Keep your private details secure

One of the requirements of owning a domain is that you must give your contact details when registering that domain.

Internet regulations require that your name, address, email, and phone number be accessible 24/7 to anybody who wants to see them just by looking up your domain. This rule was created to make it easy to contact a domain owner in case of problems, but it has since been exploited by spammers and marketers to bother people. Your personal information is exposed 24 hours a day, everyday, to anyone, anywhere.

Unfortunately since this information is publicly available it may be used by spammers and marketers to send unsolicited messages, or by others who want to harass a domain owner.

You have the power to change this. With a private (“unlisted”) registration through Domains By Proxy (our affiliate company), registering a domain name doesn’t mean sacrificing your privacy. Their name is shown on the registration instead of yours, but you still retain the full benefits of full registration.

Starting today you can add the private registration upgrade when you buy a domain, or if you have an existing domain registered on WordPress.com you can make it private at any time. If your domain expires in less than six months in the current year you’ll get the rest of the year free but you will have to renew the domain and cover the cost of the privacy upgrade for the remainder of the domain’s lifetime.
For example, if it’s July, and your domain expires in two months in September, you can renew the domain today and only be charged for the renewal and private registration upgrade for the coming year starting in September. We’ll give you two free months of private registration upgrade.

The private domain registrations upgrade costs $8 a year and you must purchase the upgrade for the length of time your domain is registered for.

In March, VideoPress added support for Facebook so that when using Publicize, your videos would get added to your Facebook update as well.

Until now, we’ve neglected your images.

Starting today, however, we’ll cherish your images as much as we already do your text and video; when sending a Facebook Profile update, WordPress.com will include any image you upload to the post. Image support was the #1 most requested feature for Publicize: Facebook, and we’re happy we finally got around to it

(Before you ask, the #2 most requested feature is the ability to update Facebook Pages as well as Profiles, so it’s already on our list.)

Since we started, you’ve sent out nearly 1.3 million Facebook updates from WordPress.com. Keep them going!

NB: Only the first five images uploaded to a post and included directly, in a gallery, or in a slideshow will be sent to Facebook.

A broken telephone I saw while wandering around Bangkok

It’s happened to all of us. The night starts off innocently enough with a little gin and tonic, maybe a mojito, then next thing you know you’re doing tequila shots with the bartender and the girl from Brazil and you find yourself thinking it would be a treMENdous idea to call up your ex and see how they’re doing and perhaps impress them with your newfound wit.

We’ve got the cure. Now, instead of drunk dialing random friends, lovers, and acquaintances one at a time, what if you could dial your blog and talk to the whole world at once? It’d be like something out of Star Trek.

The future is now, folks. You can now go to your My Blogs tab, enable Post by Voice, and get a special number and code to call your blog. After you’re done, the audio file from your phone call will be posted to your blog for all to listen to and enjoy. (And added to your RSS feed for podcast support.)

So now you can post to your WordPress via the web, email, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, desktop clients, and now any telephone in the world. Of course when you post it can be pushed to Facebook, Twitter, and more using the Publicize feature. What more could you want?

Right now this is completely free, but we’ll charge you money to take down posts. Just kidding! We’re making it free and allowing recording lengths up to sixty minutes, but that limit may go down without a paid upgrade in the future. Mostly we’re just curious to see how people use this.

I have a few ideas myself, but to find out you’ll have to listen to this voice post:

But now more than ever, this national tragedy has made me grateful for the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. While the oil continues to spew, the media — WordPress.com bloggers included — have been on the frontlines, making sure that Americans and everyone the world over know what is really happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil spill has also made me realize how fragile this freedom is — as the Associated Press reported, “journalists covering the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been yelled at, kicked off public beaches and islands and threatened with arrest …”

Which is why I’m happy to announce that WordPress.com is a proud supporter of the 1 for All campaign that launches today with the simple goal of raising awareness about the First Amendment. We join more than 1,000 media outlets who have partnered with 1 for All, and we have a special connection to the project — their site is hosted on WordPress.com.

Any U.S. resident is welcome to enter their “How Free Can You Be?” contest by submitting photos, videos and stories that illustrate First Amendment liberties. Back here on WordPress.com, please tag any posts you write about this topic with “First Amendment.” And since we know many of you don’t live in the United States, we welcome all readers — regardless of where you live — to discuss civil liberties in your country, as well. Please tag those posts with “human rights.”

We’ve all been there — those days when the light bulb seems dim, if not burned out. To give you a little creative push and get that writerly mojo flowing again, we’ve added a new service called Plinky.com.

