Announcing DailyPost.WordPress.com

Starting today, you can go to dailypost.wordpress.com for inspiration, encouragement and advice about blogging. We’ll be posting every day so you can get regular boosts of motivation to blog more often.

The Post Every Day challenge

Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing.

As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:

• Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
• Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011

If you’re thinking big, sign up for PostADay. If you’re haven’t posted in ages, or have never posted at all, PostAWeek might be your speed. Still noble and bold, but perhaps more your style.

And of course, feel free to set your own goal – sign up as if you were doing PostAWeek, just so we can keep tabs on what you’re up to.

How to Join:

You can sign up any time.

Signing up is simple – do the following:

1. Post on your blog, right now, that you’re participating
2. (You can grab a sample post from dailypost.wordpress.com)
3. Use the tag postaday2011 or postaweek2011 in your posts (tips on tagging here)
4. Go to dailypost.wordpress.com
5. Subscribe to dailypost.wordpress.com- you’ll get reminders and inspirations every day to help you bring your full potential to your WordPress blog!

If you need a new blog, go here first to get one fast.

That’s all for now. For more, check dailypost.wordpress.com real soon!

Since then, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of sites joining WordPress.com every day. With the addition of Windows Live Spaces sites moving to WordPress.com, Windows Live users who are new to blogging coming here, and word-of-mouth from our current and very passionate users, the number of people joining WordPress.com has doubled to over 900,000 per month (up from around 400,000 per month before the migration). We’re thrilled to see this explosion and to be introducing so many people to publishing with WordPress. With the recent releases of many new features and several new themes, and more of each on the way, it’s a great time to be on WordPress.com.

Throughout the transition, we Happiness Engineers have had the privilege of helping many new users adjust to a new platform and learn to take advantage of the amazing features and capabilities unique to WordPress.com. If you’ve moved from Windows Live Spaces and feel that you’re still having trouble getting up to speed, or are about to join us on WordPress.com, we’d like to take a moment to talk about a few of the speed bumps you might run into as part of that transfer process.

Photos

A sample WordPress photo gallery.

The number one question we receive after a move to WordPress.com is “where are my photos?” Because uploaded photos are part of a different service—Windows Live SkyDrive—they aren’t always brought over with your blog posts to WordPress.com.

If you had inserted some of those images into your blog posts, we’ll bring those over for you automatically as part of the upgrade process. However, if you were using the Photos module to display your albums, you won’t find your images when you get to your new site. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you can move your images over to WordPress.com galleries very easily. In fact, a user who moved here from Windows Live Spaces has written an excellent step-by-step tutorial and posted it on her site to help other Windows Live Spaces users make the move with their photos.

Drafts, Modules, and Lists

After your move to WordPress.com, you’ll notice that some parts of your Windows Live Spaces site won’t have moved with you. The upgrade to WordPress.com automatically moves your published posts and your comments to your new site.

Draft posts are just one such item, so you’ll need to make sure that you either copy them into a separate document or publish them prior to starting the migration process. Any posts left in draft will no longer be accessible once you’ve completed the migration process.

Information you had in modules won’t make the move to WordPress.com, either. Not to worry, though! You just need to make a note of the information you wish to transfer prior to migrating. Here at WordPress.com things are a bit different. Instead of modules, we use widgets to place content into your site’s sidebar. We have many available widgets which can display text, an image, your Gravatar, a tag cloud, or any one of a number of additions to help your readers find content and learn about you.

There’s one notable exception: if you’re looking for your Lists from Windows Live Spaces, we’ve worked out with the Windows Live Spaces team to find a way to retrieve that content once you’ve migrated. It won’t be moved to your new site, but you can get the info and then copy it into a new widget whenever you like. You can learn how to do this in our frequently asked questions about the move.

Where to Get Help

Change isn’t always easy. Although we think WordPress.com is the best publishing service in the world, if you’ve just come from using another platform for the last few years, it can be difficult to learn new tricks and wrap your brain around new concepts. Thankfully, we have lots of great support resources here to help you get rocking and back up to speed creating great content.

If you’re brand-new, you should of course start with the excellent Learn WordPress.com, which will introduce you to the basics.

Support
For more specific questions, move on to our Support documentation. Click around and learn more details on how to use WordPress.com, or search for your question and find an answer in one of the hundreds of pages in our knowledgebase.

Forums
Do you have a more specific question? Or would you rather talk about it with your fellow WordPress.com users and get to know others? The WordPress.com Forums are a great place to ask. Our Happiness Engineers patrol the forums, and there are a lot of very knowledgeable volunteers around who will be happy to answer your question or point you in the right place.

