home page:
Your reader displays all the posts across all the blogs you follow in the order they were published, with the most recent content appearing at the top. You’ll see an excerpt of the introduction to each post, the first image in the post, and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains.
You can even like and reblog WordPress.com content directly from the reader (we’re working on bringing reblogs back to the toolbar!) using the icons in the top right corner of each post:
Whether you’re at the computer or using the WordPress app on an Android or iOS mobile device, having all the posts from the blogs you follow in one place makes it easy to find the updates that are important to you, and skip over the ones that aren’t.
Click 
in the toolbar at the top of any WordPress.com site (you must be logged in to see it) to add new blogs to your reader. For directions on adding blogs from Tumblr, Blogger, and other services to your reader, check out the support document on managing the blogs you follow.
Discover New Blogs, Too
To find some awesome new WordPress.com blogs you might like, check out the Recommended Blogs section of the reader:
Right now you can browse blogs in twelve different categories, and we’ll be adding more very soon.
Use WordPress.com as a Real-Time Information Network
If you want to see what people are saying about your hometown, favorite sports team, or a concert you attended last night, add any topic to your reader to create a stream of all posts published with that tag.
You can add as many topic streams to your reader as you like. You’ll notice frequent updates being published under general topics like “art” and “books,” but you can also add more specific topics like “Picasso” or “J. K. Rowling.”
Want less email?
Each time you follow a blog, new posts from that site will appear instantly in your reader, and you’ll also receive them by email. If you prefer to receive email notifications on a daily or weekly basis, or not at all, you can change your default email settings from the bottom left corner of your reader. You can also change your email notification preferences on a per-blog basis.
Find Friends on WordPress.com
Want to see if any of your Facebook and Twitter friends are on WordPress.com? Give the Friend Finder a try:
So, how will you use the reader, and what can we do to improve it?
January 18 2012
Introducing Improved File Preview (and better Sharing)
One of the key aspects of PBworks is the ability to work with files. We’ve made files collaborative–you can upload them, set per-file access controls, share them, track their revision history, comment on them, tag them, and link to them.
Some types of files, like web-viewable images like GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs, we display as part of PBworks, and provide thumbnail images you can mouse over while you’re browsing your folders. We also display the first page of PDFs, for example.
Yet for many types of files, like Microsoft Office documents, you’ve had to download files simply to look at them, even if you didn’t want to make any changes. This is a problem, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes you don’t want to download a massive 50MB file simply so you can take a look inside and identify it. Other times, you may not have the required software to view a file of a particular document type–Photoshop files (PSDs) are a great example. But the most important problem is simply the inconvenience. Our statistics show that viewing is about 10 times as popular as editing for PBworks users; that means 90% of the time, when someone downloads a file, they’re simply trying to take a look.
That’s why we just introduced our new File Preview feature.
The new File Preview lets you to view nearly all the most common types of files, within PBworks, and without downloading. This includes Microsoft Office documents, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as compatible file formats like CSV, WPD, and RTF, and the ever-popular PDF. File Preview also works for common image formats like Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (AI), PostScript (EPS), BMP, and TIFF.
In cases where the document contains multiple pages, you can page back and forth without ever leaving PBworks.
There are some limitations on this first version of File Preview. File Preview will not work for iWork documents like Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, nor will it work for page layout formats like InDesign or Quark. And because the File Preview page relies on Flash, iOS users (e.g. iPhone, iPad, iPod) will not be able to page back and forth; if you want to see more than the first page of a multi-page document, you will need to download it.
File Preview is available to all users of our business products (Business Edition, Legal Hub, Agency Hub, and New Business Hub).
P.S. We also some major improvements to our “Share” functionality. While “Share” was very useful for sharing wiki pages, files, folders, and tasks with existing users, it was difficult to share content with anyone who wasn’t already a PBworks user. You would have to cancel the “Share,” add the users you wanted to share with, and only then go back and share. This latest revision allows Workspace and Network Administrators (who have the power to add users) to add new users as part of the sharing dialogue. This makes sharing with outsiders easier (while maintaining the current policy of only allowing administrators to add new users).
P.P.S. If you haven’t done so already, try out our new Personal Workspace functionality. And because you’re always the administrator of your own Personal Workspace, you can easily share content on that workspace with others using the new and improved “Share” feature.
Join Our Censorship Protest!
Have you been paying attention to all the hubbub online about the proposed U.S. legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that threatens internet freedom? I wrote about it last week over on WordPress.org, but the gist is this: there’s a bill in the U.S. Senate that if passed would put publishing freedom severely at risk, and could shut down entire sites at the whim of media companies. Fight for the Future created this nifty video to sum it up better than I can.
