Video Contest Extended!
Earlier this week, we launched a WordPress.com Video Contest all about giving thanks. No matter where on Earth you are, we invited you to submit a 30-second video all about the things that bring you joy. And it’s still on!
The new deadline for submissions is midnight Pacific time (UTC-8) on December 4, giving you an extra week to show us your awesome vids.
Remember, the winner of the contest wins a Flip Mino HD video camera, plus a one-year subscription to VideoPress!
To submit your entry, just post your video to your blog with the tag ThanksgivingContest09.
Black Friday 20 hour 20% off sale now on!
In the US there are some strange traditions, and one of them is the day after Thanksgiving when people line up from 3 or 4 in the morning to be the first people in a store when it opens to get some item for a really good price. This is ostensibly to get a head start on Christmas shopping.
We’ve decided to replicate this experience but without the cold, the early morning, or the scramble to get to the door first.
Right now you can get 20% off on all upgrades purchased on the Upgrades page on your blog. This is our Black Friday sale and must end in 20 hours time!
For example, you can get VideoPress for only $47.98, register a domain and map it for $11.98. Custom CSS costs $11.98 right now.
20% off everything, only for the next 20 hours. Check out the list of available upgrades to see what’s on offer then visit your Dashboard and click “Upgrades”.
This is the first sale we’ve ever had, and might be the only one.
Google “Go”
Ya hace unos días que Google anunció el lanzamiento de su nuevo lenguaje de programación: Go, creado con la finalidad de simplificar el desarrollo de aplicaciones de software: Go es un proyecto open-source que está empezando, pero no cabe duda que, con el respaldo de una compañía como Google, puede llegar (y seguramente llegará) muy lejos. [...]Del lado obscuro de la tecnología móvil
Luego de sencillas y exitosas experiencias con el Internet móvil de los SonyEricsson y LG desde Ubuntu estoy ahora explorando como se integra GNU/Linux con teléfonos con tecnología propietaria, no con el famoso iPhone que es de la empresa propietaria por excelencia sino de los menos afortunados Windows Phone, específicamente en un Samsung Omnia i900. En [...]GIMP no se instalará por defecto en Ubuntu 10.04
De la pasada Ubuntu Developer Summit (para Ubuntu 10.04), que ha tenido lugar del 16 al 20 de noviembre en Texas (USA), nos ha llegado una noticia que ha hecho correr rios de tinta: Canonical ha decidido no incorporar GIMP en la instalación por defecto del futuro Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). El motivo de esta decisión [...]Fedora 12
Recientemente se ha anunciado el lanzamiento de la última versión de la distribución Linux patrocinada por Red Hat: Fedora 12. Entre las novedades en esta versión tenemos un mejor soporte para webcams, audio, vídeo y administración de energía, además de nuevas características como la herramienta de informe de errores, bluetooth por demanda, y otras mejoras en [...]Mockup de la nueva versión de Ubuntu Tweak
Ubuntu Tweak software imprescindible en mi instalación ha anunciado que tendrá cambios en su apariencia, y aunque ya es muy funcional, esperemos que los cambios sean para mejorar en todo sentido. Que te parece la apariencia que proponen para la nueva versión? Vía | Sitio OficialWordPress.com Video Contest: Giving Thanks
Announcing our first-ever video contest, brought to you by turkey, stuffing, and that gelatinous stuff that grandma calls cranberry sauce. Yes, that’s American Thanksgiving. Appropriate to the occasion, the topic is giving thanks.
While it’s inspired by the holiday, it’s in no way limited to residents of the U.S. Whether you’re in Jacksonville, Jakarta or Johannesburg, you’re invited to take stock of all that you’re thankful for, and share it with the WordPress community through video.
To enter the contest, embed your video in a blog post tagged with ThanksgivingContest09, any time between November 23 and 27. We’ll announce the winners the following week.
