Lifestyle writer - when just being alive is your style.
Location: Burton Upon Trent, UK
Website: alongfromsloth.wordpress.com
Now that you’ve been snapping away, you’ll want to build your photographic following. WordPress.com has an excellent photo blogging community, which you can tap into by following these tips and tricks.
Tags, topics, and phloggers, oh my!
Tags work to connect your blog to the larger WordPress.com community, so you can see others who are writing, or photographing, the same subjects as you. By tagging your post as “Photography” or “Black and White,” your posts will be included in t..
Trying out new themes is fun, isn’t it? I think so! The thing about changing my blog’s theme that has traditionally bugged me, though, is the 10-15 minutes right after you click “Activate” when you have to rush through uploading a new custom header, maybe resetting the background, fiddling with a new sidebar configuration, and other transition adjustments so that people won’t see your site in a half-switched state. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to that — I don’t like to leave things half-p..
There’s something about this time of year that always makes me wistful for the good old days—the simpler times, if you will—when all that mattered were family, friends, and a whole lotta blogging about everything under the sun. I miss those days, don’t you?
Fear not, my fellow blogging friends. We’ve got you all covered today with a theme that will make you want to stop time and write about everything in your lives until you can’t write anymore.
A Simpler Time, designed by Denis..
It’s now much easier for you and your commenters to keep track of the conversations you’re involved in across WordPress.com. Some recent tests have shown that by subscribing commenters to new comments by default, they are more likely to stay engaged and come back and comment more on your blog. With that knowledge, we’ve changed the default comment following behavior to help you get more conversations going on your blog.
We made the initial changes last week and after great feedback from you..
We’ve added a user showcase where you can view stunning customizations made by people just like you. From complete redesigns with CSS to adding pizzazz with Custom Fonts to clever use of options like background and header, this showcase will spark your imagination and inspire creativity.
Discover details about what each showcase blog is doing with WordPress.com themes and customizations by clicking a thumbnail to see a colophon-style list of credits on the left.
We’ve also updated ..
Spring is in the air. With the weather warming up, now is a great time to get started on a photo blog. Creating a photo blog is a wonderful introduction to blogging on WordPress.com or an opportunity to refresh your current site. Ready to get started? You can sign up for a new blog right over here.
Getting started
Photo blogs, sometimes called phlogs, use pictures instead of words. While many photo bloggers choose a type of photo that they want to focus on, such as portraits, others use the..
Happy Thursday! We’ve added some exciting new themes to our ever-growing collection, and we’re happy to tell you all about them.
First out of the oven is…Just Desserts. Yep, that’s a theme! Designed by Andy Rutledge, Just Desserts is a deliciously stylish premium theme that’s perfect for blogs centered on food.
With its responsive, single-column layout and unique presentation of images and posts on the front page, Just Desserts gives you a delectable canvas on which your mouthwate..
Are you curious to see how your friends are using WordPress? Give the new and improved Friend Finder a try to connect with your Twitter, Facebook, and Google contacts who have WordPress sites!
After authorizing WordPress.com to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account to find your friends (don’t worry — none of this account information is saved!) you’ll see a list of people you know who have WordPress sites.
Click Follow and each time your friend publishes a new post it will show..
In our quest to help you find the perfect look for your blog, we’ve added two brand new themes to our collection!
First up is Everyday, a beautifully designed premium theme by James Goode.
Everyday has been precisely calibrated to be pleasurably readable on almost any screen. Attention and care has especially been given to provide a robust and versatile layout to suit your writing needs. From short quips to lengthier bits of prose, Everyday will rise to the challenge and shine with every ..
Back in 2010 we introduced the exciting new ability to Like the individual posts you’ve read all around WordPress.com. It’s been one of our most popular features since then, as evidenced by the chart below that goes up-and-to-the-right as an indication of great success and achievement.
Likes per week since the beginning
Today I’m happy to announce a few enhancements to the way Likes work that we think you’ll really like.
Show Likes on Pages
In the past, we’ve alwa..
This Sunday, April 22nd will mark the 42nd observance of Earth Day. According to Earth Day Network, “More than 1 billion people now participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance in the world.”
To inspire you to get in on this year’s celebration, here are eight amazing nature-related blogs on WordPress.com:
Birdlightwind.com
70degreeswest-explore.com
Leahyetter.WordPress.com
Drawandshoot.me
Beingmark.com
Beetlesintheb..
We’re happy to announce three new things that you can embed into your site!
Spotify
Embed music from Spotify by right-clicking any song, album, or artist in Spotify and selecting “Copy HTTP Link” or “Copy Spotify URI”:
Then paste that into your post editor, making sure that it’s located on its own line all by itself. You’ll end up with something like this when you view your post:
Rdio
If you’re an Rdio user, you can embed music from them too. Copy the UR..
This is a guest post by Kristina Chang, Evan Moore, Tony Xu, and Omer Rabin; students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we’ve been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.
Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of..
We are happy to announce our new REST Application Programming Interface (API) that lets developers explore, interact, and create great new content with the vast community of sites on the WordPress.com network and, in the near future, Jetpack-enabled sites.
The API gives developers access to posts and comments, as well as the ability to Follow, Like, or Reblog content for users. Other features from WordPress.com, like the daily handpicked content on Freshly Pressed, are also available through..
People blog for different reasons, but many post with hopes of seeing feedback from readers. Here at WordPress.com we’ve studied why some posts and blogs get more comments than others, and want to share our advice with you.
You need visitors before you’ll get comments. You won’t get comments until people visit your blog. Start by reviewing our famous post on How to Get More Traffic to understand the basics of building an audience. Posting on a regular schedule is an important part of buildi..
