Back in February, we launched Publicize: Facebook as a way to connect your WordPress.com account to your Facebook profile.

In March, VideoPress added support for Facebook so that when using Publicize, your videos would get added to your Facebook update as well.

Until now, we’ve neglected your images.

Starting today, however, we’ll cherish your images as much as we already do your text and video; when sending a Facebook Profile update, WordPress.com will include any image you upload to the post. Image support was the #1 most requested feature for Publicize: Facebook, and we’re happy we finally got around to it

(Before you ask, the #2 most requested feature is the ability to update Facebook Pages as well as Profiles, so it’s already on our list.)

Since we started, you’ve sent out nearly 1.3 million Facebook updates from WordPress.com. Keep them going!

NB: Only the first five images uploaded to a post and included directly, in a gallery, or in a slideshow will be sent to Facebook.

A broken telephone I saw while wandering around Bangkok

It’s happened to all of us. The night starts off innocently enough with a little gin and tonic, maybe a mojito, then next thing you know you’re doing tequila shots with the bartender and the girl from Brazil and you find yourself thinking it would be a treMENdous idea to call up your ex and see how they’re doing and perhaps impress them with your newfound wit.

We’ve got the cure. Now, instead of drunk dialing random friends, lovers, and acquaintances one at a time, what if you could dial your blog and talk to the whole world at once? It’d be like something out of Star Trek.

The future is now, folks. You can now go to your My Blogs tab, enable Post by Voice, and get a special number and code to call your blog. After you’re done, the audio file from your phone call will be posted to your blog for all to listen to and enjoy. (And added to your RSS feed for podcast support.)

So now you can post to your WordPress via the web, email, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, desktop clients, and now any telephone in the world. Of course when you post it can be pushed to Facebook, Twitter, and more using the Publicize feature. What more could you want?

Right now this is completely free, but we’ll charge you money to take down posts. Just kidding! We’re making it free and allowing recording lengths up to sixty minutes, but that limit may go down without a paid upgrade in the future. Mostly we’re just curious to see how people use this.

I have a few ideas myself, but to find out you’ll have to listen to this voice post:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Born and raised on the Texas Gulf Coast, I’ve spent the past few months trying to wrap my head around the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent massive oil spill that is now ruining the coastline from Louisiana to Florida. At times, I have to turn off the news, as the images of dying wildlife hit me deep in my gut.

But now more than ever, this national tragedy has made me grateful for the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. While the oil continues to spew, the media — WordPress.com bloggers included — have been on the frontlines, making sure that Americans and everyone the world over know what is really happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil spill has also made me realize how fragile this freedom is — as the Associated Press reported, “journalists covering the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been yelled at, kicked off public beaches and islands and threatened with arrest …”

Which is why I’m happy to announce that WordPress.com is a proud supporter of the 1 for All campaign that launches today with the simple goal of raising awareness about the First Amendment. We join more than 1,000 media outlets who have partnered with 1 for All, and we have a special connection to the project — their site is hosted on WordPress.com.

Any U.S. resident is welcome to enter their “How Free Can You Be?” contest by submitting photos, videos and stories that illustrate First Amendment liberties. Back here on WordPress.com, please tag any posts you write about this topic with “First Amendment.” And since we know many of you don’t live in the United States, we welcome all readers — regardless of where you live — to discuss civil liberties in your country, as well. Please tag those posts with “human rights.”

Do you ever think “Ugh, I’d totally write a new blog post, if I just had something to say?” Or maybe, “I’m sick and tired of writer’s block but I don’t know what to do about it!”

We’ve all been there — those days when the light bulb seems dim, if not burned out. To give you a little creative push and get that writerly mojo flowing again, we’ve added a new service called Plinky.com.

Each weekday, Plinky provides a prompt — like a question or a challenge — and you type in an answer. To keep it interesting, prompts are a mixed bag of fun commands (“Write a haiku about the last meal you ate”) to more thoughtful questions (“What is your favorite summer memory?”)

