drawing room

intuor: Telluride Film Festival

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:17:20 -0800

Telluride Film Festival

The Happiness Engineers had a great time in London last week. We worked on some cool projects and...

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:27:13 -0700

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

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

No need to mess around with HTML in a text widget. Go to Appearance->Widgets in your Dashboard, add the RSS Links…

Last week you guys published 1.4 million new blog posts, but you only ran the spell checker about...

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:40:44 -0700

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

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

It’s amazing to me how…

Clouds from my trip to WordCamp Dallas RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a way...

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:42:38 -0700

Clouds from my trip to WordCamp Dallas

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

Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud…

I’m back in San Francisco after a trip to London for the Happiness Engineer meetup. It’s serious...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:14:50 -0700

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

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

Here are last month’s stats:

426,047 blogs were created.
4,560,168 posts were…

In the coming week, the Support crew (seen among the lovely faces here) will be meeting in London...

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:34:36 -0700

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

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

Of course, our team will still be monitoring servers and services while we’re…

Sandbox 1.6.1 is now available to all WordPress.com blogs. Alongside Sandbox 1.6.1 you’ll also find...

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:26:13 -0700

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

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

Sandbox is a skeleton theme for WordPress. Though you can use it by itself, it’s mainly intended for dressing up with a custom Custom CSS Stylesheet upgrade. Sandbox provides all the HTML markup, with a rich semantic structure, and…

We are big fans of SoundCloud, a really useful service that is part Flickr for music, part...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:39:59 -0700

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

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

Check out this address: http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten If you visit it, you’ll end up right back here....

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:39:59 -0700

Check out this address:

http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten

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

WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
These are all exposed in the using …

iNove by mg12 is one of the top themes used for self-hosted WordPress blogs, and a commonly...

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:37:50 -0700

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

Some handy features of this theme:

Display pages or categories in the menu below your header.
Display your page hierarchy in your menu on hover.
Options to show a notice, banner, and special…

We kicked off July with an open vote on new media features. Thanks to all of you who voted and...

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:15:06 -0700

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

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

Here are July’s stats:

394,609 blogs were created.
5,666,839 posts were published.
418,946 new users joined.
6,594,795 file uploads.
3,762 gigabytes of new files.
…

You publish a lot of quality content (trust us, we know). And so we understand that making it...

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:45:27 -0700

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

Enter our newest shortcode – [archives].

This little guy will allow you to quickly and easily add a post index to anywhere on your blog (page, post, or …

Say goodbye to messing around with HTML in a Text widget just to get an “About Me” in your...

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:19:43 -0700

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

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

This Gravatar widget allows you to quickly and…

PollDaddy joined the Automattic team last year, and we have been working on adding some of our...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:34:48 -0700

PollDaddy joined the Automattic team last year, and we have been working on adding some of our great features directly into the WordPress platform ever since.

Ratings

The PollDaddy rating feature that was enabled on WordPress.com last week has really started to see some use. Over 100k blog posts, pages and comments on WordPress.com are now being rated. If you need some help getting started, check out our support page for ratings.

This excellent demo video from WordPress.tv gives a…

Here at WordPress.com, we always run the most recent version of the WordPress open source software....

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:01:03 -0700

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

Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to...

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:10:27 -0700

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

Here are the stats for June:

388,580 blogs were created.
5,845,417 posts were published.
411,540 new users joined.
5,800,941 file…

Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to...

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:47:19 -0700

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

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

It’s an even more fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you. And maybe the best part is that it starts…

You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if...

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:28:29 -0700

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

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

Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a…

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever. May was a fun month for us. We rolled out a ton of...

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:28:28 -0700

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

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

May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly)…

"Social is the new .com"

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:36:41 -0800

“Social is the new .com”