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For all of you stats junkies — you know who you are! — we’ve added some holiday cheer to your WordPress.com Stats Page. In addition to the number of views your site receives, you can now keep tabs on how many unique visitors come to your site, all on a single, easy-to-read chart.

A visitor is a unique user or browser/device that views one or more posts or pages on your site. When your friend checks out your site from her laptop and then again from her phone, that’s two visits.  If she clicks on four different posts, that’s four views.

At a glance, you can now get a feel for how these numbers relate:

Hover over a day, week, or month in the chart to see how many views and unique visitors you had. To make this data even more useful, we do the math for you &…

New Tools for Restaurateurs

Between starting the demi-glace and getting the case of chickens out of the walk-in for stock, the last thing we think you should be worrying about as a restaurateur is whether the guests showing up to your soft-open can actually find your phone number and location on your web site. Can phones do Flash yet? How long has that osso bucco been braising? We think the latter is probably a much better thing to take up your time, so we put together a few key tools to help get your mind off your website and where it belongs – on the food.

Introducing Confit

When looking at common restaurant site problems, one of the first issues that sprang to mind was how often broken animations, inaccessible information and bloated PDFs are foisted upon us when using our smartphones, when all we really need is a phone…

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…