Toluu : WordPress.com Blog

WordPress.com Blog

The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community, written by the staff of Automattic.

This month we grew not just in blogs and users, but in company size. As I mentioned in a previous post, the team from Intense Debate is now a part of Automattic. We’re also trucking along with Version 2.7, and listening to your input from the two design surveys opened up this month.

Here are the stats:

334,004 blogs were created.
335,693 new users joined.
3,753,063 file uploads.
1766.49 gigabytes of new files.
489 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
7,910,452 comments.
6,252,336 logins.
952,281,311 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 694,985,128 on self-hosted blogs (1,647,266,439 total across all WordPress blogs we track — a jump of 191,084,227 views since last month).
1,317,190 active blogs and 15,433,379 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
1,176,044,534 words.

Other interesting stuff:

We welcomed new WordPress VIPs, including The NFL.

Martha Stewart converted to WordPress and

WordPress 2.7 Design Survey #2: Search, Favorites, Future PublishSeptember 28

October 1, 2008 Update: The survey is now closed. Thanks to all those who participated.

Did you get a chance to weigh in on how to structure the navigation in the next version of WordPress two weeks ago? Another round of mini-mockups and multiple choice questions awaits the first 5000 respondents. The WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2 is now available to take your opinions regarding:

Where to put the search box
Where to put the Add New Post button/favorites menu
How to label the Future Publish/Edit Timestamp function

The survey (hosted by the good guys over at PollDaddy.com) will automatically close after receiving 5000 responses. That only took about two days for the navigation survey, so hurry over and cast your votes.

When the survey has closed, these links will be disabled and this post will be updated.

Note: If you don’t know what the “future publish” function is, you can learn about it before you take the survey:

WordPress.com FAQ: Can I schedule a post?
WordPress.com Screencast: How do I change the time or date for my post? How do I set my post to publish in the future?
Jane’s

Automattic Acquires Intense DebateSeptember 23

I’m pleased to announce that Intense Debate is now an Automattic joint.

Intense Debate is a richly interactive comment system that includes cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles.

For more details on the product and our plans, check out my blog, Toni’s blog, and Jon’s blog at Intense Debate.

The Journalist, RevisedSeptember 22

If you admire clean and classic journalism style, you probably became a fast fan of The Journalist theme. Well today The Journalist got a bit of a makeover, care of Lucian Marin, that might make you fall in love even more:

The Journalist, Revised

The bar that contains your tags, categories and post info is now more subtle, and has swapped positions with the comment count, bringing the attention to your brilliant content.

Your subtitle appears in a cute little word bubble in the upper right, and the header font has been freshened up as a sans serif.

Print geeks, enjoy. And don’t forget you’ll need to look under “T” for “The” under Design > Themes in your dashboard.

(UPDATE: Classic “The Journalist” is still available. It’s called The Journalist v1.3 under Design > Themes.)

Go (Even More) Ad-FreeSeptember 18

About two years ago, we announced that we were running some experimental Google ads on post and tag pages. It was an announcement that was necessary because, as it turned out, they were so discreet you didn’t even notice them.

As we said in our original post:

The ad code tries hard not to intrude or show ads to regular readers, which means a small percentage of page views [might have an ad].

We seemed to have lucked in to a good balance with this approach, and don’t plan to change anything there. (Most of your readers will never see an ad.) As an added bonus the light advertising has allowed us to focus on free features for you guys rather than paid upgrades, and enabled us to invest in infrastructure so your blog is always fast and reliable and never shows a fail whale.

At the same time it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them: businesses, startups, non-profits, political activist sites, the list goes on. Google Adsense analyzes the content to show contextually relevant ads, but that might mean a link to a competitor. Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.

With this upgrade, no one, whether they’re logged in or not, will see any ads on your blog. Ever. (Or at le