Support Hours and WordPress Logo Fun
As Matt mentioned in the September Wrap-Up, the Automattic crew is heading to Québec City to work on some top-secret projects. It worked well when we closed the email support system for our London Support meetup, so we’ve decided to do it again.
Support will be unavailable from 10 a.m. EST on Friday, October 9 to 4 a.m. EST on Monday, October 19.
Of course, our team will still be monitoring servers and services while we’re out to keep you blogging smoothly and safely. In the meantime, we encourage you to read through the Support docs and make use of the WordPress.com forums (which are full of friendly users like you) if you need a little help.
While we’re away, we’ll be running a contest to see who can use the WordPress logo in the most creative way. Take advantage of your camera, graphics applications, crayons, and anything else you have at your disposal. Create a post on your WordPress.com blog, upload your image or images, and leave a comment here with the URL of your post. Please make sure to leave the URL to your post in the comment text or the entry will not be accepted.
We’ll get you started by providing some official WordPress logos, but the rest is up to you. I’m sure you can do better than the photos I’ve included here. We’ll keep an eye on submissions and post some of them to the @wordpressdotcom Twitter account during the week.
The deadline for submissions will be 4 p.m. EST on Monday, October 19.
We’ll create categories based on the best submissions and run polls to let you select the winners. Prizes will include WordPress.com upgrades, swag, and maybe other surprises. Good luck!
Free Access to Premium Images
We all love adding great images to our blog posts, and today we’ve enabled a new WordPress.com Shortcode that adds millions of available premium images to the mix, all for free.
The Shortcode is for a service called PicApp, which offers up to the minute sports, news, and celebrity images from some of the top photographers and agencies throughout the world.
Looking for that shot of Eli Manning of the NY Giants throwing a perfect pass during this weekend’s NFL game ? A search for “Giants” brings up a few good ones:
What about a photo for your political post about Obama:
Or do you need a recent photo from Stella McCartney’s fashion show in Paris this week?:
To add these and other great images, just locate the “For WordPress.com” Shortcode when viewing an image on PicApp and paste it into your post:
Here is also a brief video overview of how it all works:
The related-images strip you see embedded at the bottom of each photo links to pages on PicApp.com that help support the photographers and agencies involved with these images. For more details on the related-images strip, modifying the image size, and how to copy the WordPress.com Shortcode, please read the documentation in our support area.
And for self-hosted WordPress sites, be sure to grab the plugin at WordPress.org.
Theme Viewer
We know you love themes and we know you like to try new ones. With our new super-charged theme viewer this is now even easier than before.
The new theme viewer let’s you quickly step through themes without reloading the page. You can search for specific words (for example, ‘orange’), and you can filter by requirements (for example, ‘two columns’).
Still not sure what to pick? The random feature will select 15 themes at random, which may help jog your inspiration. Want to pick something that few others are using? You can also view themes in order of their popularity. Join in with everyone else or be independant, the choice is a few clicks away.
Still can’t find a theme to your liking? Don’t forget our Sandbox theme. It’s a simple and clean theme that is designed to be used with the CSS upgrade to give you control over how your blog looks (check out this site for Sandbox examples). If you’re not too sure about using CSS then our recently introduced CSS revisions feature will give you the reassurance that if something goes wrong you can quickly jump back to an earlier version.
If you haven’t changed your theme in a while then give the new theme viewer a try – you may discover a whole new look!
Full details about the theme viewer can be found on the theme viewer support page.
Theme Viewer
We know you love themes and we know you like to try new ones. With our new super-charged theme viewer this is now even easier than before.
The new theme viewer lets you quickly step through themes without reloading the page. You can search for specific words (for example, ‘orange’), and you can filter by requirements (for example, ‘two columns’).
Still not sure what to pick? The random feature will select 15 themes at random, which may help jog your inspiration. Want to pick something that few others are using? You can also view themes in order of their popularity. Join in with everyone else or be independent, the choice is a few clicks away.
Still can’t find a theme to your liking? Don’t forget our Sandbox theme. It’s a simple and clean theme that is designed to be used with the CSS upgrade to give you control over how your blog looks (check out this site for Sandbox examples). If you’re not too sure about using CSS then our recently introduced CSS revisions feature will give you the reassurance that if something goes wrong you can quickly jump back to an earlier version.
If you haven’t changed your theme in a while then give the new theme viewer a try – you may discover a whole new look!
Full details about the theme viewer can be found on the theme viewer support page.
Publicize: Yahoo! Updates
You can now send your WordPress.com posts to your Yahoo! Profile via the Yahoo! Updates service.
Check out that cute WordPress icon!
The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Yahoo! account.
These connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Yahoo! accounts separately.
More details can be found on the Publicize support page.
Yahoo! Updates is the prestigious first of a series of Publicize features we’ll be launching or highlighting over the coming months.
September Wrap-Up
September was a big month for us. We acquired proofreading service After the Deadline, and launched it as a feature on WordPress.com. We implemented RSS Cloud and custom CSS revisions. The Happiness Engineers rolled out two new widgets: the RSS Links widget and the Image Widget, along with other improvements. We also launched a new theme: DePo Square.
Next month the Automattic crew is heading to Québec City for our biannual meetup. This is our time for working on special projects, like comment reply by e-mail, blavatars, and the original Prologue. More surprises are on the way.
On to the stats for September:
- 448,025 blogs were created.
- 6,325,895 posts were published.
- 481,505 new users joined.
- 7,113,257 file uploads.
- 5,384 gigabytes of new files.
- 816 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
- 8,845,411 comments.
- 7,827,502 logins.
- 1,317,218,759 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,350,080,907 on self-hosted blogs (2,667,299,666 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
- 2,244,794 active blogs and 23,395,291 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
- 1,510,819,760 words.
More neat stuff:
300,037 of you made use of After the Deadline.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle and the University of British Columbia are using WordPress.
Student Life relaunched on WordPress MU.
The NASA Glenn Research Center launched a resource guide for WordPress development.
September WordCamps: WordCamp Los Angeles, WordCamp Romania, WordCamp Portland, WordCamp Philippines, WordCamp Seattle, and WordCamp Birmingham.
WordCamps in October: WordCamp Spain, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Kyoto, and WordCamp Netherlands.