On January 18, 2012, sites all over the internet will be blacking out to protest and try to mobilize more people to speak out against this bill coming up in the Senate next week — S. 968: the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — in an attempt to let U.S. lawmakers know how much opposition there is. WordPress.org, Wikipedia, and even WordPress.com VIP I Can Has Cheezburger? will be participating in the blackout to raise awareness and spur you to action.
Here on WordPress.com, we want to participate as well. Freshly Pressed will be blacked out during the strike.
Sorry to take away your daily fix of yummy web content, but this bill threatens to do that on a much wider scale. You don’t want that, do you?
More importantly, we are making it possible for you to participate in the protest. There are two options: a “Stop Censorship” ribbon and a full blackout. The blackout portion will be in effect January 18 from 8am to 8pm EST, while the ribbon will be displayed until January 24. Here’s how to join in:
- Go to Settings → Protest SOPA/PIPA in your dashboard.
- Select if you want to join the blackout or show a ribbon.
- If you choose to join the blackout, you can edit the message that will be shown on your site during the blackout.
- Preview what your protest will look like.
- Click “Save Changes” button to activate your protest.
That’s it! Easy-peasy activism right at your fingertips.
The “Stop Censorship” ribbon will display in the upper corner of your site and links to americancensorship.org. It will display until January 24, 2012 (the Senate vote date).
If you choose to do the blackout in addition to the ribbon, then we will black out your site from 8am to 8pm EST along with the official strike. You can customize the message that will appear on your blacked-out site to tell people why this issue is important to you. Your site will return to just displaying the ribbon after the strike is over.
I hope that a significant number of you on WordPress.com will join in this protest. Publishing freedom is a right we must protect.
And one last pitch: whatever you decide to do about your site, please take a few minutes to head over to americancensorship.org and take action. It only takes a few moments of your time to be an agent of change!
January 15 2012
January 12 2012
New Theme: Fresh & Clean
Today we’ve got a new theme for you that is so fresh and clean that it’s called…Fresh & Clean. Designed by AJ Clarke, Fresh & Clean is a responsive, spick-and-span theme that lets you put your best content forward with minimal frills.
Fresh & Clean utilizes Featured Images to help you to easily transform your blog into a stylish online portfolio. There’s a featured slider on the front page that highlights Sticky Posts that have large Featured Images. All other Featured Images appear as prominent thumbnails next to their respective posts.
Not looking to build an online portfolio at this time? No problem, Fresh & Clean is great as an all-purpose blogging theme! Take a moment to read more about Fresh & Clean and its features on the Theme Showcase.
Introducing Personal Workspaces
Yesterday, PBworks celebrated the new year by introducing our first major feature of 2012: Personal Workspaces.
A number of our customers told us that they wanted to use PBworks as a place where their employees could store their stuff–files, documents, brainstorms, etc. One customer even went so far as to dedicate a member of their team to creating a “personal dropbox” for every one of their employees.
To meet this need, we’re introducing Personal Workspaces.
Every business user now has their own Personal Workspace. While each Personal Workspace includes all the key features of a regular workspace, like wiki pages, folders, and files, they also include special adaptations for their specific purpose.
1) Personal Workspaces are accessible from any screen.
Just go to the Account drop-down menu, and your Personal Workspace will be the first link shown.
2) Personal Workspaces are personal.
While you can access your Personal Workspace from any screen, no one else will even see it. Network Administrators can join a Personal Workspace, but doing so will alert the owner of the Personal Workspace to the intrusion.
3) You can move items from your Personal Workspace to other workspaces.
Thanks to Move Between Workspaces, you can move a page or file from your Personal Workspace to another workspace. This lets you use your Personal Workspace for rough drafts or private work, then move the finished product to a more public location.
To learn more about Personal Workspaces, visit our User Manual.
Get Married With WordPress
One of the most important events of your life might just be your wedding. It also might be one of the craziest, disorganized, mixed-up times of your life too. We’d like to help with that a bit with a free wedding theme we call Forever. Along with a handful of cool features we’ll get to below, Forever makes it easy to wrap your wedding up in a neat little blog on WordPress.com. You can show off every one of your best photos and highlight every important detail leading up to the big day and beyond.
Forever makes it easy to welcome your family and friends to your blog with a dramatic personalized home page. The design is bold and clean with lots of room for large, colorful photos of the happy couple (that’s you!) in an optional featured post slider and home page excerpts.
You can also easily customize the color scheme and get Forever to match your wedding colors with only a few clicks. You can update the background color (or add your own pattern) from the custom background page in your blog dashboard and even change the color of the all the links from the Forever Theme Options page.
