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Many of you use WordPress.com as a platform for your personal blogs, but it can also be your online home for your business. We have tools and features to help you establish a professional web presence, and support when you have questions.

Meet Erica Varlese, Happiness Engineer and Support Lead for WordPress.com Business. Erica is a New York-based writer, customer service maven, dog lover, and espresso fiend. Since 2011, she’s helped nearly thirty thousand WordPress.com users via email, forums, live chat, and in-person at conferences and WordCamps. We asked Erica for her tips on using WordPress.com for business, getting the support you need, and dos and don’ts.

What advice would you give someone who wants to use WordPress.com to create a site for their business?

For many businesses, the focus is on building a standard website, not a blog. WordPress.com is great for blogging, and flexible enough to use…

Pretty amazing.

(posting below in case the ad comes down soon).

Grab a paper bag, breathe into it and calm your ass down. You’re hyperventilating because you ain’t never seen a deal like this before. Now collect yourself, then keep reading this incredible description that barely serves to do justice to my 2010 Felt Gridlock 3 speed fixed gear bike. Yes 3 SPEED FIXED GEAR. Also known as the greatest bike the city has ever had the privilege of existing around.

What makes this bike so much better than every other bike that has ever been pedaled? Glad you asked. It starts with the paint scheme. It looks like Iron Man if Iron Man were a bike. That’s bold, son. Curb appeal. It’s probably also why some piece of trash stole the front tire that originally came with this beauty. Why didn’t he steal the whole bike? Because he knew…

The WordPress 3.6 Beta has been released, and users with a self-hosted WordPress installation can easily upgrade to it with the Beta Tester plugin. This is the first beta release, so it’s not recommended for live sites, but plugin/theme developers and anyone with a keen eye for bugs are encouraged to try it out now.

Unlike previous WordPress Beta releases, this one is feature-complete, so everyone can focus entirely on reporting and fixing bugs without worrying about any incoming new features.

This new release brings with it a new default theme, local autosaves (to project your post in the event of crazy unforeseen events), a new post formats UI, a new simplified custom menus UI, support for embedding uploaded audio and video files without relying on a plugin or third-party service, and better revisions with the ability to lock a post in progress.

If you run into any bugs…

Your blog’s design should reflect your personality, and we want to make that as easy as possible. That’s why, today, we’re releasing three big upgrades to the Theme Customizer on WordPress.com that make customizing your blog faster and easier.

1. A more-focused Customizer.

We’ve made the Customizer more compact; open it via Appearance → Themes → Customize, and you’ll notice that you have more room to view your customized design in the live preview. The panels open when you need them, and they slide out of the way when you’re done.

2. Your Custom Design tools, inside the Customizer.

What does this mean? Instant live previews of your CSS, font, and color changes. See your creativity immediately instead of repeating the old cycle of “edit-save-preview, edit-save-preview.”

3. Custom Design Snapshots.

Design Snapshots make it possible to save all of the Custom Design changes you’ve made in the Customizer…

The future is here, or rather the future is at the new almost-finished Automattic headquarters in San Francisco.

In case you don’t know, Automatticians are employed all throughout the world, most work from home, and only a comparatively small amount work from San Francisco (though you could say that San Francisco is the city with the highest concentration of Automatticians). Thanks to the magic of Double Robotics, any Automattician can now feel like they’re part of the crowd at the San Francisco headquarters by taking control of an iPad on wheels.

If your curiosity has been rightfully engaged, gaze in wonder as Theme Wrangler Konstantin Obenland tours the new headquarters, and check out the tweet below from Lounge Manager Warren Kleban for a quick look at the robot in action.

The big news on the internet the last couple of days has been that seminal RSS reader Google Reader will be shutting down on July 1, 2013. Google Reader had lots of fans, including many of us here at Automattic, but it’s time to move on.

Speaking of moving on from Google Reader, did you know that you can import your subscriptions directly from Google Reader into the WordPress.com Reader? We launched the Reader about 18 months ago; it’s responsive to fit any size screen, you can like and reblog WordPress.com content without leaving the news stream, and if you run out of new posts to read, you can discover new content in the Recommended Blogs section.

To import your subscriptions, just visit the WordPress.com Reader import page; you’ll be reading your feeds in the WordPress.com Reader in three clicks or less, or your money back.

The…

Update: The application period is now closed. Thank you to all who have submitted an application! We’ll get in touch with potential candidates via email. 

Our company Automattic — which runs WordPress.com, Akismet, VaultPress, and many other services — is looking for a few stellar summer student development interns, specifically to work with us on the WordPress.com VIP team.

As a paid intern, you’ll be working on a range of projects depending on your skills & passions — everything from doing development work on plugins that improve WordPress functionality for large media companies to working on core WordPress.com features and development. Last year, our interns had a great time developing code for WordPress.com that launched and is still in use! One of our intern developers worked on an early version of WordPress.com Enterprise, and another worked on Push Syndication, which is live on the WordPress.com VIP platform now.

Do you shoot photographs or video? Illustrate, paint, or draw? Design things? If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above, WordPress.com is the perfect place to show your stuff. We’ve just launched WordPress.com/portfolios to help you build an online portfolio you’re proud of.

Over 30 portfolio themes

You need a canvas that lets your work shine. With over 30 portfolio themes to choose from (and over 200 total themes in our Theme Showcase), there’s surely one that reflects your style.

Customize your theme

Your online portfolio is about you and your personal brand. All of our themes let you set a custom header image and a custom background image or color.

Turn your portfolio site into a work of art in itself with the Custom Design upgrade. Choose the fonts and colors that match your personal style, and tweak your design even further with Custom…