Rantings and Ravings

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…

I’m constantly finding sites on WordPress.com that leave me happily surprised. I ran across Wir sprechen Online a few weeks ago and just kept coming back to it. For both the content and the design.

Wir sprechen Online is a P2 powered blog written in both German and English with content ranging from tech tid-bits to personal posts. Aside from the great content, I love how the site has taken advantage of the CSS Upgrade. The customized header, tweaked colors, and other…

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…

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 text widget. Go to Appearance->Widgets in your Dashboard, add the RSS Links…

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 spelling (which my browser catches), but grammar and style.

It’s amazing to me how hard it is…

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 on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud…