Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.
Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.
An…
October was another busy and productive month. We released Publicize for Yahoo! Updates and Twitter, and upgraded the Theme Viewer for WordPress.com. Coming out of the Automattic team meetup in Québec City, we launched new image templates and mobile themes, and open sourced our After the Deadline proofreader. We also shipped WordPress 2 for iPhone and added support to VideoPress for Ogg, an open video format.
Many of us will be heading out to the Big Apple this month…
When we announced After the Deadline, the proofreading tool used on WordPress.com, many of you asked us to add proofreading to the HTML Editor.
The HTML Editor lets you edit the HTML in your posts and pages directly. It is also very lightweight.
We’ve been hard at work and now you can check your spelling, style, and grammar from the HTML Editor. Here is a screenshot:
The proofreader for the HTML Editor has the same features as the one for the Visual Editor.
Click 
to…
Last week you had fun with the WordPress logo. We received nearly 100 entries and many of you have been patiently waiting for news. You don’t have to wait any longer. Here are our favorites split into 5 categories. Cast your votes to pick the final winners. Voting will close on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 12pm EST. Click an image to see the large version displayed in the user’s blog post.
Brownie Bites
Needle Cushion
As strong believers in open source technology, we were excited when Firefox started supporting the new HTML video tag this past summer. It has the potential to transform the future of online video.
While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video…
As technology advances, mobile devices are playing a bigger role in our lives. Thousands of you have been using the iPhone and Blackberry applications to post and edit content for your blog, and over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices. New smartphones do a great job with most web sites, but older phones have many problems and may not display anything at all.
Today we’re launching a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be…
Our team loves photography and we hope you do too. While taking countless photos in Quebec, we thought it would be an appropriate time to update the image templates for all of the WordPress.com themes.
If you are using galleries or inserting one image at a time into your posts, you can take advantage of the updated image templates. Make sure to click the Post URL button in the Link URL area when inserting your images or configuring a gallery. When you do this, the images will then…
We dig Twitter over here at WordPress.com (check us out at @wordpressdotcom). With the launch of our newest Publicize feature, we dig it even more since you can now tweet your WordPress.com posts automatically.
You can stick with the default, automatically generated tweet, or customize it to your heart’s content.
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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,…
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 Quebec City for our biannual meetup. This is our time for working on special…
Today we’re bringing you yet another theme designed by Derek Powazek: DePo Square.
This theme looks great! Minimal, simple, yet unique. But, it doesn’t stop with great design. This theme comes with a seriously cool feature: post types.
Map your categories to one of five pre-defined post types — Status, Quote, Link, or Quickie — and your content will be displayed in a format special to those types.
Just select your category mappings by visiting the “Current Theme Options”…
Customizing your theme just got easier! The Custom CSS Upgrade now provides the ability to save revisions of your code and uses the same engine that WordPress uses for post revisions.
If you currently have the CSS upgrade, you can see this in action by logging in to your WordPress admin and going to Appearance->Edit CSS. Click the “Save Stylesheet” button. You should now see the Post Revisions box below the preview and save buttons. Note: the revisions box will appear on the CSS editing…