We also built in a special Guestbook Template that lets your guests take over a page of your choice with their best wishes for you … and maybe a few embarrassing stories … as comments.
And, of course, Forever works seamlessly with all the other WordPress.com features you love; emails sent to your blog followers every time you post, contact forms (perfect for RSVPs), custom domain names (like robandlaura.com instead of robandlaura.wordpress.com), customized fonts and CSS with the Custom Design upgrade (great for changing your blog title to a handwriting font), and everything else.
Forever with a custom background, custom font, and custom link color
And it works especially well with our new Milestone Widget.
Save The Date!
Forever also sports a custom design for a new widget we call Milestone. You can find it in your blog dashboard at Appearance → Widgets and it’s pretty easy to use. Just pick a title for your event, a date and time, and a special message for the big day, and you’re ready to go. Now you have a special save the date widget for your Wedding on every page of your blog.
The Milestone Widget in Forever
If that sounds pretty awesome and you want the Milestone widget available for your non-Wedding blog too, you’re in luck. We’re also making the milestone widget available to every theme on WordPress.com right now.
Enjoy Forever
To find out more about our new Wedding Theme, Forever, check out the demo site and visit the Forever theme showcase page. Or just go ahead and activate it on your brand new Wedding blog.
Here’s to your wedding and your wedding blog on WordPress.com. Cheers! (That means you have to kiss now.)
January 09 2012
Splinder Importer Now Available
Italian blogging service Splinder.com is closing down at the end of this month, and we’d like to extend a hearty “Benvenuto” to any Splinder users who’re looking for a new blogging home. To help make migration easier, we’ve added a Splinder importer to WordPress.com. If you’d like to make the move, please go ahead and get started now so that there’s time before the January 31st deadline to work out any issues.
Exporting your Splinder Blog
To import a Splinder blog, you’ll first need to save your export file to your computer by following these steps:
First, log in to Splinder and click the “Blog” link available at the top of the home page.
Next, click the “configura” link available at the top of the blog page.
Now click “Esporta blog e attiva redirect” in the right-hand sidebar.
Next, download the content of your blog by clicking the link “Clicca qui per scaricare il file con i contenuti del tuo blog.”
Now you’re ready to import the downloaded file into your WordPress.com blog.
Importing to WordPress.com
Create a WordPress.com account and blog if you haven’t already, and then visit Tools -> Import in the admin sidebar. You should find the Splinder importer among the list of importers.
Click the link to get started. Next, you’ll upload the export file you’ve downloaded to your computer from Splinder.
Once the importer has validated your import file, you’ll be prompted to map users from the old blog to the new.
If you’d like to have your post images downloaded as well, be sure to tick the “Download and import file attachments” checkbox.
Once you’ve submitted the import request, it can take a few minutes to perform the import, and you’ll receive an email letting you know that the import finished.
After you have imported your content into WordPress.com, you can return to your Splinder settings to create a redirect that will forward your old Splinder blog to your new WordPress.com blog. Provide your new WordPress.com blog URL in the field and click the “Attiva redirect” button.
If you have any trouble importing your blog, of course you’re welcome to contact support, and one of our Happiness Engineers will be glad to help out. To learn your way around WordPress.com, we encourage you to check out our handy tutorial. We also provide comprehensive feature documentation at our support site. Welcome to WordPress.com!
January 08 2012
January 06 2012
Even more Space in 2012
To celebrate the New Year we decided to offer you more space for your precious media.
Our previous space upgrade levels have been increased without any additional cost for you as follows:
- 5GB → 10GB
- 15GB → 25GB
- 25GB → 50GB
- 50GB → 100GB
- 100GB → 200GB
If you already subscribed to one or more of these upgrades ( yes, they are cumulative ), your total available space has been automatically updated as you can see in your Media Library.
If you don’t have a Space Upgrade yet, or need to add more, the new levels have been implemented in the Store section of your dashboard.
The Space Upgrade of course gives you more space to store your photos, and docs, but it also enables you to upload audio files, which makes it perfect for podcasts, MP3s, or any audio format.
We don’t even limit your bandwidth, and we’ll keep your files as long as your blog exists.
If you want to learn more about these upgrades, feel free to visit our space upgrades support page.
But wait, there’s more…
For those of you with a private blog, we lifted the previous limit of 35 users allowed to access it. From now on, you can add as many authorized users as you wish, from the Settings → Privacy section of the dashboard.
We hope you’ll enjoy these new features, and we wish you and your WordPress.com site all the best for 2012!