Each weekday, Plinky provides a prompt — like a question or a challenge — and you type in an answer. To keep it interesting, prompts are a mixed bag of fun commands (“Write a haiku about the last meal you ate”) to more thoughtful questions (“What is your favorite summer memory?”)

To get started, sign up for a new account at Plinky. Then, add your WordPress.com blog to your Plinky account, which will let you share your answer. We’re excited to see what you’ll create, and we hope to feature some of the best Plinky answers on WordPress.com. But we can’t feature your Plinky posts without your help: You’ll need to add a “Plinky” tag to your blog post, so that it appears on the Plinky tag page.

Support instructions for using Plinky on your WordPress.com blog.

The Modularity Lite Theme

If you’re attaching large images (950 pixels by 425 pixels and up) to your posts you can turn on the optional home page slideshow in Appearance → Theme Options. Modularity Lite grabs the first large image attachment from your most recent posts and turns them into a dynamic, full-width slideshow.

Also available from the Theme Options page: a welcome message you can enable on the home page just above the slideshow and a checkbox for making Modularity Lite a full-width, no-sidebar theme.

Modularity Lite Theme Options

We’ve also made sure that Modularity Lite is really customizable. There’s a Custom Header (950 pixels by 200 pixels), Custom Background, and a fully-widgetized footer at the bottom of every page. Check out the Modularity Lite demo and take a closer look.

Designed by Graph Paper Press, Modularity Lite is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

Example of Koi's layout showing the lovely illustrations behind the header and navigation bar.

Enjoy the playful artwork and textured background, or customize the look with a custom background color and image, custom header image*, and custom navigation menu.

Add a background image and change the background color via the Custom Background menu.

Koi’s right-hand sidebar and three footer columns are ready for all your widgets. If no widgets are enabled in the footer widget area, it will not appear.

Example of Koi's three footer widget areas and more of the design's gorgeous artwork.

Designed by Nick La of N.Design Studio, Koi is now available for your WordPress.com site and is coming soon for self-hosted WordPress.org sites.

Does this number surprise us? Not at all. Because we’ve long known that you — our users — have an infinite amount of things to share with the world.  From posts about your struggles with life and death, your favorite hobbies or your simple yet touching thoughts of the day, you are who we have to thank for helping us become the success we are today.

Onward and upward. And if you’re curious to know more about our stats, you’ll probably enjoy this page. Happy blogging!

The Wu Wei theme

Wu Wei is a gorgeous theme but we’ve also made sure it’s packed with features for you. Starting from the top, beautiful, fully customizable, drop-down menus using the Menus feature in Appearance → Menus, and an optional Custom Header. You can add a header image below the text, and if you’re uploading your own logo here, choose to hide the text altogether.

Wu Wei's customizable menus

And, at the bottom, totally optional Widget areas in the footer of every Wu Wei-themed page of your site. To keep things simple, they’re turned off by default. Visit Appearance → Widgets and add your own Widgets to any of the three available areas to automatically turn the footer Widget area on.

Wu Wei's optional footer widgets

Wu Wei also comes with an alternate, dark color scheme.

The dark color scheme

Turning on the dark color scheme is simple. Just visit Appearance → Theme Options, check off the option to use the dark color scheme, and click the save button. Both the color schemes are beautiful so this might be a tough choice!

You also have complete control over the background for this theme in Appearance → Background. The choice of dark or light color schemes works really well with this.

Designed by Jeff Ngan, Wu Wei is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers, or aliens, it was completely our fault. A single line, nay, a single character out-of-place, slipped by our normal review and testing and started overwriting settings when triggered. The team immediately took the site down to prevent further damage and clean up the mess that had been caused. All hands were called to deck.

First we determined that 11.2 million blogs were unaffected by the bug. So we brought those back up. For the remaining 50,000 or so, including some VIPs, we started restoring the lost settings using backups, audit trails, and logs. This was largely automated and we brought blogs back online as they were fixed, but a few final tricky ones were brought back one-by-one by hand because we wanted to make sure everything was in its right place.

For most folks (99%) your site was only unavailable for an hour, the rest came up a bit after that, and the tricky ones we worked on until Friday morning. Fortunately because of the time of day and the shorter duration, this had a smaller effect on traffic (about 3.9m) versus the last time (5.5m).

As a silver lining to this failing of the cloud, we learned a lot. We’ll be using our newfound experience to keep WP.com a safe, stable, and robust place to hang your hat and have your blog call home.

If you have any questions, notice any remaining wonkiness, or just want to say howdy, we’d be happy to hear from you.