Tim McGiven's Blog, page 58

The Best of WordPress: September 2016

Hi everyone, it’s been a busy few weeks in the world of WordPress, WordPress.com, and Automattic, so I thought I’d share a roundup with all of you! Here’s a rundown:

Welcome to WordPress

We are proud to host the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s new Biohub, with a bold vision to  invest in science, technology and human ingenuity “to help cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”
Harvard Gazette: The university’s news site is now on WordPress.com VIP! Here’s their latest story, on Harvard alum Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed new novel, The Underground Railroad .
New York Times Journeys: A new travel vertical from the Times.
The San Jose Mercury News: Silicon Valley’s newspaper, now on WordPress.
The Brookings Institution: The nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC, with a mission “to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.”

Fresh New Look

Our friends at Feminist Frequency got a beautiful new design for their site.

Book Deals, Books Published, and WordPress-ers in the News

Belle Boggs published her much-anticipated book, The Art of Waiting , a memoir and exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility.
Congrats to Stephanie Land ( Stepville ), whose viral essay for Vox has led to a book deal with Hachette. “I celebrate today with all of you, my friends, and followers, who have stuck with me through all of these years. Thank you for your support. Thank you for reading. I can’t wait to share my book with you.” We’re excited to read MAID: A single mother’s journey from cleaning house to finding home.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries , a book by Kory Stamper at Harmless Drudgery , will be released in March 2017. Kory is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster.

Notable and Viral: Stories from WordPress Publishers and Bloggers

Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight are tracking the presidential poll data as we get closer to the U.S. presidential election in November.
Fortune’s Erin Griffith looks at the startups working to build a driverless future for cars.
Longreads published some excellent new original essays, including Maria Bustillos on her daughter’s MS diagnosis, Rob Tannenbaum on intersex Olympic champion Stella Walsh, a collaboration with The Marshall Project and Pulitzer Prize finalist Tom Robbins, and a partnership with the new Racquet Magazine.
Automattic’s new Design.blog featured thought-provoking posts on design, inclusion, and careers — from contributors such as Jessica Helfand, Kevin Bethune, Alice Rawsthorn, Julie Zhuo, Lena Groeger, Ti Chang, and John Maeda, our new Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion.
We launched Data.blog, a new site from the data team at Automattic. Read about network science and mapping the communities of WordPress.com.

New Features for WordPress.com

This month we introduced new content options, browser notifications, and more coming soon!

How We Work

“This pioneering tech company figured how to make work-from-home work.” Our parent company Automattic was featured in this new Quartz story by Alice Truong about our distributed work model. How do we get things done with 500 employees in more than 50 countries? (Hint: There’s a lot of blogging and Slack-ing behind the scenes.)

Other News from Around Automattic

We are proud to share our commitment to diversity and inclusion at Automattic. See our new page here.
The ! Design.blog, Dave.blog, Data.blog, and more. The .blog names will open up to everyone starting November 21.
Pressable scored high marks from Review Signal for its WordPress-hosting service and performance — and our enterprise WordPress.com VIP got this rave: “I’m also not sure what sort of hardware they are running by they blew my WPPerformanceTester PHP bench out of the water… they put on an amazing show and easily earned Top Tier Enterprise WordPress Hosting status.”
Our own Derek Powazek spoke at this year’s XOXO Fest to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Fray, the pioneering online community devoted to personal stories, which he launched in 1996.
Congrats to our CEO and WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg, recipient of the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment, and named to Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40” list.
Our company is now 500 Automatticians in 57 countries, speaking 70 different languages. We all got together last week in Canada for this group photo. Oh, and we’re hiring!

Filed under: Automattic, WordPress, WordPress.com

Join Automattic’s Worldwide WP 5k 2016

The Worldwide WordPress 5k (#WWWP5k) is back and better than ever!

Any time between Monday, September 19th to Sunday, September 25th, lace up your running/walking/hiking/hopping shoes and join us for the 5k blogged about around the world!

Automatticians are planning to hit the trail on September 19th during our company meetup in Whistler, Canada. This year, we will also be making a donation to Soles4Souls, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty through the collection and distribution of shoes and clothing.

Automatticians laced up and ready to go! Photo by Naoko Takano.

What is a 5k?

A 5k run/walk is approximately 3.1 miles long. That is roughly equal to:

Twelve laps around a track.
Approximately 6,000-7,500 steps.
Approximately 50-60 minutes of brisk walking.

