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Get Married With WordPress

by Paul Joseph January 12, 2012 Featured

One of the most important events of your life might just be your wedding. It also might be one of the craziest, disorganized, mixed-up times of your life too. We’d like to help with that a bit with a free wedding theme we call Forever . Along with a handful of cool features we’ll get to below, Forever makes it easy to wrap your wedding up in a neat little blog on WordPress.com. You can show off every one of your best photos and highlight every important detail leading up to the big day and beyond . Forever makes it easy to welcome your family and friends to your blog with a dramatic personalized home page. The design is bold and clean with lots of room for large, colorful photos of the happy couple (that’s you!) in an optional featured post slider and home page excerpts. You can also easily customize the color scheme and get Forever to match your wedding colors with only a few clicks. You can update the background color (or add your own pattern) from the custom background page in your blog dashboard and even change the color of the all the links from the Forever Theme Options page. We also built in a special Guestbook Template that lets your guests take over a page of your choice with their best wishes for you … and maybe a few embarrassing stories … as comments. And, of course, Forever works seamlessly with all the other WordPress.com features you love; emails sent to your blog followers every time you post , contact forms (perfect for RSVPs), custom domain names (like robandlaura.com instead of robandlaura.wordpress.com), customized fonts and CSS with the Custom Design upgrade (great for changing your blog title to a handwriting font), and everything else . And it works especially well with our new Milestone Widget. Save The Date! Forever also sports a custom design for a new widget we call Milestone. You can find it in your blog dashboard at Appearance → Widgets and it’s pretty easy to use. Just pick a title for your event, a date and time, and a special message for the big day, and you’re ready to go. Now you have a special save the date widget for your Wedding on every page of your blog. The Milestone Widget in Forever If that sounds pretty awesome and you want the Milestone widget available for your non-Wedding blog too, you’re in luck. We’re also making the milestone widget available to every theme on WordPress.com right now . Enjoy Forever To find out more about our new Wedding Theme, Forever, check out the demo site and visit the Forever theme showcase page . Or just go ahead and activate it on your brand new Wedding blog. Here’s to your wedding and your wedding blog on WordPress.com. Cheers! (That means you have to kiss now.)

Tagged as: color, facebook, linkedin, new features, widgets

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Splinder Importer Now Available

by Paul Joseph January 9, 2012 Featured

Italian blogging service Splinder.com is closing down at the end of this month, and we’d like to extend a hearty “Benvenuto” to any Splinder users who’re looking for a new blogging home. To help make migration easier, we’ve added a Splinder importer to WordPress.com. If you’d like to make the move, please go ahead and get started now so that there’s time before the January 31 st deadline to work out any issues. Exporting your Splinder Blog To import a Splinder blog, you’ll first need to save your export file to your computer by following these steps: First, log in to Splinder and click the “Blog” link available at the top of the home page. Next, click the “configura” link available at the top of the blog page. Now click “Esporta blog e attiva redirect” in the right-hand sidebar. Next, download the content of your blog by clicking the link “Clicca qui per scaricare il file con i contenuti del tuo blog.” Now you’re ready to import the downloaded file into your WordPress.com blog. Importing to WordPress.com Create a WordPress.com account and blog if you haven’t already, and then visit Tools -> Import in the admin sidebar. You should find the Splinder importer among the list of importers. Click the link to get started. Next, you’ll upload the export file you’ve downloaded to your computer from Splinder. Once the importer has validated your import file, you’ll be prompted to map users from the old blog to the new. If you’d like to have your post images downloaded as well, be sure to tick the “Download and import file attachments” checkbox. Once you’ve submitted the import request, it can take a few minutes to perform the import, and you’ll receive an email letting you know that the import finished. After you have imported your content into WordPress.com, you can return to your Splinder settings to create a redirect that will forward your old Splinder blog to your new WordPress.com blog. Provide your new WordPress.com blog URL in the field and click the “Attiva redirect” button. If you have any trouble importing your blog, of course you’re welcome to  contact support , and one of our Happiness Engineers will be glad to help out. To learn your way around WordPress.com, we encourage you to check out our handy tutorial . We also provide comprehensive feature documentation at our support site . Welcome to WordPress.com!

Tagged as: design, fresher, howto, import, linkedin, splinder, tutorial

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New Themes: Duet and ThemeMin

by Paul Joseph January 5, 2012 Featured

I’m excited to announce we’ve added two great new premium themes to our ever-growing collection of themes today. First up is Duet – a responsive, minimal, and sophisticated design from The Theme Foundry . Duet is tailored for writers, journalists, and business bloggers. Meticulously crafted and refined options provide you with the power to effortlessly customize your theme. Choose and mix from ten accent fonts, and five body fonts to discover the perfect typographic style for your website. You can also upload a custom logo image to put your own personal stamp on your blog. With a flexible featured slider, your readers have no chance to miss your important posts. Duet comes with more great features, so be sure to read about it on the showcase page . Next up is ThemeMin , designed by Themify . ThemeMin is a minimal, light-weight, and fast-loading theme that focuses on typography. Together, all of these elements help to provide a comfortable reading experience. ThemeMin comes with a featured posts carousel on the front page. Plus, you can mix and match between five color schemes, three site layout options, and two post layout options until you find a combination that hits the spot for your blog. Go find more about the theme on its showcase page .

