We’re often asked when we plan to make our intelligent proofreading technology available for more languages.

We’ve been hard at work and today we’re announcing After the Deadline proofreading for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

These languages feature After the Deadline’s smart contextual spell checking. We’re also using a great open source project called Language Tool to check French and German grammar.

If you’re on WordPress.com and your blog language is set to French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish–you’re ready to use our multi-lingual proofreader.

Click in the visual editor or in the HTML Editor.

We realize many of you blog in multiple languages and we have not forgotten you. Visit your WordPress.com profile page and select Use automatically detected language to proofread posts and pages.

With this option enabled, our proofreader will guess the language of your blog post and apply the correct proofreading technology for that language.

The WordPress.com Proofreading technology is available as the After the Deadline plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Enjoy.

Here at WordPress.com we like to keep stats on the various features and resources available to our users. So as part of the release for rssCloud on WordPress.com I added internal stats to see how it was being used. It tracks things like the number of subscription requests and the number of sent notifications (pings) that get processed each day.

That’s where the numbers for my rssCloud Update post came from. It’s been three months since that post so I took another look at the numbers to see how things were going. The first thing I looked at was the number of subscription requests per day. I was a bit surprised by what I saw:

Turned out we’d had a bit of a spike

Things were pretty consistent before that spike, getting between 160,000 and 200,000 subscription requests per day. Then, for a few days towards the end of January, subscriptions really started coming in. At the very tip of that peak there were 1,548,657 subscription requests in a single day. And as quickly as they came, they went, dropping to a daily average below what we were seeing before. Then this week we saw another (much smaller) spike back up to 359,759 requests in a single day.

Now I was curious, what did the numbers look like for pings sent out? Turns out there was a spike there as well, though not nearly as big:

The daily numbers were again pretty consistent, between 65,000 and 110,00 pings sent per day, with the weekends being on the lower end of the scale. Then, on the same day where the number of subscription requests had peaked we saw a spike in pings sent out; 143,769 (the red arrow). And just like the subscription numbers, after the spike the daily averages fell below their earlier norms. And then another peak this week. This time though the second peak was even higher, at 146,809 pings sent out in a single day.

The reach of rssCloud has been growing too. Back in November there were 135,000 WordPress.com blogs with at least one rssCloud subscriber. Today there are 237,420.

Makes me wonder what the next three months will bring.

February has been a great month for mobile blogging on WordPress.com. In just the past week, WordPress apps for Android and BlackBerry made their official debuts, and the iPhone app reached version 2.2. No other blogging service has this kind of app support across these three smartphone platforms — we checked!

Power and control, on the go

While each of these mobile apps is unique, they share a common design philosophy: to give you the ability to easily update and manage your blog from an optimized smartphone user interface. You can easily create new posts, add media, manage comments, and more. There are small tweaks and differences, but the other thing that is shared is the developers are constantly improving the apps based on your feedback, just like we do here on WordPress.com.

100% free and open source

Each app is released free of charge, and the code is open source. The teams welcome suggestions for new features and even code contributions. One of the coolest things about open source development is community involvement. It makes the code better, and it makes the apps rock.

Developers can get involved here:
Android | BlackBerry | iPhone

If you’d like to give feature suggestions, do it here:
Android | BlackBerry | iPhone

Language support

WordPress.com users come from all over the world. The mobile apps here are available in multiple languages but need volunteers to enable even more people to use them. If you’re interested in helping localize these mobile apps, you can get involved by emailing us. We’ll send you instructions on how to translate.

Works with WordPress.org blogs

Each of these mobile apps also lets you publish to and manage your self-hosted WordPress.org blogs.

Now with video

VideoPress is now supported in the WordPress for BlackBerry app, and is coming soon for iPhone and Android.

One more thing

We are very excited to share with all of you that in the coming weeks we’ll be opening up a beta test for the official Open Source WordPress for Nokia app. For developers who are interested in getting involved, we just opened-up a dev blog with details, links to the source code and trac tickets, and an early alpha build. We’ll be leveraging the Qt framework which means will be able to support both the S60 and Maemo platforms.

Blog on!

What are you waiting for? Download WordPress for your favorite mobile device and get blogging on WordPress.com.

Publishing your blog on WordPress.com lets you focus on your content while we sweat the technical stuff, including helping your content reach a larger audience.

Last week WordPress.com turned on sitemap pings for our millions of hosted blogs. Now, immediately after you publish or delete a page or post*, your WordPress.com blog sends a ping to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Ask. These immediate notifications help the major search engines receive your new content as quickly as possible (often within seconds) so your blog can show up in search results faster.