To get started, sign up for a new account at Plinky. Then, add your WordPress.com blog to your Plinky account, which will let you share your answer. We’re excited to see what you’ll create, and we hope to feature some of the best Plinky answers on WordPress.com. But we can’t feature your Plinky posts without your help: You’ll need to add a “Plinky” tag to your blog post, so that it appears on the Plinky tag page.

Support instructions for using Plinky on your WordPress.com blog.

Grab your extra-large images and check out today’s new theme, Modularity Lite. If you want a photo blog or portfolio site our one-hundredth theme might be the perfect thing for you. Let’s take a look at it.

The Modularity Lite Theme

If you’re attaching large images (950 pixels by 425 pixels and up) to your posts you can turn on the optional home page slideshow in Appearance → Theme Options. Modularity Lite grabs the first large image attachment from your most recent posts and turns them into a dynamic, full-width slideshow.

Also available from the Theme Options page: a welcome message you can enable on the home page just above the slideshow and a checkbox for making Modularity Lite a full-width, no-sidebar theme.

Modularity Lite Theme Options

We’ve also made sure that Modularity Lite is really customizable. There’s a Custom Header (950 pixels by 200 pixels), Custom Background, and a fully-widgetized footer at the bottom of every page. Check out the Modularity Lite demo and take a closer look.

Designed by Graph Paper Press, Modularity Lite is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Say hello to Koi, our newest theme. This light and colorful theme provides a beautiful framework for your WordPress.com site with delicate, hand-drawn illustrations and refined typography. The tasteful artwork featured in the header and footer are suggestive of koi, an ornamental fish often considered a symbol of love and friendship.

Example of Koi's layout showing the lovely illustrations behind the header and navigation bar.

Enjoy the playful artwork and textured background, or customize the look with a custom background color and image, custom header image*, and custom navigation menu.

Add a background image and change the background color via the Custom Background menu.

Koi’s right-hand sidebar and three footer columns are ready for all your widgets. If no widgets are enabled in the footer widget area, it will not appear.

Example of Koi's three footer widget areas and more of the design's gorgeous artwork.

Designed by Nick La of N.Design Studio, Koi is now available for your WordPress.com site and is coming soon for self-hosted WordPress.org sites.

This month we passed an impressive milestone: 200,000,000 posts have been published on WordPress.com.

Does this number surprise us? Not at all. Because we’ve long known that you — our users — have an infinite amount of things to share with the world.  From posts about your struggles with life and death, your favorite hobbies or your simple yet touching thoughts of the day, you are who we have to thank for helping us become the success we are today.

Onward and upward. And if you’re curious to know more about our stats, you’ll probably enjoy this page. Happy blogging!

The Taoist concept of “Wu Wei” involves knowing when to act and when not to act. It’s also the name and neat description of the design philosophy behind today’s new one-column theme. Let’s take a look at Wu Wei.

The Wu Wei theme

Wu Wei is a gorgeous theme but we’ve also made sure it’s packed with features for you. Starting from the top, beautiful, fully customizable, drop-down menus using the Menus feature in Appearance → Menus, and an optional Custom Header. You can add a header image below the text, and if you’re uploading your own logo here, choose to hide the text altogether.

Wu Wei's customizable menus

And, at the bottom, totally optional Widget areas in the footer of every Wu Wei-themed page of your site. To keep things simple, they’re turned off by default. Visit Appearance → Widgets and add your own Widgets to any of the three available areas to automatically turn the footer Widget area on.

Wu Wei's optional footer widgets

Wu Wei also comes with an alternate, dark color scheme.

The dark color scheme

Turning on the dark color scheme is simple. Just visit Appearance → Theme Options, check off the option to use the dark color scheme, and click the save button. Both the color schemes are beautiful so this might be a tough choice!

You also have complete control over the background for this theme in Appearance → Background. The choice of dark or light color schemes works really well with this.

Designed by Jeff Ngan, Wu Wei is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

As some of you noticed, including a number of major media organizations, WordPress.com had some unexpected downtime on Thursday evening. Whether you’re eating delicious BBQ, as I was, watching a marathon, or about to post your opus, downtime is an annoying interruption and we hate it.