How do I participate?

You can run, walk, or skip — it’s totally up to you. There’s no time limit and there’s just one requirement: that you participate! You can do it at a gym or outdoors, on a treadmill or on a track, or even swim or bike instead of running/walking — just get moving!

Post about your participation on your site and tag the post “wwwp5k” so that other runners around the world can find you and read about your experience. If you’re not on WordPress.com, link back to this announcement post so others might join in and participate, too.

You’re welcome to blog about your entire route and preparation (a video or gallery, perhaps?), but above all we’d love to see where you are and how you’re completing your 5k.

When can I run?

We’re all busy, but we want you to participate, so we’re giving you lots of flexibility. You can complete the WWWP5k any time between Monday, September 19th and Sunday, September 25th.

Who’s invited?

Anyone who’s ever used or loved WordPress (and your families and friends, too). Heck, the entire internet is invited!

Will you be joining us for the Worldwide WP 5k? Let us know in the comments!

Filed under: Community, Events

Field Notes: Junior Innovation Camp

Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do when not in front of a computer.

Today I’d like to share some experiences we had during the Junior Innovator Camp that was part of the Wonder Women Tech conference earlier this summer. I was joined by my colleagues Marjorie Asturias (who also spoke), Sarah Blackstock, Erica Varlese, and Anne McCarthy.

Wonder Women Tech, where Automattic was a sponsor, is a conference that highlights women in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math), and provides a forum for discussing important topics around diversity. The two-day event drew over 150 speakers, all of whom were successful entrepreneurs or business leaders, who shared their triumphs, failings, and learned lessons. The conference offered educational opportunities to a number of area students who were attending on scholarships.

My colleagues and I presented a half-day workshop on “WordPress for the Beginning Entrepreneur” as part of the Junior Innovator Camp aimed at young adults aged 13-17. First up we taught the students how to create websites using WordPress.com, including how to customize the look and feel of a site. After that we walked them through a hands-on branding exercise that explored how to come up with a product or service, how to make your business unique, and what types of people your business would appeal to. We rounded the whole thing out with a crash course in marketing before the students shared their businesses with us.

Twenty-one students (and their parents) attended this event. Students worked in groups for the workshop, but I was pleased to see the adults following along on their own as well. It’s never a bad day when you can share your knowledge with someone, and this day was no different. Our students were wonderful and enthusiastic. We ended up with a lot of great business ideas and even a few opportunities to talk about future career paths for these young innovators.

I’m grateful to the organizers of Wonder Women Tech who gathered and encouraged such a wonderful group of students. I left feeling reminded of all the ways that technology allows us to be creative, share our unique experiences, and build a future we can all be proud of. Wanting to be part of something big? We’re always hiring!

Filed under: Community, Events

Introducing Content Options: An Easy New Way to Make Visual Changes to Your Site

We’re excited to announce a newly launched Customizer panel called Content Options.

The Content Options section gives you an easy way to make small visual modifications across your site—like hiding the post date or displaying an excerpt instead of a full post, with no custom CSS needed!

There are three main features for now:

Blog Display: choose between displaying the full content of each post or an excerpt on the blog and category, tag, and date archive pages. A “default” option is also available for themes that mix excerpts and full posts based on post format.
Author Bio: Hide the author bio on single posts.
Post Details: Show or hide the post date, tags, or categories.

You can see Content Options in action in this video:

Check out the full support documentation to learn more about how these new theme options work.

Not all the themes support all these features, but all new free themes will fully support Content Options.

Here’s an extended list of themes that either fully or partially support Content Options:

Apostrophe
Baskerville
Big Brother
Boardwalk
Button
Canard
Cubic
Dyad
Ecto
Edin
Forefront (premium)
Franklin
Gateway
Gazette
Goran
Harmonic


Hemingway Rewritten
Libre
Libretto
Motif
Penscratch
Pictorico
Pique
Rebalance
Revelar
Rowling
Sapor
Sela
Sequential
Shoreditch
Twenty Sixteen

We also plan to add support for modifying other elements in the future, including the ability to hide featured images and author names. If you have more ideas, we’d love to hear from you!

Filed under: Customization

Introducing: Data for Breakfast!

 

The Data Team at Automattic is pleased to announce a new blog for everyone who loves data! Data for Breakfast will feature posts about our data stack, trends in WordPress.com usage, and whatever currently tickles our data fancy. We’re data scientists and engineers with a passion for our craft, and we’re starting this blog to share that passion with you!