Help search engines discover your content

Sitemap pings are just one of the ways WordPress.com helps your content reach a large audience moments after you hit “Publish.” Every blog includes support for webmaster validation through Google, Bing and Yahoo! webmaster portals. Post updates are sent through Ping-o-Matic!, a ping relay tool owned by the WordPress Foundation, to major feed reader and blog search engines. Our Publicize feature updates your Yahoo! and Twitter accounts with a short summary and a link back to your blog content. These are just some of the ways WordPress.com helps you find your audience.

More information

• Creating and submitting sitemaps to Google
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• How Yahoo! supports sitemaps
• Ask.com webmaster FAQ

* Note: We only expose content to search engines for public blogs on WordPress.com.

I’m happy to present to you, “Motion,” a dashing new theme inspired by movement and film. Bursting with style and options, Motion is a clean, colorful, and charismatic new theme.

Motion, a colorful and clean theme.

Motion combines color and clean lines to give your content character without hindering consumption. Aside from great design, the theme features some pretty interesting features. The menu shows both categories and pages, in separate locations, allowing your visitors to choose how they’d like to navigate your site.

Pages and Categories

There is also a really nice widget area that acts a little bit different than most other widget areas. It’s the “header” widget area – you can use it for intro text, a link to your RSS feed, or anything you want your users to see right away.

Intro Text / Header Widget Area

Last, but definitely not least, is the footer.  It’s big, clean, and widgetized. By default you have Links, Pages, and Archives – but it’s all up to you, customize the footer however you’d like.

The Footer

Check out Motion on your own WordPress.com blog! Just login and visit Appearance -> Themes

Motion was designed by 85ideas and is available for .org users too.

Posterous is a blogging system that launched with an interesting twist — everything happens via email from signup to posting. Since the launch of our post by email features in addition to things like email comment replies and blog subscriptions we’ve been receiving more inquiries from people wanting to graduate from Posterous to a full blog with the features, flexibility, and reliability of WordPress.com.

It was actually easier than we thought: Posterous has a very nice API for reading from and writing to their service.

After logging into your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Tools -> Import.

Click on the Posterous importer.

Type in your Posterous host name, user name, and password and click the Submit button.

The importer will validate your user name and password. After starting the importer, you can sit back and watch the status counters tick away.

You can also safely leave the importer page or close your browser. The importer will keep running.

Currently, the importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

We will send you an email when the import finishes. Easy peasy!

There are a few things still on our roadmap, like more auto-post functionality, but don’t worry it’ll all be ready soon.

Full of character yet minimal, we bring you the wonderful “Steira,” bursting at the seams with detail and functionality.

Steira in all its glory!

Recent Comments Widget for Steira

The sidebar is large in this theme giving you a lot of room to play.

Any widget will do, but the custom widgets are quite convenient and stylish. The “Recent Comments” widget is especially nice. It shows a dedication to your content while at the same time keeping the visual intensity that the rest of the theme boasts.

The "New" post.

There are a lot of subtle details in this theme. Most notably, your newest post shows up with a nice “New” label, giving your users a heads up.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen Steira before, it’s because you haven’t. It was designed by Made by Elephant for WordPress users.

The theme will soon be available in the Theme Repository over at WordPress.org and we’re extremely happy to be sharing it with you today.

We have made a couple of updates to the polls and ratings feature on WordPress.com that you may have already noticed.

Ratings on front page

There is now an option in the ratings settings to allow you to display your posts ratings on the front page.

Usage is very simple – pick whether you want the rating above or below the post, and save.

Your ratings will now appear on your blogs front page… nice!

Poll Options Menu

You may have noticed a new menu option under the polls menu – Options.

Here you can import another PollDaddy account if you wish to access another account from your WordPress dashboard.

Using the default poll settings, you can set your typical poll settings, like a custom style. Then with each new poll created, these default settings are loaded automatically, saving you time and hassle.

Expiration limit on block repeat voting

There is an additional setting in the poll editor that allows you to set a limit on how long to block repeat voters.

Just choose one of the block options, select how long you wish to block repeat voting and save your poll.

We have also made a few minor updates like adding support for right-to-left (RTL) languages, and tightening permissions. The WordPress.org plugin has also been updated with these changes and with a few additional ones detailed on the PollDaddy blog.

You can find out more details on the support page.

Since our Post by Email feature opened last year the emails have been coming in fast and furious. Here’s a wrap-up of some of the latest improvements.

Bigger attachments
We like to see photos and video in your posts, so we’ve increased the size of emails that can be sent, now up to 50MB. Anything you can upload to WordPress.com can be sent in an email and will be neatly placed on your post.

Better image handling
In conjunction with this we’ve also improved our image handling so your photos look even better, particularly when teamed up with duotone, a great new photo theme.

Perfect for mobile photo blogging
If you have a camera-enabled mobile phone this makes for a very powerful photo blogging tool. If you need some inspiration check out Matt on his one-man-and-his-phone photo and video journey around the world. We’ll even geotag any posts, if sent from a GPS enabled phone.