This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers, or aliens, it was completely our fault. A single line, nay, a single character out-of-place, slipped by our normal review and testing and started overwriting settings when triggered. The team immediately took the site down to prevent further damage and clean up the mess that had been caused. All hands were called to deck.

First we determined that 11.2 million blogs were unaffected by the bug. So we brought those back up. For the remaining 50,000 or so, including some VIPs, we started restoring the lost settings using backups, audit trails, and logs. This was largely automated and we brought blogs back online as they were fixed, but a few final tricky ones were brought back one-by-one by hand because we wanted to make sure everything was in its right place.

For most folks (99%) your site was only unavailable for an hour, the rest came up a bit after that, and the tricky ones we worked on until Friday morning. Fortunately because of the time of day and the shorter duration, this had a smaller effect on traffic (about 3.9m) versus the last time (5.5m).

As a silver lining to this failing of the cloud, we learned a lot. We’ll be using our newfound experience to keep WP.com a safe, stable, and robust place to hang your hat and have your blog call home.

If you have any questions, notice any remaining wonkiness, or just want to say howdy, we’d be happy to hear from you.

Our newest theme is Andrea, a gorgeously minimal two-column theme with an unusual blue color scheme.

Though the design may seem simple on the surface, once you try it you will appreciate its flexibility. I love Andrea both for its elegance and for its level of customization, and I think you will, too.

This theme includes two layout choices. The default layout is wide, yet flexible: the main column becomes wider or narrower depending on the size of your browser window. It is smart enough to adapt not only the width of the main column but to also adjust your images to make sure they fit correctly.

The alternate layout option is fixed-width—and narrower—to give your site a controlled, form-fitting feel. To enable this layout option visit Appearance→Theme Options.

Andrea is loaded with customization options, including Custom Menu, Custom Background, and Custom Header.*

Designed by Lucian Marin, Andrea is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Update: An astute reader noted that maximum size for the flexible width should be 1280 pixels—which is in fact correct. We’ve updated the layout to be 80 pixels wider, which means the main column images can be 1000 pixels wide and your header image should be sized to 1270 x 260 pixels.

Based on your feedback, you are loving the Custom Menu feature we launched two weeks ago. It’s natural to want that feature enabled for your favorite theme, too. We’re working on adding it to all WordPress.com themes.

In the meantime, you can find themes with Custom Menu support in Appearance→Themes by choosing Custom Menu from the Feature Filters menu.

Custom Menu filter enabled in Appearance→Themes.

We’ll also keep an updated list on the Custom Menu Support page.

Today’s new theme is dirty and grungy-looking—but that’s just what makes it so good! Let’s take a look at Greyzed.

The Greyzed Theme

While Greyzed might look rough it’s been carefully designed and it isn’t short on features. Starting at the top, it has a really sharp drop-down menu ready for our new menus feature. Visit Appearance → Menus and you can order the links here any way you like.

Customizable Drop Down Menus

The distinctive Greyzed design elements are repeated throughout your blog and finish off nicely at the bottom of each page with an optional extra-large widgetized footer in the same tough style. Visit Appearance → Widgets and add any Widget to Footer Left, Footer Middle, or Footer Right, to create your own unique footer.

Footer Widgets in Greyzed

Greyzed is available today in your WordPress.com dashboard under Appearance → Themes and, for WordPress.org users, in the WordPress.org themes directory.

Back in March when we announced Gravatar-powered profiles on WordPress.com, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:

As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!

People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:

• Profile pages are completely public, and accessible via nice short links, for example http://gravatar.com/beau (get your link from the bottom of your profile page)
• foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)
• You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!
• Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image (via the Gravatar profile editor) or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass:

As always, if you’d prefer that your information was kept private, then please just go your profile either here on WordPress.com or over on Gravatar.com to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!

Have you ever come across a blog post that you enjoyed so much you wanted to easily share it with the readers of your own blog? Sure, you can copy and paste the link and perhaps even a snippet of text with your own comments, but overall it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. We wanted to change this and make sharing other posts with your readers as easy as posting to your blog.

Today we’re introducing a new like and reblog feature enabled across the whole of WordPress.com. When you’re logged in to WordPress.com and viewing a post you’ll notice a new link in the admin bar at the top of the page. If you really enjoyed the post then you can click the “Like” link to signify this. This will then show the author how many readers liked the post.