In addition to blogging about data-powered WordPress.com features, like search and post recommendations, we’ll share insights we’ve learned from our robust social network.

Over 26% of the web is powered by WordPress! On an average day, the sites on WordPress.com alone stream about 1.5 billion events, and our largest Hadoop cluster does around 32TB of reads and writes. Our largest Elasticsearch cluster has 45 nodes and handles about 35 million queries on a daily basis. We’re continuously developing this data ecosystem, and we’ll share the journey with you.

Why the toaster?

The toaster was originally created by our team’s designer Jan Cavan Boulas as an exercise to illustrate her design process. When the team reacted so positively, she quickly iterated, adding the bimodal slice of toast. With the comment, “Data: it’s not a normal breakfast,” our logo was born!

So, if you like data, please join us for breakfast!

You can find Data for Breakfast at data.blog. Interested in your own custom .blog domain? !

 

Filed under: Automattic, Stats, WordPress.com

Level Up with Blogging U.

Thousands of bloggers have used Blogging U’s step-by-step email courses to get started, grow as writers, create beautiful websites, learn the ins and outs of WordPress.com, push their photography skills, and more.

There are ten different courses currently available, for folks of all interests and skill levels. Click any course’s title to learn more about it and to get started!

Blogging: Learning the Fundamentals — a solid grounding in the three big components of blogging: publishing, customizing your blog, and engaging with the blogging community.


Blogging: Commenting Basics — a short course to get you comfortable with reaching out to other bloggers and commenting etiquette.


Blogging: Branding and Growth — audit your brand, analyze your stats, explore social networks, learn about SEO, and more in this intermediate course.


Blogging: Intermediate Customization — go in-depth into the customization options available on all WordPress.com sites. Learn to work with themes, custom headers, background and fonts, widgets, and basic HTML.


Writing: Intro to Poetry  — find your inner Dickinson with daily poetry prompts, and sharpen your verse by learning some basic poetic forms and devices.


Writing: Finding Everyday Inspiration  — a longer course to spark a daily writing practice and explore ways to find new post ideas all around you.


Writing: Shaping Your Story — an intermediate course on the art of revision: four weeks of self-editing and rewriting. Dig into the process of focusing and building a story, whether fiction or nonfiction.


Photography: Developing Your Eye I  — a fun introduction to the fundamentals of photography, with 10 daily themes and shooting tips. Use any camera you like: the lens on your phone, a point-and-shoot, or a dSLR.


Photography: Developing Your Eye II  — 10 more days of themes and tips, getting progressively more in-depth. Take it after Developing Your Eye I, or on its own!


Websites: Build a Business Site  — create a website to help you meet your business goals. Publish pages and add site navigation, look at themes and customization, understand custom domains and SEO, and more.

Courses give you a daily assignment or writing prompt, along with the technical help you need to complete the task and insider advice from both our editors and the wider blogging community; each course has a handy resource page collecting everything in one place for you to refer back to whenever you’d like. Publish new posts using the course’s tag  and you’ll be able to connect with others working through the same course for support, feedback, and friendship.

Click on any course title for more detail on what it covers and to begin immediately (click the “Start” button on the course’s page to enroll) or read on to learn more about how Blogging U. works.

FAQs
How do I start a course?

Visit the page for the course you’re interested in and click the “Start” button — that’s it! If you’re logged in to WordPress.com, you’ll receive an introductory email right away, and your first assignment a few minutes later. If you’re not logged in, we’ll prompt you to do so, and you’re off and running. Do each assignment as you’re able, and interpret them however makes sense for you and your site.

What if I want to stop?

No problem — every email you’ll receive includes an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Click it, and the course stops.

This won’t affect any of your other WordPress.com emails, like notifications. And if you want to give the course another try, you can register again.

How many courses can I take? Can I take them more than once?

As many as you’d like, as many times as you’d like. We recommend taking one course at a time — blogging is fun, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be overwhelming! — but you’re free to take multiple courses simultaneously.

What if I need assistance during the course?

Every assignment includes expert advice from our staff as well as links to more resources and to our customer support folks, called Happiness Engineers.

How do I connect with other bloggers during my course?

