New Theme: Dark Wood

Go against the grain with “Dark Wood,” an eye-catching and playful theme. Bright colors and whimsical icons fuse with dark tones to provide a pleasing and harmonious design. Dark Wood is a three column theme with a rich wood textured background.

Dark Wood

When you’re looking for a theme with some serious character, Dark Wood could definitely be the one. Bright links and header icons give the design some real spice, complemented with a whimsical background.
Dark Wood doesn’t leave out the extras either. There are two sidebars that can be packed with widgets and the search box comes styled nicely to match the design.

Dark Wood's Sidebars

Dark Wood will provide a pleasing and harmonious backdrop for your blog. Give it a spin and see how you like it.
Dark Wood is available for all WordPress.com sites and is available for WordPress.org users over at the Theme Directory.
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New Theme: Titan

Titan is a fantastic theme, now available on WordPress.com. It’s a highly readable, clean theme, with lots of options: four widget areas, a customizable header, and more.

Behold Titan!

An enticing color scheme and loads of customization make Titan a wonderful theme for you blog. To start things off the header has some nice social networking and RSS links, making it easy for users to keep up with your blog.
Right below the title is a highly customizable header. There are options to turn on and off categories and pages, allowing you to choose how users navigate your blog.

Titan's Header Options

Aiding in even more customization are four widget areas, including a nice footer widget area.

Titan's Footer Widget Area

Titan was designed by Drew Strojny and is available in the WordPress.org Themes Directory. You can check out Titan for yourself at http://titandemo.wordpress.com
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OMG WordPress BBQ at SxSW

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and fans (including many hosted here on WordPress.com) are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.
If you’re a WordPress.com user attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. Come, eat, meet some of the WordPress.com team, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress on your site, let us know what we can do better, talk about some of the new features and themes you’ve been seeing here lately, etc. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. See how many WordPress.com staff you can spot chowing down on Matt’s favorite meal.
Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you’re tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

View Larger Map
* We’ll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We’ll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry. .

Rub-a-Dub-Dub in the PubSubHubbub

From the tongue twisting name department we welcome PubSubHubbub, or as some people have shortened it to: PuSH. Like rssCloud, PuSH is a way for services that subscribe to updates from your blog (think Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes) to get updates even faster. In a nutshell, instead of having to periodically ask your blog if there are any updates they can now register to automatically receive updates each time you publish new content. In most cases these updates are sent out within a second or two of when you hit the publish button.

Today we’ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. There’s nothing to configure, it’s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.

For those using the WordPress.org software we are releasing a new PuSH plugin: PuSHPress. This plugin differs from the current PuSH related plugins by including a built-in hub.

For more PuSH related reading check out the PubSubHubbub project site and Google Group. And if you really want to geek out there’s always the PubSubHubbub Spec

rssCloud By The Numbers

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.

Vox Importer

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!

Post by Email Wrapup

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:

Is Post by Email great?

Absolutely
Maybe
I like eggs

VoteView Results
Share ThisPolldaddy.com

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.

WordPress Personas for Firefox

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.

New Theme: monochrome

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

WordPress.com: Now on HootSuite

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!

New Theme: Duotone

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

Upcoming WordCamps

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!

Two New Stats Things

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