Once you’ve liked the post, the link will change to “You like this” and you’ll be presented with some new options via a drop down menu. You can also access this menu at any time in the future by hovering over the “You like this” link in the same way other menu items work.

When you reblog a post the details are auto populated on the QuickPress form.

If you decide that you want to share the post with your own readers, you can click the “Reblog this post” link and you’ll be taken to the new QuickPress tab on the WordPress.com home page. This will auto-fill a snippet of the post text, a link back to the original post, and a link to the blog. If the post includes any images we’ll also automatically add a thumbnail image to the reblog post. Finally you can add your own comments to the reblog post then select which blog you’d like to post it to (if you have more than one).

Even if you are not going to reblog a post you can use the QuickPress tab as a centralized and easy way to post to any of your blogs across WordPress.com.

Posts I Like

Alongside the new QuickPress tab you’ll also notice there is a “Posts I Like” tab. This will aggregate all of the posts that you have liked across any WordPress.com blog.

Browse all the posts you like with full post display and a handy search tool.

Instead of this just being a list of post titles, we fetch the whole post content along with any media so that you can use this tab as a place to browse any of the posts you like at a later date.

There’s also a handy search tool that will allow you to easily find that awesome post you want to reblog, but it’s just been a little too long to wade through all the other great posts you’ve liked since. Once you’ve found the post you can reblog it simply by hitting the “Reblog Post” button.

All these features are now live and ready to be used (maybe you’ve already noticed the “Like” link for this post?) so go forth and start liking and reblogging, we hope you find it useful.

Have you been hearing a bunch of hubbub around the web lately about the upcoming release of WordPress version 3.0? I know I have, and it’s always fun to hear what people are saying when we get close to a release over at WordPress.org. Here on WordPress.com, though, you never have to wait! We merge in the new features as they’re ready, so every one of you gets early access to features that only beta testers are using out in the rest of the world. Yay, right?

This new update to WordPress has a lot of under-the-hood things that you won’t really notice, but I wanted to take a minute to tell you about the new custom menu system, which is pretty exciting. Have you ever wanted to have a different title for one of your pages than the label displayed in your site’s navigation? Ever wanted to change the order of the list of pages to an order you chose yourself? Ever wanted to be able to mix pages, categories, and random links in your navigation instead of your theme deciding for you? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re in luck! The new custom menus feature will do all those things.

Go to Appearance → Menus in your dashboard to get started, and follow the directions there. Note: Since this feature is so new, not all themes support it yet. Right now, these themes have the custom menu feature built in: Twenty Ten, Structure, Vostok, Bueno, Enterprise, and Notepad. If you’re using a different theme, don’t fret. We’ll be adding support to more themes, but in the meantime you can still play with custom menus by using the new widget called, amazingly enough, Custom Menu. This widget will let you add any of the custom menus you create to one of your sidebars/widget areas.

Menus are the big new feature for you guys, but there are a couple of other things worth noting:

• Have you noticed the lighter color scheme for your dashboard? Now more than ever, being in your WordPress administration tool is about focusing on your content without being distracted by the tool itself.
• If you turn on privacy controls, you’ll see a little reminder note next to your site title in the dashboard, so that when you’re ready for search engines to crawl your site again, you won’t forget to change the setting.

I hope you guys enjoy the new features!

When Neil Pasricha started his WordPress.com blog, 1,000 Awesome Things, he decided to highlight one awesome thing each weekday to help him keep a positive outlook.

That was three years ago, and now, the awesomeness just keep rolling on in for Neil: He has not only become a successful blogger and earned three Webby awards, he also can consider himself a critically acclaimed author.  “The Book of Awesome” went on sale last month and was warmly received by reviewers.

“Now I’m writing a page-a-day calendar, meeting with TV producers, and basically trying to catch my completely spinning head,” Neil says of his success.

All this and Neil has still got 505 more awesome things to blog about!

Congrats, Neil, and we wish similarly awesome success to all our WordPress.com bloggers.