Now with polls
Opinions are an important part of any blog and you can now create PollDaddy polls by email. Just include a special shortcode:

[poll]
Is Post by Email great?
* Absolutely
* Maybe
* I like eggs
[/poll]

We’ll do the rest so you end up with a poll like this:

Tell Twitter and Yahoo
If you’re using our Publicize service to send updates to Twitter or Yahoo you can customize the message in your email, and enable or disable specific targets.

[publicize twitter]check out my latest post[/publicize]

Location enabled
Are you a keen trekker and have a Spot GPS device? Send your emails to WordPress.com and we’ll show them on a map so people can follow your journey.

Details, details, details
Don’t forget that you can also set the post title, tags, and category of any email:

[title Animals I like]
[tags lion,penguin,mole]
[category elephant]

You can find the full list of shortcodes on the Post by Email support page.

On a final open-source note, we’ll be releasing the code for Post by Email soon, so all you WordPress.org users can install it on your own self-hosted sites.

Thinking of moving your blog from Vox.com to WordPress.com? You are not alone.

We’ve noticed that several people are dissatisfied with the service and want to move their blog elsewhere. A lot of people that we’ve heard from say they didn’t realize that there is no way to export from Vox and are looking for a solution.

Vox users have at least one option now: create a free blog here at WordPress.com, then import your Vox blog. (And never be locked in again — we make your data as free as possible.)

After logging into your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Tools -> Import.

Click on the Vox importer.

Type in your Vox host name, user name, and password and click the Submit button.

The importer will first validate your user name and password. After starting the importer, you can sit back and watch the status counters tick away.

You can also safely leave the importer page or close your browser. The importer will keep running.

Currently, the importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

We will send you an email when the import is finished. Easy peasy!

Update: You can now apply a password to all posts that will be imported from Vox.

Last week Mozilla released Firefox 3.6, the latest and greatest version of their open source Web browser. To mark the occasion, we worked with designer Chad Pugh to create a couple of brand new WordPress Personas for Firefox. Personas are like skins for your browser, and these designs are a great way to show off your WordPress colors.

The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of the great old-time printing presses. Get it here.

And the “Inkwell” Persona uses splashes of color to decorate a well-used piece of paper. Add it to your Firefox here.

Sleek, and bursting with elegance, I’m happy to bring you monochrome, another addition to the wonderful collection of themes available on WordPress.com. monochrome is a beautiful theme with wonderful details.

monochrome, the theme, in action.

The name comes from the theme’s monochromatic color palette. Beautiful and sleek, it’s the attention to detail that really makes this theme shine.

metadata, sub-menus, and the search Box

The headers and dates are uniquely styled. The menu shows sub pages, with a nice smooth animation as well. And don’t forget the custom search box widget styled up with rounded corners.

Want to check out monochrome? Just login to your WordPress.com blog and click on Appearance -> Themes in the sidebar. Preview the theme and if you like it, activate it.

If you are a WordPress.org user, please check out monochrome on the .org Theme Repository

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus

From the time we started WordPress.com in 2005, we’ve focused on making it easy and rewarding to use so that anyone could get started with blogging. Along the way all of you who’ve been using WordPress.com and giving us your feedback have helped us figure out which features to roll out next. Thanks!

I took a look back at all the feature announcements we’ve made here, and it came to 370 posts, 82 in 2009 alone. That’s a lot of features. So in case you missed anything along the way here are some of my picks for cool things you can do with WordPress.com.

Create
We’ve set up lots of ways for you to write, post photos and videos, and generally add stuff to your blog, including mobile apps.

• Add quotes, images, and videos to your blog while browsing other web sites with the Press This bookmarklet.
• Post by email makes it easy to publish blog posts from any email client. (It’s what I use to post to my photoblog.)
• Post additional media to your blog, like video, with the VideoPress Upgrade and music, with the Space Upgrade
• Use shortcodes to display videos, slideshows, polls, maps, and more.
• Write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog using WordPress for iPhone, WordPress for Blackberry, and m.wordpress.com.
• Import your blog to WordPress.com from other platforms, like Blogger and TypePad.
• Schedule posts and pages so your blog can update itself, change your post and page timestamps, and display a page as your front page.

Personalize
You can also tweak how your blog looks, set the domain to be your own and pick your language.

• Customize the appearance of your blog with the Custom CSS Upgrade.
• Map your domain to remove “.wordpress.com” from your blog’s URL.
• Change the language of your dashboard and blogs, contribute translations to WordPress.com using GlotPress. We have support forums in Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Share and Read
We’ve built in some cool sharing and reading features so you can easily let people know about your new posts and also see what other people are blogging.

• Publicize your blog using:
  Email subscriptions for posts and comments
  Twitter
  Yahoo! Updates
  RSS

• Subscribe to other blogs using:
  Email subscriptions for posts and comments
  The Tag Surfer
  Readomattic
  Jabber
  Twitter

We’re working on much more for you in 2010. In the meantime check out Support for an updated list of features, and tips on making the most of your blog. Thanks for making WordPress.com amazing.