January 05 2012
New Themes: Duet and ThemeMin
I’m excited to announce we’ve added two great new premium themes to our ever-growing collection of themes today.
First up is Duet – a responsive, minimal, and sophisticated design from The Theme Foundry.
Duet is tailored for writers, journalists, and business bloggers. Meticulously crafted and refined options provide you with the power to effortlessly customize your theme. Choose and mix from ten accent fonts, and five body fonts to discover the perfect typographic style for your website. You can also upload a custom logo image to put your own personal stamp on your blog.
With a flexible featured slider, your readers have no chance to miss your important posts. Duet comes with more great features, so be sure to read about it on the showcase page.
Next up is ThemeMin, designed by Themify.
ThemeMin is a minimal, light-weight, and fast-loading theme that focuses on typography. Together, all of these elements help to provide a comfortable reading experience. ThemeMin comes with a featured posts carousel on the front page. Plus, you can mix and match between five color schemes, three site layout options, and two post layout options until you find a combination that hits the spot for your blog. Go find more about the theme on its showcase page.
January 01 2012
December 28 2011
Introducing Multi-value User Profile Fields
Thought we were done for the holidays? Think again. We’re still working away here at PBworks HQ. Today’s new feature is the addition of multi-value user profile fields.
Our user profiles are an important part of PBworks; Network Administrators can add any fields necessary to allow the members of their organization to share their skills and find one another. One drawback, however, has been that each profile field could only accept a single value. If you created an “Office” profile field, each person had to choose whether they belonged to New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, even if they split time between more than one.
Today, we’re enabling multi-value user profile fields. Now users can add multiple values to a single profile field, and this information will show up in search results.
Don’t worry; we’ll still support regular single-value profile fields; Network Administrators can choose whether or not to enable multi-value profile fields, and how they’re configured.
In the words of the classic advertising slogan, now you can select both “Tastes Great” and “Less Filling”!
Multi-value User Profile Fields are available on all business products, including Business Edition, Agency Hub, New Business Hub, and Legal Hub.
December 27 2011
Kick Off 2012 with Project 365
If you were going to blog about one thing for an entire year, what would you choose?
Would you post photographs of your favorite place? Interview different people from your hometown? Create a new piece of art each day?
Here are eight unique blog projects (some are updated every single day) to inspire you to kick off 2012 with your own Project 365:
Blog Radstone
RichardRadstoneBlog.com
The goal, every day for the next year, approach one stranger, photograph them and promptly blog the experience. Rain or shine, hot or cold, healthy or ill, no days missed. I’ll do my best to create interesting photos, and for the sake of entertainment, work to get myself into a sticky situation from time to time. It’s a huge commitment. I’m sure there will be some hero photographs and some not so magnificent ones. Let’s see what happens!
The Creative Panic
TheCreativePanic.com
The project right at this moment is to illustrate something (anything!) as quickly as possible every day.
36ixty5
36ixty5.WordPress.com
Each day a new image will be uploaded with a small caption, phrase, quote, poem or whatever.
Everything Burger
EverythingBurger.WordPress.com
I created 365 pieces of burger artwork for a year from May 17, 2010 until May 16, 2011.
An Afternoon With
AnAfternoonWith.com
This is a project about people. It is a project about our space and the things we keep and the things we don’t throw away. It is a project about looking for and finding connections we all have. It is about seeing yourself in these spaces. Every picture is a portrait of the owner – be it a room, an object or a view. Every portrait in the end becomes a self-portrait. So in the end this is a project about me.
Footballists
Footballists.WordPress.com
I often walk around the city in my beloved Liverpool FC jersey. I never miss to notice every other person wearing a soccer shirt, no matter how big the crowd. I’ve decided to approach and meet them, and photograph. Here are my brief encounters, far away from the pitch.
A Drink with Chicago
ADrinkWithChicago.com
Since making Chicago our home, we have found that all it takes is one great conversation over one drink to create a long lasting friendship, change your outlook or learn something new. We have had so many of these experiences that we thought we’d start to share them as we continue getting to know the many fascinating people around our city. Join us as we sit down and have a drink with local entrepreneurs, chefs, celebrities, socialites, artists and athletes who all love Chicago as much as we do.
{365} Breakfasts
OneBreakfastADay.WordPress.com
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A blog to celebrate this is worth it.
So, do you have any ideas for your own Project 365?
For tips on choosing a topic, check out the Learn WordPress.com tutorial on Getting Focused. You can also find writing ideas, blogging tips, and photo challenges at The Daily Post.
Happy New Year from all of us at Automattic!
December 25 2011
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