Reaching out to other bloggers helps participants get the most out of Blogging U. courses. We encourage you to use the tag for your course when publishing posts (e.g., #bloggingfundamentals) and to browse that tag in the Reader to find and connect with other bloggers. If you don’t know what tag to use or browse, don’t worry — when you begin a course, we’ll tell you.

We also have a weekly Community Pool discussion thread where anyone can seek or give feedback on any aspect of blogging. A new thread opens every Monday. And each Friday, new bloggers are invited to share their first posts with the community in our First Friday thread.

What if I don’t blog on WordPress.com?

All general assignments (publishing posts, customizing your blog, leaving comments, etc.) are applicable to any blog, anywhere. However, you’ll need to have a WordPress.com account to register for a Blogging U. course, and any specific how-to guidance we offer will be specific to WordPress.com.

How much does each course cost?

Nothing. Blogging U. courses have always been free, and still are.

Ready to register? Head to the Blogging U. home page to get started!

Filed under: Better Blogging, Community, Customization, Writing

It’s Time: Apply For Early Access to Your Own .blog Domain Name

If you’ve been looking for the perfect address for your blog, it’s about to get even easier. Millions of new .blog domain names (like yourname.blog) will be available this November — and starting today, you can apply to secure your own domain name.

Just go to get.blog and apply to pre-register the domain you want. Like .com before it, .blog is clear and accessible, and it creates millions of fresh, new options for naming your blog. It’s the perfect way to personalize your home on the web.

With a domain like .blog, you can get a name that truly matches your identity. Plus, you’ll get the same Google search benefits as any other custom domain.

How to apply for your .blog name

Early applications start at $250 USD, and will be open until November 9th. It’s the best way to secure your own .blog domain ahead of the November 21st launch.

After the launch, any .blog domain that isn’t taken will be available at get.blog, starting at the standard yearly price of $30.

Meet Dave.blog, Design.blog, and more

A .blog site can be anything you want! Here are just two great examples:

Dave.blog: Dave.blog is the new site from pioneering software developer and writer Dave Winer, one of the founders of the blogging movement.


Design.blog: We’re proud to launch this new site, co-led by WordPress.com’s design team and featuring stories by and about people who love to create. Follow the site for contributions from people like Alice Rawsthorn, Cassidy Blackwell, Jessica Helfand, and John Maeda, our new Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion.

Get future .blog updates

If you’d like to be notified about other upcoming .blog updates, just sign up here and we’ll keep in touch!

Filed under: Domains, New Features, WordPress, WordPress.com

Three Ways to Showcase Instagram Photos on Your Website

Your Instagram account is a great way to share your life, products, and services online. With all that great content, why not showcase your Instagram account on your website or blog? Learn three ways WordPress.com makes it easy and discover other sites that are doing it well.

Activate the Instagram Widget

The Instagram Widget allows you to display your latest Instagram photos in your site’s sidebar, footer, or other widget areas available with your theme.

La Colombe is a chain of coffee shops in New England. Their blog, The Daily Grind, runs on WordPress.com, using the MH Magazine theme. They display their Instagram account prominently on their site using the sidebar widget area.

 

If you’d like to show off your latest shots like La Colombe, begin by adding the Instagram Widget to the widget area of your choice. You’ll have to grant WordPress.com access to the Instagram account from which you want to display photos. You can only display images from an Instagram account that you own or manage.

Embed an Instagram photo on a post or page

Whether you’re blogging about your new pair of flip-flops or your recent summer road trip, you can add snaps from your Instagram account to tell the story. Embedding an Instagram photo includes the likes and comments the photo is generating and encourages your readers to follow your Instagram account.

Ily Magazine is a new digital magazine founded by Erika Ramirez. It uses the Goodz Magazine theme and features essays, interviews, and poetry about love, passion, and relationships. 

In an interview with Amy Forsyth, author Jessica Rovniak includes a throwback Instagram photo right in the body of the post. 

To embed an Instagram photo in a page or post, copy the link of the Instagram photo on any public account and paste it into the WordPress.com editor. Your photo will appear along with the caption and likes.

Add an Instagram social media icon

Another way to make Instagram a part of your website is to link to your account using a Social Media Icons Widget.

Pine and Crave is a food blog by Mackenzie Schieck. She shares her recipes, home-decor ideas, and lifestyle tips with beautiful photographs and thoughtful writing using the Zuki theme. 