On WordPress.com, you start with a standard WordPress.com domain name for your blog which looks something like this – example.wordpress.com. You then have the option of upgrading to a custom mapped domain such as example.com.

The good news is by setting example.com as your primary domain, all your visitors who try to access your old example.wordpress.com links automatically get redirected to the new domain.

But what about search engines and other services that access the old example.wordpress.com links ? Up until now, WordPress.com would send those services a 302 redirect which would tell them that a link had a new temporary home, and to go index that new link, but to not forget about the original one.

Today we have changed 302 redirects to 301 redirects. A 301 redirect tells search engines the new link has moved permanently, and they can discard the old links.

Why does this matter ? This change should help maintain traffic levels from search engines when changing or upgrading to custom domains, and makes things more flexible for you if you ever want to move from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress.

As with anything search engine related, your mileage may vary, and the timing on when search engines such as Google, Bing, and others update their index is not something anyone can predict. We have a short support document explaining some of the complexities involved with search engines that is worth a read if you have any questions.

Today we are pleased to introduce Paperpunch, a clean and versatile theme featuring a subtle, textured background and hand-crafted icons.

To go along with a widget-ready sidebar, Paperpunch offers no fewer than four columns at the bottom of the page to display many more widgets.

If you want to customize the look a bit, use the Custom Background option found in your Dashboard under Appearance → Background to change the background color or add your own background image.

To dress up the design even more, you can easily enable gorgeous typography for Paperpunch with two Typekit fonts: Chunk for the site title in the header and Junction for the titles and headings.

Since the correct CSS selectors are already in place for both fonts in the theme stylesheet, you can simply sign up for Typekit, enable Chunk and Junction, refresh, and enjoy! (Learn more about using Typekit with Paperpunch.)

For a working demo of Paperpunch with the optional Typekit typography, visit paperpunchdemo.wordpress.com.

Paperpunch was designed by The Theme Foundry and is now available for your WordPress.com blog and, for self-hosted WordPress.org blogs, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Do you use a contact form on your site? If so, you’ll enjoy today’s update. Our [contact-form] shortcode has always been boring. It never had any configuration options and didn’t work in widgets. Today we’re giving the shortcode a makeover.

The old shortcode would send an e-mail message to the author of the post or page. Now you can send the message to any e-mail address you wish. You can even send to multiple e-mail addresses.

[contact-form to="you@me.com"]
[contact-form to="you@me.com,me@you.com,us@them.com"]

Maybe you never liked the [Blog Title] Post Title style subjects on the e-mail messages. Set your own default subject.

[contact-form subject="My Contact Form"]

You can even let the visitor set the subject by showing a subject field on the contact form.

[contact-form show_subject="yes"]

Use as many or as few of the options as you need. The old [contact-form] without any options will still work as it has in the past, but you now have the flexibility to do something like:

[contact-form to="mom@wordpress.com,dad@wordpress.com,billy@wordpress.com" show_subject="yes" subject="Contact WordPress Family"]

These changes allow us to improve the consistency of the built-in contact form from the following themes: Blix, Flower Power, MistyLook, and Sweet Blossoms. The contact page template in those four themes allowed your visitors to send you a message, but didn’t work in the same way as our shortcode. With today’s update, the contact page template in those themes will work just like using [contact-form] with any other theme.

For more details on how to use the contact form feature, head over to the Contact Form page on our Support site.

Today’s new theme is Notepad. A richly styled and beautiful, personal theme inspired by iPhone’s Notes application.

The Notepad Theme

With Notepad you have the option of displaying expertly designed icons that link to your profile on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. Simply add the appropriate URL in Appearance > Theme Options. There’s even an optional RSS feed icon that fits in perfectly.

The optional Notepad header icons

I really like the Notepad theme’s bubbly drop-down menus—great for keeping all your pages neatly organized—and I think you’ll like them too.

The Notepad theme drop-down menus

I hope you’ll find the Notepad theme’s visual flourishes and careful focus on graphical detail as exciting as I do. Check it out. It just might be the perfect theme for your blog.

The Notepad theme is available in your WordPress.com dashboard under Appearance > Themes and, for WordPress.org users, in the WordPress.org themes directory.