There are support forums available in multiple languages, also filled with great volunteers and users from the WordPress.com community. We have support forums available in Arabic, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish,French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian),Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Contact Support
If you have a question about your user account on WordPress.com, or have a problem that can’t be solved using the documentation or asking a volunteer, you can of course contact our resident team of Happiness Engineers for assistance. We’re online and answering your questions twenty-four hours a day, and nothing makes us happier than helping you to make the most of your WordPress.com experience. Don’t forget: we’re here to help.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?
J. B. Priestley

December 1st makes a lot of us think of the holidays. It’s hard not to think about snow even if your climate doesn’t bring it. Once again, we’d like to spread snow around the world through WordPress.com.

To make it snow on your site:

1. Go to your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance → Extras.
3. Check the box next to “Show falling snow on this blog.”
4. Click the Update Extras button.

If you used snow last year it is automatically turned back on. If you want to turn it off, follow the steps above but uncheck the box.

Here’s a latin jazz version of Let it Snow to listen to while activating the feature:

Older computers may run slow or stop responding due to snow. Use the following links if you run into a problem (the options below only affect your user account):

Prevent Snow
Allow Snow

P2 now sports a site member autocomplete tool that takes the guesswork out of tagging people in your posts. P2 will also now display the most popular tags for a blog as well as the number of times a tag has been used. These new features allow you to better identify and organize your posts.

Site Member Autocomplete

When you write posts it is now possible to bring up a list of members posting on your blog. From the front page of P2, type the @ character with part of a username and the a list of username suggestions will appear based on username and display name. You can choose the correct member name to insert and the name should be added to your post content. After tagging a member in your post, the post will be filed under a special URL (for example: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/mentions/justin/).

Tagging Improvements

We have also made some great improvements to the tag-it box. The tags that appear when you begin typing will now be ordered by popularity. P2 will also display the number of times a tag has been used. This will allow you to better decide what tags to use. To use the feature just begin typing some characters and a list of available tags should display.

Using P2

Just like other themes, you can find P2 under Appearance > Themes on your dashboard. Those who are into the self-hosted version of WordPress can keep an eye out for the updated version of P2 in the coming weeks.

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

—Dr. Emmett Brown

The streets of the future probably won’t be filled with flying cars and hover boards but the Web will be filled with more semantic content thanks to new markup elements introduced in HTML5. Today’s new theme will let you take advantage of that future right now, right here, on WordPress.com. It’s called Toolbox.

Much like the Sandbox theme, Toolbox provides all the markup you need to build your very own theme with CSS alone–with one difference. Toolbox uses some really exciting new HTML5 elements–like <article>, <header>, and <nav>–that better describe what your content is all about.

What can you do with it? Anything you want. Since HTML and CSS go together like peanut butter and jelly we’ve put together a small demonstration. Clicking the image below will take you to a demo site where you can see—and download!—some really cool Custom CSS working in concert with the Toolbox markup.

The Toolbox Theme markup together with Custom CSS

If you need some more inspiration, take a look at a small sample of the infinite themes styles available with Custom CSS. All you need to get started is the Custom CSS upgrade and some experience with CSS.

If you’re building a WordPress theme for a self-hosted site, you can use Toolbox too! It’s available right now in the WordPress Themes Directory.

Sometimes things just work out. When Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7, a complete remake of the Windows Phone platform, we all got very excited. The simplicity of the platform is unheard of, with the target being to “spend less time on your phone – and get to the things you want to do quicker”. A perfect platform for a WordPress app to enable blogging while on the move.

Today I’m very proud to introduce you to the latest addition in the WordPress app family, WordPress for Windows Phone 7:

The Actions Dashboard

In this, the first version of WordPress for Windows Phone 7, you will find most of what you’ve come to expect from WordPress apps. It’s easy to write and edit posts and pages on the move, you can upload photos, as well as check stats and moderate comments. It’s all easily accessible from an Actions dashboard. In future versions of the app we’re also hoping to implement video uploading – let us know what else you’d like to see!

To navigate through the app a Panorama view is used, something unique to the Windows Phone 7 platform that works really well for managing a blog or a website. You can get an idea of what it’s like using the app by clicking through the slideshow on the brand new WordPress for Windows Phone 7 website.

We couldn’t be more excited about this, and we’re hoping to take the app even further in the coming months. It’s a partnership between iSoftStone, Microsoft and us that’s made this possible, thank you for all your help and support!

WordPress for Windows Phone 7 is an Open Source app. To learn more and get involved, visit windowsphone.wordpress.org/development.

To get the latest news while they’re hot, be sure to subscribe to the WordPress for Windows Phone 7′s Twitter stream: @WPWindowsPhone. We’re also blogging about the app over at windowsphone.wordpress.org/blog. If you need help setting up or using the app, or if you have feedback, be sure to visit the forums.

WordPress for Windows Phone 7 is available now for free in the Windows Mobile Marketplace.

If you answered yes to any of those questions you’ll be happy to hear this news. I’m proud to introduce the official WordPress.com Theme Showcase.

Example of the Theme Showcase landing page.