It wasn’t just a one-time event! The Automattic Worldwide WP 5k is back again in 2012! Set your timers for April 29th!
At Automattic we work from all over the world, and we use internal blogs for socializing and exchanging non-work ideas in addition to making WordPress.com and our other products more awesome. One of the things we’re really concerned about is staying healthy – we even have an entire internal blog dedicated to fitness.
We had a great idea: Get all Au..
Heads up, Custom Design users! The Custom CSS feature on WordPress.com now supports all of the new features of CSS3. This means that you can use gradients, animation, multiple backgrounds, @media queries, and many more new features in your custom CSS.
If you want to make your images pop and tilt, give your post titles a polished letterpress embossed look, or add high-dpi graphics for retina displays—you can do that. If you’ve just got to have a Machu Picchu color palette complete with linear ..
We have three awesome new themes for you today that I think you’ll love. A news-oriented magazine theme, a theme for just about everybody, and a food-oriented theme. Here they are!
The Mimbo Pro Theme
Mimbo Pro is a sharp-looking, premium magazine theme from Pro Theme Design. It takes your content and formats it in a structured way grouped by category. Using all of the standard WordPress functionality, custom headers, custom backgrounds, post thumbnails, custom navigation and more – Mim..
We know many of you love your blogs, and gleefully publish photos and posts without thoughts to reuse your work in other forms. But we know some wonder: could this be a book? Recently we wrote about how a WordPress.com blogger scored a book deal for You Are Not So Smart. But what if you want to do it all yourself?
As a blogger who has authored several successful books with publishers, and who works on WordPress.com, I recently self-published a book based entirely on posts from my blog. I wa..
Another beautiful theme worthy of the red carpet has been added to our ever-expanding cast of premium upgrades.
Designed by Jason Schuller of Press75, On Demand was created to bring videos front and center. Adding them into posts is a snap, and you’re free to use virtually any embeddable video format from any video service. On Demand also works brilliantly with WordPress.com shortcodes.
On Demand: Home Page
Also included in On Demand is a custom Featured Posts widget that allows you..
As more and more of you take advantage of our fabulous Upgrades, we’ve been conscious of the increasing need to offer a great way to manage your purchases. What if you could track all of your upgrades, manage them, renew them and *gasp* even cancel them, all in one place?
Well, starting today you’ll see a new page in the Store section of your dashboard: My Upgrades.
On that page you’ll find the list of the upgrades purchased for the site you are managing, followed by a lists of the up..
Today I’m happy to announce two great new additions to our collection of premium themes.
First, we have Standard, a sleek, exacting theme designed by 8BIT for professional blogging with an emphasis on contextual display of your content.
Your content, in each of its various forms, deserves to be presented with unique distinction. Thanks to Standard’s support of post formats, it can. Image, video, quote, status, and link posts all receive a beautiful visual treatment.
If your visito..
Once in a while, it’s important to stop, catch your breath, and look at your accomplishments before you move on to the next thing — to put a stake in the ground that says, “I made it this far!”
Today, we’re rolling out a couple of notifications to help you celebrate your blog activity milestones. From now on, whenever you hit a milestone for how many followers your blog has (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and beyond), you’ll get a badge:
We also created badges to celebrate when you rec..
Today, I’m excited to introduce the latest additions to our ever-growing collection of free themes.
First up is Ari—a responsive and minimal blog theme designed by Elmastudio. This theme is beautiful out of the box but it’s also packed with cool features including two color schemes, three custom color options, a custom header image, a custom background, and a custom menu. With all of these features, the Ari theme will be suitable for a wide range of blogs. Yes, for yours too! So be sure to ..
After moving from New York City to Chicago and getting married, Rachel Bertsche realized that her new life was missing one crucially important thing: a local best friend. So she decided to go on one friend date every week for a year, and she documented her quest on a WordPress.com blog at MWFseekingBFF.com.
But before Rachel even started the blog, the 27-year-old writer put together a book proposal based on her search for a local BFF, and successfully pitched it to agents, and then editors. She s..
It’s been just over two years since we first launched our Posterous importer and I never could have predicted how the blogging space would evolve so quickly in that time. As you may have seen in the news today, the Posterous team is joining Twitter, which we know will be exciting for our friends at Twitter and well-earned for Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal.
We’ve had an over 250% spike in the number of imports the past few hours, so it seems timely to recap how the importer works:
..
If you’ve ever wondered where on Earth all the visitors to your site are coming from, this feature is for you!
Mosey on over to your My Stats tab on the WordPress.com homepage:
…and check out the brand new “Views by Country” panel.
Now, you can see at a glance exactly which countries comprise your audience:
When you click on or hover over a country name, the map zooms in so you can really get a feel for all the parts of the planet your content has reached:..
Today we’ve got two great new free themes for you: Sunspot and Triton Lite.
Inspiration for Sunspot came from one of our older and beloved classics, Sunburn (and perhaps a bit from the recent solar storms). A sharp theme with subtle grid lines and sun-splashed accents, Sunspot is a great all-purpose canvas for your blog, especially if you prefer a dark color scheme.
Sunspot offers two arrangements for posts on the front page: single-column (default) or double-column (pictured above). Addi..
The process of publishing new posts just got simplified big time. Starting today, any time you’re logged in to WordPress.com, you can create and publish new posts without leaving the page you’re on. So instead of having to visit your blog’s dashboard each time you want to publish a post, now you can start a new post the very second you’re inspired to create one.
Simply click the New Post button on the right side of the toolbar, and you can instantly start a new post with the editor that s..
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