Tagged as: design, facebook, howto, linkedin, power, stumbleupon

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Holiday Desktop Backgrounds from WordPress.com

by Paul Joseph December 20, 2011 Featured

Illustration by Caroline Hadilaksono We’ve got a little year-end tradition here at WordPress.com. Every year, we commission an artist to spread some WordPress-themed holiday cheer. For 2011, Caroline Hadilaksono has created a warm and joyful scene that’s sure to get you in the mood for the holidays (and some blogging). We’ve made some desktop backgrounds from her illustration that we’d like to share with you. Here’s to a safe and happy holiday season for all of you, from all of us at Automattic . Large   (2560x1830px · 6.4 MB) Small (1280×915 · 1.8 MB) For tablets (1024×1024 · 1.6 MB) For smartphones (640×960 · 971 KB) Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for  Mac OS X ,  Windows , and Ubuntu .  A tip: Choose an image larger than your screen size, and set the position to “center” or “fill screen” ( not  “stretch”). If you missed them last time around, be sure to check out our illustrations from 2010 and  2009 .

Tagged as: backgrounds, facebook, holidays, linkedin, widgets

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The Long and Short of It

by Paul Joseph December 8, 2011 Featured

Would you like some more Twitter in your WordPress? We got ya. As an update to our ever-popular Tweet embedding functionality we’re supporting Twitter’s new embed API to enable richer, better looking, and more functional Tweets inside your blog posts. To embed a Tweet just put a permalink to it on its own line  or use our new shortcode that allows for extra formatting . But wait, there’s more! Have you ever wished that when you’re on Twitter and come across a link to someone’s blog post, like this one , you could see a preview of the post without having to click on the link? Now you can, our friends at Twitter have made it so that all  wp.me  links can be previewed, including snippets of posts and photos, directly on Twitter.com. In addition to this being something I’ve personally wanted for a while, we think it’ll get a lot more people visiting your blog.   Finally, if you link your Twitter account on your Gravatar profile we’ve made it so it’s easy to follow you right from that page. Now go forth and tweetify. P.S. You can follow me on Twitter here , and WordPress.com here . The Long and Short of It wp.me/pf2B5-2pL — WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) December 08, 2011

Tagged as: friends, howto, linkedin, news, stumbleupon, widgets

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New Themes: AutoFocus, Imbalance 2, and Reddle

by Paul Joseph December 6, 2011 Featured

Today we are absolutely thrilled to warm your creative hearts with the announcement of three new themes: AutoFocus, Imbalance 2, and Reddle. AutoFocus is an elegant, minimal theme designed for artists, photographers, and other creatives seeking a simple but beautiful way to showcase their talents online. Designed by Allan Cole , this oft-requested theme simultaneously boasts impressive featured images throughout and a clean, unobtrusive design that gets out of the way of what truly matters—your creativity. AutoFocus Home Page If you publish single-serving images on a daily photoblog, AutoFocus will accommodate you with ease. If you insert large galleries into your blog posts with the intention of writing assignment recaps, AutoFocus will also elegantly serve up your photo sets and stories. Wordsmiths will also enjoy the sleek and readable aesthetic that AutoFocus delivers. Point is, AutoFocus works on so many levels for so many different types of creators that it’s simply a perfect fit here. Read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes . Imbalance 2 , designed by WPShower , is yet another gorgeous theme that strikes a perfect balance between functionality and minimalism. Combine that with its modern style and your choices of use with this theme are quite varied. Photo-heavy blogs, online portfolios, and online magazines are all intelligently handled by Imbalance 2. One of the first cool things you’ll notice about this theme is how everything on its home page automagically snaps into place regardless of whether you have a habit of publishing lengthy blog posts or tighter, short-form entries. Imbalance 2 Home Page Along with a full-width layout template Imbalance 2 comes with several theme options: a site-wide theme color selector, which affects links, background hovers, and borders; sticky post handling; and the option to make your image and post grid fluid or fixed. Read more about Imbalance 2′s features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes . Our final theme for you today is Reddle , a deceptively minimal, multi-purpose theme that impresses upon its user both versatility and simplicity. The elements of Reddle’s layout were inspired by an older theme called Rubric but there’s really nothing basic about its minimal layout. Everything about the design adapts to how you want to use your blog and what you want to use it for. Want to you use your blog for a simple one-column link blog? A two-column business site with a custom header and no posts? Reddle can do that. It even adapts its layout to visitors reading your blog from a device like an iPhone. Reddle Home Page Reddle also provides support for two additional Post Formats : Image Posts and Aside Posts. Aside Posts are ultra-minimal. They don’t have a title or tags. Image Posts will highlight the first image in your post along with a short excerpt. You can see both post formats, as well as many other of the theme’s features, by visiting Reddle’s Theme Showcase page or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes .

Tagged as: creativity, fresher, linkedin, news, stumbleupon, widgets

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