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February 19 2012
February 14 2012
New Theme: Retro-fitted
I’m pleased to announce the latest addition to the ever-growing collection of free themes here at WordPress.com. Retro-fitted by Justin Tadlock mixes subtle textures with clean lines and shadows to create a beautifully balanced composition perfect for all types of blogs.
Retro-fitted can be personalized in a variety of ways. Customize the look of your blog by uploading a header and background image. Take control of you navigation by configuring the dropdown menu. Add widgets to the sidebar for a two-column layout or leave it empty for a single column design.
Check it out in the Theme Showcase.
February 12 2012
February 11 2012
February 10 2012
Comment Notifications!
A few months ago we added Notifications to the WordPress.com Toolbar and recently we released a Chrome extension so that you can always keep up with the activity on your blog. Today we’re adding comment notifications, complete with comment moderation and reply functionality. When your post receives a comment, you’ll get a Notification that looks something like this:
If you’re using threaded comments, you’ll see if someone responded directly to you, right in the notification.
You will see Approve, Spam, and Trash links in your comment notification if you have permission to moderate comments, allowing you to moderate the comment from within the notification:
Clicking Reply automatically approves a comment and displays an area for you to type a reply in. When you’re done, just click Reply and you can get back to whatever you were working on, without having to navigate to the dashboard to manage your comments.
You can still manage comments in your dashboard, but we hope you’ll find the comment notification a convenient shortcut.
For more information about comments and comment moderation: Comments, Manage Comments.
February 07 2012
New Themes: Splendio and Suburbia
Happy Tuesday! We’ve got two unique free themes for you today, and they are quite a study in contrasts.
Our first theme, Splendio, dazzles with an unconventional yet stylish design from Design Disease that pops out of the box — literally.
How you use this theme is limited only by your imagination! It comes loaded with features: six widget areas (one in the right sidebar and up to five in the footer), featured header images, and a custom background. In addition, there’s a showcase page template (pictured in the screenshot above) that includes a featured slider for sticky posts, and a nifty compact listing of your latest posts. For details on how to set up the Splendio theme on your blog, consult the Theme Showcase.
Our next theme, Suburbia, is as orderly and minimalistic as Splendio is eccentric and playful. Designed by WPShower, Suburbia’s attractive arrangement of posts inside a grid make it an excellent choice for magazine-oriented sites.
Suburbia makes use of featured images to display your posts in a clean, refined style. If you’d like a post to have a larger featured image, mark it as a sticky post. In this manner, you can highlight your most important content. In addition to featured images, Suburbia supports five optional widget areas (four in the footer and one in the sidebar on single posts and pages), a custom background, and custom header image. As always, you can click on over to the Theme Showcase to read more about Suburbia.
We look forward to seeing how you use these two great themes.
orca
February 05 2012
February 03 2012
Post Videos from Your iPhone or iPad
Would you like to post videos to your blog while you’re on the go? Are you interested in a photography theme that’s also video-friendly? Well, look no further, because we have some news for you.
The VideoPress upgrade, which allows you to upload and embed your own videos on your blog, now comfortably handles videos from iPhones and iPads. You can shoot vertically or horizontally, and we’ll take care of rotating it for you so that your video looks great when it’s published on your site.
If you don’t already have VideoPress on your WordPress.com account, head on over to VideoPress.com, we’ll get you up and running in no time. And don’t forget to install the free WordPress App on your iPhone or iPad!
Duotone: Now Video-Friendly
If you’re a photoblogger, you’re probably familiar with the cool Duotone theme, which changes color to match the first image in every post and page. The big news is that Duotone now seamlessly supports VideoPress videos, so now you can engage visitors with photographs and videos!
Learn More about VideoPress
If you use VideoPress on your self-hosted WordPress site, keep an eye on the VideoPress Blog – we have some exciting annoucements coming out soon, just for you!
You can find more details about VideoPress by checking out the following resources:
February 02 2012
New Themes: Currents and Debut
Today, I’m excited to introduce the latest additions to our collection of premium themes.
Designed by Andy Rutledge, Currents, is a responsive, minimal yet attractive premium theme from WooThemes.
Currents is perfect for news driven sites. The phrase, “less is more” couldn’t be more true. This clean and minimal design maximises your reader’s focus on the content. Having said that, the theme is packed with many customization options — a wide featured post slider, custom news areas, six alternative color styles, and more. Together, all of these features help you to control how to present current events you want to share with your readers.
Think your readers might check your site on a mobile device? No problem! Currents makes your site look great on an iPad, iPhone or any other mobile device.
This is not all about this great theme, Currents — so be sure to read about it on the Theme Showcase.
Next up is Debut – a beautifully designed theme by Luke McDonald of Press75.
Debut is a mobile-ready theme custom tailored to present your content in a professional and eye-catching manner. Five beautifully designed post formats provide you the flexibility needed to display media of all types. Musicians may be specially interested in the audio post format which expands into a multi-track playlist. Highlighting specific content couldn’t be easier with Debut’s Home page template which includes an innovative, customizable content slider as well as a featured area that can display in both grid and list styles.
Read about its features in detail in the Theme Showcase!
Import from Tumblr in 3 Easy Steps
We’ve recently noticed that a fair number of you have been bringing your tumblelogs over from Tumblr to WordPress.com using one of the variety of Tumblr to WXR conversion tools which exist on the web. We thought you would appreciate an easier way to import your content, so we bring you 3 easy steps to import your content.
Authenticate with Tumblr
To bring your tumblelog’s content to WordPress.com, head to Tools → Import in your WordPress.com dashboard and look for the Tumblr importer. If you don’t already have an account here on WordPress.com then head over and sign up first.
Click the link to get started and then enter the email address you used to sign up to Tumblr, your Tumblr password and click Connect to Tumblr.
Start the Import
The importer will then fetch a list of your blogs and let you pick which one to import. Click Import this blog to get going.
Once you have started, the import progress will be shown on the import page and you will be sent an email when the import is finished. We try super hard to make sure that all your Tumblr content, including your Videos, are imported into your WordPress.com blog. Videos you had uploaded to Tumblr are imported into VideoPress and other embeds are converted to use shortcodes. Sometimes the importer finds an embed it can’t convert and a list of these is included in the import completion email for you to check.
If your Tumblr site has a custom domain (like you.com instead of you.tumblr.com), then you’ll need to disable the custom domain temporarily while the import is processed. You can do this by going to your Tumblr Dashboard, clicking on the Settings button and then un-ticking the “Use a Custom Domain” checkbox:
Then you’ll want to set up Domain Mapping on your WordPress.com blog so that your readers can use the same domain to reach your site as before.
Style Your New Site
WordPress.com supports Post Formats which allow you to distinguish between the different types of content you post on your site. While you wait for your content to be imported why not customize the design of your site by picking one of our post-format-enabled, Tumblelog-ready themes.
If you have any trouble importing your blog you’re welcome to contact support where one of our Happiness Engineers will be glad to help out. To learn all about WordPress.com’s features, we encourage you to check out our handy tutorial. We also provide comprehensive feature documentation at our support site.
January 29 2012
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!
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