Mackenzie features her Instagram account with the Instagram Widget as well as the Social Media Icons Widget in her theme’s sidebar. To help her Instagram followers find the related content on her website, she’s also created a dedicated page called Instagram Bites, where she publishes the Instagram images and links to the related posts.

To add the Social Media Icons Widget just like Mackenzie, launch the Customizer and click on widgets. Select the widget area and the widget, then add your Instagram username in the proper field.

 

If you have an awesome Instagram account to share, try out these features on your website today!

Looking to do more with your website?

If you’re eager to make your mark on the web with a professional website or an impressive blog, consider the Personal Plan.

The Personal Plan includes:

A personalized domain that’s all your own.
No more ads on your site — just your content.
3GB Storage Space for all your files.

In addition, WordPress.com Plans come with fast, friendly help from our expert Happiness Engineers: ask any question from theme help to setting up pages to adding widgets on your WordPress.com site. We’re ready to help make your site even better.

Filed under: Customization, Embeds, Features, HowTo, Photos, Social, Technical, Widgets

Browser Notifications on WordPress.com

Today we’re launching a feature that will show instant notifications for new comments and likes — even when you are not actively using WordPress.com. Browser notifications give you a real-time sense of your readers’ reactions, allowing you to stay more engaged with your audience. Notifications will show up in Chrome or Firefox in the same location where each browser normally displays notifications. They will appear whether or not you have WordPress.com open, as long as your browser is running.

Browser Notifications for WordPress.com as seen in Chrome

Browser Notifications for WordPress.com as seen in Firefox

You’re in complete control. You can enable browser notifications from the notifications page of your personal settings. If your browser supports them, you’ll see an option at the top of the page to enable browser notifications.

Browser notifications are supported in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox — if your browser isn’t up to date, make sure you update to the latest version.

 

Filed under: Admin Bar, New Features, Notifications, WordPress.com

Field Notes: Podcast Movement 2016

Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do in the community. This week, we share our experience at the Podcast Movement 2016 conference.

People use WordPress.com to share many types of stories, from written essays and photo galleries to podcasts. Podcast Movement has quickly become the conference to attend for audio storytellers, so we were excited to be there to support the podcasting community and spread the word about podcasting tools on WordPress.com.

Live from the WordPress.com booth

Cesar Abeid, Trevor Montgomery, and Dustin Hartzler, Happiness Engineers at Automattic, attended the latest installment of this exciting event earlier this month in Chicago, Illinois. The conference, now in its third year, drew over 1,500 attendees. WordPress.com was a sponsor, so we had a great opportunity to engage with the community from our booth — and to feel the love for WordPress!

Podcast Movement 2016: A Recap

There were sessions on how to get started with podcasting, how to monetize your show, best practices for conducting interviews, and many other topics aimed to help podcasters take their shows to the next level. This year’s speakers included Alex Blumberg, former producer for This American Life and Planet Money on NPR, and Dan Miller, bestselling author of 48 Days to the Work You Love.

Hundreds of conference goers stopped by the WordPress.com booth, where we talked about using WordPress for podcasting and the different tools to publish and promote a show. We were also available to offer hands-on help with bloggers’ WordPress sites.

Podcasting on WordPress.com

While many podcasters are using self-hosted WordPress.org sites, some attendees did not know that WordPress.com also supports podcasting.

Did you know: according to Todd Cochrane from Blubrry, creators of the PowerPress podcasting plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites, there are over 200,000 active podcasts in iTunes. Since Blubrry powers over 60 thousand of them, at least 30% of all currently active podcasts are running WordPress!

WordPress.com makes it very easy to get started with podcasting. All you need to do is create a new post category, change a few settings in your dashboard, and submit your podcast to iTunes and other catalogs. Just follow these steps to launch your podcast (if you don’t have a WordPress.com site yet, get one here).

Some of the advantages of podcasting with WordPress.com:

Simplicity: Both your website and your media are hosted in the same place, making it easier to manage your content.
Security: Your podcast and site will be protected by WordPress.com against attacks and spam.
Backups: All content published on WordPress.com is protected and backed up so you don’t have to think about it.
Maintenance-Free: Your WordPress.com site is always running the latest version of WordPress, and you will never have to worry about updates.

We continue to work on tools for podcasters here at WordPress.com, and would love your input on how we can make them better.

What’s your show?

Do you have a podcast? Tell us about it and post a link to it in the comments below!

Filed under: Automattic, Community, Events, WordPress.com