Last month we introduced new ways to post and keep up to date with WordPress.com blogs through the Twitter API. One of the coolest parts about this is you can make use of a growing number of microblogging apps to publish to your WordPress.com blog.

Today our friends at HootSuite announced their support of WordPress.com. HootSuite is an easy to use microblogging tool that lets you post updates to many different social networks. WordPress.com is the first blogging platform they’re officially supporting.

You can schedule and cross-post content to multiple WordPress.com blogs (posting to self-hosted WordPress blogs isn’t available yet). You can also set up a Home Feed for blogs you’re following, and reblog posts that you like. Check out the tutorial video HootSuite’s put together to see how easy it is to get going.

For even more apps, including iPhone, BlackBerry, and Firefox flavors, we created an apps for WordPress.com directory that we’ll keep updated with new ways to get your blog on. Enjoy!

Did you ever look at your stats chart and wonder which posts were published on a particular day? Now it’s easy to find out. Just move your mouse around the chart. (This only works for WordPress.com blogs right now.)

Did you ever wonder how many hits your home page gets? Now it’s listed along with your posts. There is also a comprehensive report page reachable by clicking the little icon on the right. (This works for WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted blogs using the Stats plug-in. No upgrade is required.)

I hope these little upgrades will help you prosper in the new year.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll probably say it again: attending a WordCamp is one of the most enjoyable ways to meet other WordPress users and learn new tricks that you can use on your site. There are a handful of WordCamps coming up in the next few months all over the world, including Atlanta, Boston, Toronto, Indonesia, Ireland, Greece, and Japan. For more information about these specific events, you can check out the post at WordPress.org or go to the WordCamp hub. Happiness Engineers from WordPress.com and other Automattic employees are often at WordCamps, so maybe we’ll see you there!

Happy Holidays! To spice up the coming weekend I’m here to present you with Duotone. Duotone is the successor to our highly popular photo blogging theme, Monotone. Duotone is very similar, but comes with lots of under the hood enhancements.

Duotone, a Photo-blogging Theme

Background color options

Along with an enhanced color algorithm that automatically picks the best colors to accent your image, Duotone carries some nice options for choosing a static color background.

Duotone also sports a nice widget area down at the bottom of the page. Perfect for three widgets of your choice.

And to appeal to the avid photographers, EXIF data is now shown for photographs if it exists.

We hope you enjoy Duotone!

Check out the demo over at http://duotonedemo.wordpress.com

Check out the widget areas and EXIF data!

This year, we teamed up with San Francisco artist Coley Wopperer to spread some WordPress-themed holiday cheer. We thought it turned out so well, we wanted to share it with everyone as a collection of desktop wallpapers. Sure to bring a smile to your face, even if you’re staring at spreadsheets all day. Happy holidays from all of us at Automattic!

320×480 (for mobile devices)
1024×768
1600×1200
1920×1080
1920×1200
2560×1440
2560×1600

Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you haven’t already tried our post by email feature then it makes blog publishing as simple as sending an email. Configure your blog, write an email, and we’ll do the rest. You can add photos and videos in your email and they’ll all be included, regardless of whether you send them from your home computer, your office, or a cellphone.

Last month we introduced a great geotagging feature that allows you to identify where you’re located when writing a post. This has now been linked in with post by email so you can send a photo, via email, from any GPS-enabled device and we’ll use that information to automatically set the location of your blog post. If you have an iPhone, for example, then take a photo, email it, and you’re all set.

As we roll out more geotagging features you’ll be able to use this information to show friends where you’ve eaten, to show places you’ve visited on vacation, or if you’re forgetful, to remind yourself where you’ve been.

Naturally you may not want your location to be public and the geo information will only be used if your personal profile allows it. Additionally, you can include the [geotag on] and [geotag off] shortcodes in your email to override your profile defaults.

Full details of all post by email shortcodes can be found on the support page. This includes how to include category and tags.

Happy holidays from the WordPress.com Happiness Team! We’re working hard getting ready for the holidays and sheltering from the snow.

We will be closing support for one week in order to spend time with our families whilst trying not to overcook the turkey, coping with relatives, and staying sane.

Support will be unavailable from 2pm EST on December 24th to 5am EST on January 2nd.

If you’re stuck, we have some great documentation, videos, and of course the wonderful volunteers over in the forums.

We will, however, be around in the forums as usual in case of any problems or urgent questions. We will also be working on documentation and generally improving WordPress.com support over the break. Stay happy!

...Feature-Vergleich der beiden Smartphones...

...some demos of its GoForce 5500 processor. This video shows a demo mobile phone UI, using 3D, video and Flash 2D. It mighty purdy.