The Theme Showcase exhibits the amazing collection of themes available on WordPress.com, documents theme features, and gives you a central place to explore themes outside of your dashboard. With colorful screenshots, detailed specifications, links to sites using the theme, and a list of suggested uses, I know you’ll be inspired to learn more about your current theme or try something new.

The Theme Showcase acts as both a tool for existing site owners to learn more about their theme, such as special features and quirks, and for new owners to explore all our themes and make an informed decision before signing up and choose a theme. Large-size screenshots and links to example content will demonstrate real-world usage of WordPress.com themes.

Example of a Theme Showcase inner page showcasing one theme.

To explore our themes you can browse by subject (Photography, Lifestream, Magazine, Holiday, Single Page, …), appearance (Color, Number of columns, Width, …), features (Menus, Background, Header Image, …), or style (Outdoorsy, Techy, Grungy, Girly, Colorful, Conservative, Simple, …). Or, search for a theme that matches any combination of criteria you choose.

Theme Showcase search and browse interface example.

The Theme Showcase should be your first stop when thinking about WordPress.com themes. If you are considering starting a blog, begin here to pick the perfect theme. If you’re a WordPress.com veteran, come explore WordPress.com themes and maybe learn something new about your favorite theme. Prepare to be inspired!

• Large (2560×1440)
• Small (1280×720)
• For Smartphones (640×960)
• For Tablets (1024×1024)

A tip: Choose an image larger than your screen size, and set the position to “center” or “fill screen” (not “stretch”). For smartphones and tablets, we recommend only using the background image on your lock screen, so it doesn’t interfere with your icons.

Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you were a fan of last year’s illustration, you can find it in this post.

A couple of months ago we took a step back to look at what sort of things the contact form needed and what it could be. While this is still technically a contact form, it is now so much more.

First up, the new interface. Typing in the shortcode still works fine, but we wanted to provide a graphical way for people to manage the form. To do this you click on the ‘Add a custom form’ button:

Add a new form

That will bring up our new custom form builder:

Form Builder

The form builder gives you a simple, but powerful, set of controls on how your form will look and behave.  Common changes you can do that we think you’ll find handy:

• Add and remove fields
• Re-order the field list (drag and drop)
• Select from several types of fields (text, drop down, checkbox, radio button, textarea, etc.)
• Mark fields as required
• Enter a specific email address you want the form results sent to
• Custom subject line for the form results email

Clicking on the ‘Add this form to my post’ button will insert the shortcode for the form into your post.  If  you forgot something you can either edit the shortcode by hand, or simply click the ‘Add custom form’ button again and the form builder will re-load the form details and allow you to change them.

Now if we had stopped there, this would still be a great upgrade, but we decided to turn the volume up to 11.

In addition to emailing out the form results, they are now also stored in the WordPress database.  You’ll notice a new menu item called ‘Feedbacks’, just below ‘Comments’:

Feedbacks

The feedback management is patterned after the style of comment management.  Form submissions that Akismet marks as spam are under the ‘Spam’ section.  If for some reason Akismet made a mistake you can click the ‘Not Spam’ action and the details will be sent back to Akismet so that it can learn from the mistake.  And because you indicated that it wasn’t spam after all, the form results are emailed out again.  You can delete, restore, and permanently delete each entry as well.

For more details check out the updated support documentation on the contact form. For WordPress.org powered blogs we have released this as an update to the Grunion Contact Form plugin, version 2.0.

Here are a couple tips on how to let your blog shine as you head into the new year.

Blogging made easy

Press This is a great way to simplify your blogging experience. It lets you grab content from any blog post, article, website, or photo you find on the web. If you can you see it in your browser, you can use Press This to blog about it on WordPress.com!

It will automatically insert an image, quote, video, or link on any website directly into your blog post as well as include a link back to the source. No more having to copy and paste 5 different things. With Press This you can share great content quickly.

Drag the bookmarklet (the link that says “Press This”) from the Tools page of your WordPress.com Dashboard into your browser’s bookmarks bar to get started. This adds a handy link you can use to post content.

The next time you want to share a link, photo, or video on another site just press the bookmarklet. You’ll see a window pop up where you can add photos, video, and quotes straight from the site.

The two icons next to “Add:” let you choose which photos or videos on the page you want to insert into your post.

Combine all of that with the mobile options we featured last month and you can really blog from anywhere on the web or anywhere in the world.

Let your photos shine

After many lovely days spent with family during the holidays you probably have dozens (hundreds? thousands?!) of photos from trips, meals, adventures, and lovely winter weather. WordPress.com makes it easy to showcase these right on your blog.

Using our built-in photo galleries or slideshows you can share the best moments from the holidays. Here’s a few from my trip to Yosemite National Park in the winter a few years ago.

Click to view slideshow.

Between Press This and showcasing your photos you have some great toys to play with as you make your blog even better in the new year. Enjoy the holidays!