egill.blog

The below is a list of what happens in my brain for the next 31 minutes after I hit “publish” each and everyday.  Note:  I only have about 1 original thought per minute, the other thoughts within that minute are variations of the original-thesis thought for that correpsonding minute.

 

Min 1:  “Did my post suck today?  It’s been a minute and there is only one “like”.  Maybe it sucked.”

 

Min 2:  “It’s Sunday, people don’t read very many blogs on Sunday, that’s a low-views day according to my stats.”

 

Min 3:  “Oh, wait, it’s Monday.  Okay, that is also a low-views day – so is Tuesday and Wednesday and hold on…”

 

Min 4:  “I should’ve written about my Mom.  People like it when I write about my Mom or my Wifesy.”

 

Min 5:  “I don’t think I should’ve capitalized Mom in that last minute…

Today I’m happy to announce two great new additions to our collection of premium themes.

First, we have Standard, a sleek, exacting theme designed by 8BIT for professional blogging with an emphasis on contextual display of your content.

Your content, in each of its various forms, deserves to be presented with unique distinction. Thanks to Standard’s support of post formats, it can. Image, video, quote, status, and link posts all receive a beautiful visual treatment.

If your visitors are browsing on a mobile device or tablet, Standard has got you covered. Its responsive layout adapts gracefully to smaller screens. View it in action on the demo site, or head on over to the Theme Showcase to read more about Standard and its features.

Next, we have Chalk, an innovative theme designed with a strong focus on online educators by The Theme Foundry.

Posts containing to-do lists, chats…

Once in a while, it’s important to stop, catch your breath, and look at your accomplishments before you move on to the next thing — to put a stake in the ground that says, “I made it this far!”

Today, we’re rolling out a couple of notifications to help you celebrate your blog activity milestones. From now on, whenever you hit a milestone for how many followers your blog has (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and beyond), you’ll get a badge:

We also created badges to celebrate when you receive lots of likes from visitors:

In addition to celebrating your achievements, we wanted to notify you when you’ve had a particularly good day for receiving likes or new followers. From now on, we’ll let you know of your best days for such activity:

Keep in mind that we’ve only started counting your best days this March.

We all blog for different…

If you’ve ever wondered where on Earth all the visitors to your site are coming from, this feature is for you!

Mosey on over to your My Stats tab on the WordPress.com homepage:

…and check out the brand new “Views by Country” panel.
Now, you can see at a glance exactly which countries comprise your audience:

When you click on or hover over a country name, the map zooms in so you can really get a feel for all the parts of the planet your content has reached:

The Summaries page shows you country stats for the previous week, month, quarter and all time, but keep in mind this feature is new and views by country are not available prior to March 2012:

We are tremendously excited to be working on new features like this for your WordPress.com My Stats tab.  Stay tuned for the next evolution!

This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.

Please share this video with your family, friends, and most importantly, elected officials in federal government. Make sure they understand that your vote is contingent on them fixing the abuse that 200,000 passengers face from the TSA on a daily basis.

My legal battle against the TSA’s nude body scanner and…

Today, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and with it, the Windows Store. If you were following along with the live announcement, you may have noticed that one of the apps they demonstrated on stage was our very own WordPress.com. And now, I’m proud to announce that WordPress.com for Windows 8 is available to download today.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on the team at Automattic that’s been building the app. We were lucky enough to get some great support from Microsoft along the way, especially Jeff Sandquist, James Senior, Ben Thompson, Jaime Rodriguez, Lora Heiny, and Nazia Zaman who gave us everything we needed to make the app shine, including hands-on help from Microsoft developers and designers.  We decided to focus on showcasing the best of WordPress.com for our first version of the app, and what better way to do that than Freshly Pressed? We’ve been…