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!
The Image Widget, Plus News from Support
Last month, the Support team (also known as Happiness Engineers) got together to brainstorm new ways of providing you with the features and resources you need.
Out of that meetup came a number of improvements and features, like the RSS Links Widget, introduced earlier this month. Another is the Image Widget, launching today.
In the past, it was necessary to use HTML in a text widget to display images in your sidebar. Now all you have to do is plop a URL in the image widget. The rest is done for you. If you’d like to set a title, alternate text, and image size, it’ll do that, too.
And there’s more cool stuff coming your way:
We’ve made some improvements to the Support contact form, and a better search for Support is in the works. We’ve made some internal changes, too, that will help our growing team answer your questions even more efficiently.
There’s now a Hugs page to display some of the positive feedback we receive from those of you who write in to Support. It brightens our day to hear that we’ve helped out, so we’re sharing a bit of that love. 
Maybe most excitingly, we’re going to start providing Support in other languages — a much-requested feature. The first of these will be French, with several others to follow. We’ll post announcements here when each is launched.
Support Hours and Updates
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, September 7.
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 pages and make use of the forums, which are full of helpful users like you.
