egill.blog

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…

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child…

I just got back from an exhilarating, week long Automattic company meetup in San Diego. We’ve now done 9 full company meetups over the last 6 years (plus dozens of smaller team ones), and I wanted to write down some tips on how to run a company meetup while it’s fresh in my mind:

1. Focus on connecting people: We call our get-togethers meetups – instead of off-sites or retreats – because our primary goal is to get everyone on the team to meet and to get to know each other better (not to get away or retreat from our office). We’re distributed (mostly working from home), so in-person meetups are especially important for us, but I think it would be beneficial to any company to get everyone together once or twice a year to spend time with each other to deepen personal connections and get to know the “people…

Every year the WordPress team proudly unveils a new default theme, increasing by one the collection now known affectionately as the Twenty Somethings. Serving as the flagship theme for a year, it has big shoes to fill. The theme should work well for a blog or a website, be carefully crafted under-the-hood to support essential WordPress features, and—of course—it should be aesthetically pleasing and exciting.

Say hello to the new default WordPress theme for 2012.

Twenty Twelve is an elegant, readable, and fully responsive theme that makes your site content look its best on any device.

A key component of this theme is a special homepage template. Recently, it’s become even more evident that WordPress is heavily used as a content management system (CMS) with many more sites now using it to organize any kind of content rather than purely as a blog. The homepage template meets this need by…