hand wash only

2 months ago

Hard at Work 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…

2 months ago

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…

2 months ago

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…

2 months ago

I’m back in San Francisco after a trip to London for the Happiness Engineer meetup. It’s serious business, but the group has managed to have a little fun along the way.

Our developers have been hard at work, too. In August, we launched the SoundCloud shortcode and WP.me, a URL shortener for WordPress blogs. And at your request, we introduced two new themes: iNove and Sandbox 1.6.1.

Here are last month’s stats:

426,047 blogs were created.
4,560,168 posts were…

2 months ago

In the coming week, the Support crew (seen among the lovely faces here) will be meeting in London to brainstorm new ways of providing you with the resources you need. While us Happiness Engineers are putting our heads together to churn out some big ideas, we’ll be closing our email support system.

Support will be unavailable from 10 a.m. EST on Friday, August 28 to 10 a.m. EST on Monday, September 7.

Of course, our team will still be monitoring servers and services while we’re…

3 months ago

Sandbox 1.6.1 is now available to all WordPress.com blogs.

Alongside Sandbox 1.6.1 you’ll also find the older Sandbox versions. We’ve left them intact. If you’ve been using them, don’t worry, they haven’t changed. However, we do urge you to check out 1.6.1.

Sandbox is a skeleton theme for WordPress. Though you can use it by itself, it’s mainly intended for dressing up with a custom Custom CSS Stylesheet upgrade. Sandbox provides all the HTML markup, with a rich semantic structure, and…

3 months ago