Category: random

At WordPress.com, our mission is making publishing democratic — accessible and easy for anyone, anywhere. And while anyone can start a free blog here, not everyone can access upgrades (like going ad-free or enabling custom design) because of limits on traditional payment networks.

Today, that changes: you can now buy WordPress.com upgrades with bitcoins.

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that enables instant payments over the internet. Unlike credit cards and PayPal, Bitcoin has no central authority and…

City administrators: Don’t spend thousands of dollars on a proprietary system for your city’s website. We’ve launched WordPress.com/cities as the go-to place to start a site for your city or other municipal body, and there’s no charge to get started. (“Free” is a price that will get every taxpayer on board, and since WordPress.com has been approved as a hosting site for federal government agencies, you can be sure we take security seriously.)

To supplement the impressive stable of existing WordPress.com features like custom domains (i.e., a .gov or .com of your choosing), we’ve added a couple of new ones to help you build the best site you can for residents and visitors alike:

Starter Content

When you sign up, we automatically create the pages most commonly needed on city websites, such as Parks & Recreation, City Hall, and Law Enforcement, and add them to your site’s…

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The past nine releases of Jetpack have started to reveal our vision for next-generation features that will boost WordPress’ incredible success by making it more social, more connected, more mobile, and more customizable.

Over three million downloads later, we’re excited to report that the community has embraced this seemingly impossible vision for combining the best of hosted and non-hosted WordPress. This tenth release brings some of the most-asked-for features into the hands of millions of Jetpackers.

Publicize to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr…

You no longer have to jump through hoops and developer portals to connect your blog to your friends on your favorite social networks. Through Jetpack and your WordPress.com account, you can connect to each network with just a few clicks and broadcast to your audiences and followers across several networks, making WordPress your true digital hub. Activate Publicize from the main Jetpack page in your dashboard, then go…

Move over, New York Times bestseller list.

Millions of people across the globe turn to WordPress to build their websites and blogs, and we’re proud to say WordPress is home to many bestselling writers and winners of prestigious literary awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize. In other words, we have our own bestseller list!

Take a look at the bestsellers and award winners who use WordPress — and be sure to scroll down to read about the notable works and WordPress-powered websites of twelve authors we’ve handpicked from this impressive list:

Jami Attenberg
Released this month, Attenberg’s third novel, The Middlesteins, is a story of marriage, new and old love, family, and our culture’s obsession with food. In addition to her novels, Attenberg has contributed both fiction and nonfiction to many outlets, from the New York Times and Salon to The Awl and numerous anthologies and zines. We…

Hey musicians! We just launched WordPress.com/music with two new features to help you rock the web: playlists and upcoming events.

We know that you need specific features to create a killer experience on your band’s site. You need a calendar so fans can keep track of your gigs, an easy way to embed your music, and lots of social media options to share the love. Oh, and all this on a tight budget? Check, 1-2-3.

WordPress.com has a symphony of tools you can use to keep fans in the loop and share music with them, the media, labels, and venues.

• Mobile-friendly, HTML5-based playlists (Extra Storage upgrade required)
• Upcoming Events widget and shortcode
• Social media cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and more
• Embed music from SoundCloud or Bandcamp
• Videos embeds via YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and more
• Show off your photos with tiled galleries
• Plus, turn it up to 11 with WordPress.com upgrades…

Jetpack 1.9 is here. That’s right, it’s time for another big helping of Jetpack awesomeness. This release brings you Toolbar Notifications, Mobile Push Notifications, Custom CSS for mobile themes, a JSON API, and improvements to the Contact Form.

Notifications adds a menu to your toolbar that lets you read, moderate, reply to comments from any page on your blog. Plus, if find yourself on TechCrunch, GigaOm, or any of the millions of other sites running on WordPress.com, you’ll be able to view and moderate comments on your own site from the toolbar there, too.

Mobile Push Notifications for iOS: Users who link their accounts to WordPress.com and use WordPress for iOS 3.2 can now get push notifications of comments.

Custom CSS can now be applied to mobile themes.

The WordPress.com REST API is now available in Jetpack. That means developers can build cool applications that interact with…