September 2009
4 posts
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...
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...
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...
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...
August 2009
6 posts
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 4 a.m. EST on Monday,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
July 2009
6 posts
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
June 2009
2 posts
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...
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...
December 2008
1 post
September 2008
5 posts
WatchEscalators, candy, and striped shoes.
neocitran is my friend.
WatchEl Guincho - Palmitos Park
When I was in first year art school, they made us all do this project where we had to cut out little black squares from construction paper and then repurpose them into a “composition”. I think those same little black squares decided that they had enough of first year art projects, and would prefer to act in this video - with its vintage Sesame-Street-style...
As of two weeks ago, I’m back in Vancouver. I missed Vancouver - specifically Vancouver in September, when all the leafs are shady and green, and the weather’s warm and I can wear sandals. It defies all pre-conceptions.
In the evenings, the sun casts its light down the streets, west to east. Whoever planned the city obviously never experienced a sunny day here. The sun’s...
August 2008
1 post
Twitch - Three Clips From Charlie Kaufman’s... →
The great thing about Charlie Kaufman’s writing is how it rearranges your brain, disorienting you and screwing you over in a satisfying way. And if these clips are to judge, it will succeed again.
July 2008
17 posts
I hate heat.
Radiohead - House of Cards (3D viewer) →
Radiohead’s new video makes me so excited. Come on, it was shot with lasers, people. LASERS. Beyond the techno-geek stuff, it’s also a pretty great video. The bits where the shots are disintegrating, the long lingering feel, the 80s-computer graphics look - ah, it’s so wonderful. (also see the making of.)
WatchAn experiment in photography and editing - it’s made from over a hundred digital photos stitched together to create movement. (except for the last shot.) I like it ‘cause making movies with a digital camera is fun.
"what do you want to do this weekend?"
Let’s get lost. No, I mean it. Burn maps, spin around in circles, and just start walking. And keep walking. We’ll take all the wrong streets and keep going until we can’t go on any further.
We’ll wind our way back home until we fade back into familiarity. We’ll keep walking until we can call the streets our own. And, after the slow journey back, you’ll have the experiences etched into you. Your...
“ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most...”
– David Levithan & Rachel Cohn, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (via into) (via scout)
devotchka - basso profundo
Right now, in some...
“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”
– Michel Gondry
or: save it for your livejournal
The night before last, I dreamt I lived in a physically impossible apartment building. My apartment had huge windows, covered with sheets, and an upper floor that couldn’t exist because the building didn’t have enough floors. There were stairs - dark gritty sewer stairs - leading into the center of the building that were blocked off by chain-link fence and padlocks.
My invented...
“Beware of artists – they mix with all classes of society and are therefore most...”
– Queen Victoria (via simko)
interactions #1
After paying at Starbucks, I notice a driver’s license beneath the keypad. There’s a guy waiting for his drink in front of me. I compare his black and white driver’s license photo to his face. They’re close enough. “Is this yours?” I ask, holding it up to him.
He looks at it for a moment. “YES! THANK YOU!” he exclaims.
I give it to him and return...
June 2008
5 posts
WatchA 16mm black and white surrealist film about a young woman who is diagnosed with only having a purely logical, left brain.
This was the result of my film production course from last semester. We watched Un Chien Andalou many times and used this camera. Ah, it was fun.
May 2008
4 posts
