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The updates just keep on rolling in—Custom CSS has just landed in Jetpack! You now have the ability to add to or replace your theme’s CSS right from your blog dashboard, no child theme required.

To use the CSS editor, first make sure the Custom CSS panel is activated on your main Jetpack page and go to Appearance → Edit CSS. You’ll find the editing interface is fueled up with features like syntax coloring, auto-indentation, and immediate feedback on the validity of the CSS you’re writing. Revisions are saved in case you make a mistake, and invalid CSS is removed on save.

In addition, we’re always working to improve the existing features in Jetpack.  Jetpack Comments got a nice UI improvement in this release: when you submit a comment, there’s no more annoying fullpage load on jetpack.wordpress.com.  Everything stays on your site 🙂  Also, if you’re using the pretty…

We’ve just released two improvements that will make WordPress.com even more efficient for you, leaving you more time to create content.

Site Stats

If you get a lot of traffic to your blog, your stats were sometimes slow to load.  We know you like to look at your stats often, think about how all those seconds added up.  Now, your main stats page loads all of its data in parallel:

This loads your whole stats page two to three times faster, which means less time spent staring at a spinner and more time for interacting with your readers and creating content.

Of course, if you’re a Jetpack user, you can partake in the speedy stats goodness on your WordPress.com stats page as well!

Toolbar Notifications

We’ve made your Toolbar Notifications faster to interact with also. Now you can navigate the Notifications menu from your keyboard.

Keys:

• n : Open/Close the…

Since launching WordAds earlier this year we are proud to have launched advertising on thousands of WordPress.com sites. Our goal has been to free bloggers from the weight of managing the complex and fast moving online advertising arena. Thanks to our negotiation leverage with advertisers and technical resources, WordAds is delivering returns that bloggers would not see on their own.

There is much that we want to accomplish in the remainder of the year. Here’s our road-map as well as common requests that are not on the road-map:

• Transition more sites to Optimized Ads. Many sites don’t want to have more ads and they can stay with Basic Ads. Others want to earn more per page. We are working to get more approvals from advertisers for those sites.
• Ads layout choices. We plan to roll-out an easy, self-service way for WordAds users to switch between Basic Ads and Optimized Ads.

Last November WordPress.com announced the launch of our WordAds program, whereby WordPress.com sites can partner and share revenues on ads sold and managed by WordPress.com. Since its beta launch, WordAds has grown to over ten thousand sites. WordAds has been a success because bloggers can focus on content and building their audiences while handing off the time-consuming role of advertising optimization to the WordAds team.

Today, we’re launching a new homepage for the WordAds program: WordAds.co. Here, you will find our application page as well as FAQs and a discussion forum. Moreover, most WordPress.com sites can now launch WordAds on their site within days of application.

To celebrate the successful launch of WordAds, we sat down to interview one of the program’s first sites at MyNintendoNews.com. Not every WordAds site has the visitor volume to earn significant revenue, but sites that work to develop their audience can now earn good…

Yesterday, Valentin Bartenev, a developer at Nginx, Inc., announced SPDY support for the Nginx web server. SPDY is a next-generation networking protocol developed by Google and focused on making the web faster. More information on SPDY can be found on Wikipedia.

At Automattic, we have used Nginx since 2008. Since then, it has made its way into almost every piece of our web infrastructure. We use it for load balancing, image serving (via MogileFS), serving static and dynamic web content, and caching. In fact, we have almost 1000 servers running Nginx today, serving over 100,000 requests per second.

I met Andrew and Igor at WordCamp San Fransicso in 2011.  For the next six months, we discussed the best way for Automattic and Nginx, Inc. to work together. In December 2011, we agreed that Automattic would sponsor the development and integration of SPDY into Nginx. The…

Ted D. Zoller from Innovation Center Iceland on Vimeo.

An insightful look at the deal makers with the context of Iceland. Dr.Ted Zoller has been looking at Deal Makers for a while now and all his new work is based on that. Ted has become a good friend and I am looking forward to reading and listening to him on his work. It is very interesting to see how he has organized the data around deal makers and has brought a lot of insight into that information. I enjoyed and learnt a lot listening to Ted and I hope all those who were not able to attend the conference do the same by watching this video.

Related articles

• Dr. Ted Zoller – Speaker Profile (startupiceland.com)
• Startup Iceland 2012 – Done! (startupiceland.com)
• Entrepreneurs from NYC in Startup Iceland (startupiceland.com)
• Startup Iceland Conference – Go/No Go decision April 28 (startupiceland.com)