We’re looking for creative interpretations on the topic, not confessional-style orated lists. Maybe it’s a montage of tiny moments that fill you with joy, a mini-documentary of your family traditions, or a strange stop-motion adventure about the things you treasure most. Check out our announcement video for even more ideas:
While there’s no limit to the ways you can express yourself, we do have two requests:
- Keep it rated G (obviously).
- Keep it under 30 seconds. It sounds short but, trust us, you can fit a lot of amazing things into that timeframe.
Videos that don’t meet those two requirements will be disqualified.
The first place winner will receive a one-year subscription to the VideoPress upgrade (or an additional year, for those who already have it), along with a sleek new Flip Mino HD camera!
For the runners-up, there’s lovely WordPress apparel and mugs, plus a very special WordPress Moleskine notebook, not available in our online shop.
The contest ends at midnight Pacific time (UTC -8) on November 27. To translate that to your timezone, you can calculate it on The World Clock.
If you aren’t sure how to embed video on WordPress.com, check out our handy Support resources. You can even upload videos straight to your Media Library, with the VideoPress upgrade.
All best to our contestants. We look forward to seeing what your brainy brains come up with!
A New Translation Platform
The full translation of WordPress.com is an ongoing process, of which you are a great part and whom we thank for the patience and assistance. Thanks to you, WordPress.com is now available in 60+ languages (and, yes, before you ask, esperanto, too). As you know, any text that shows up on your dashboard, widgets or (most) themes can be shown in one of the supported languages, by specifying a different language in the Language Settings of your blog’s dashboard.
Up to now the platform used for translation was simple and worked, but not only did it lack features that have been requested over time, but also made the approval and deploy process slow at times. Given the accelerated pace at which new features have been rolling out, we have been working on a new and improved translation platform that will make life easier for all involved.
Enter GlotPress, the new open source GPL project from Automattic, that is now the engine behind WordPress.com translations. Here are the most important changes:
- Filters for everything,
- Pagination! (no more filtering through thousands of strings),
- Faster, optimized process of string validation and deployment,
- Much easier to add new languages.
In the future we will bring in other cool stuff like keyboard shortcuts, more social functions (user profiles, comments, tags). We are pushing GlotPress live without them, because we were so impatient to deliver something better than the old system, that we focused on the most important features only.
Be sure to read the support pages on internationalization and on GlotPress, then dive into your language’s strings to make sure WordPress.com displays your language the way it should.
A few notes:
- Translations were generally approved by one of us at Automattic, but we can only validate so much as we don’t speak all the languages (we try, though!), so that we now support “validator” profiles on GlotPress, for those users who want to help out in semantic and consistency validation (and not just technical). If you feel this is something you might want to sink your teeth into, please drop us a line in the forums.
- Remember that for the 10 or so most spoken languages, we import those language communities’ translations directly, overwriting existing strings, at every new release. We strongly encourage you to get in touch with the .org translators for your particular idiom.
- If you are a programmer and wish to contribute to the GlotPress code self, there’s a Trac for the project, where you can browse the code and contribute with patches and additions.
Email Subscriptions
There are many ways of reading WordPress.com blogs and we’ve now added another: blog subscriptions.
This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.
If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.
All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.
HTML formatting will be used in emails, where possible, to retain the flavor of your post. This includes your images, making for attractive email photo galleries. Subscribers can also choose to receive emails in plain text, should they not have access to an HTML enabled mail client.
You can select to have an email sent each time a post is made, or to receive a daily or weekly digest of all the posts. Perfect for catching up on your reading at the weekend.
Want to keep up-to-date with all the latest WordPress.com developments? Subscribe to this very blog and get all future announcements delivered to your inbox. It really does only take a few seconds and you’ll find the form just after this text. Want to keep up-to-date without using email? Have posts sent direct to your Jabber-supporting instant messenger client, or try Readomattic to keep a list of your favourites. Remember that you can also subscribe to an individual post by checking the ‘notify me of follow-up comments via email’ when making a comment.
We’ve got a lot more plans for email so stay tuned!
Full details of the subscription feature can be found on the subscriptions support page.