But once she turned fifty, the romance writer decided that she was tired of living in isolation, and ready to face her greatest fear. On December 31, 2010 she started a blog at ArLynnPresser.WordPress.com and wrote in her first post, “My New Year’s resolution is to meet every Facebook friend I have.”

And so she spent 2011 visiting friends all over the world (and meeting some for the very first time). Her son Joseph accompanied her on the journey, recording video clips for ArLynn to share on her blog, which she’s been updating regularly since announcing her resolution on New Year’s Eve 2011. By the end of the year she had been to 13 different countries and met with 292 of the 325 friends she had as of January 1, 2011.

“Without WordPress.com, this project wouldn’t have happened,” she says. We set up an interview with ArLynn to learn more about the role that blogging played in her mission to face her agoraphobia. Here’s what she had to say:

Had you ever blogged before New Year’s Eve 2011? Why did you choose WordPress.com to share your resolution?

ArLynn: I had never blogged. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say. And I’m not sure blogging necessarily was about speaking to an audience so much as me creating a record of my experience. I chose WordPress.com because it was easy to use and allowed for customization.

What role did your blog play in the project?

ArLynn: It was absolutely vital. It gave me the discipline to say, “I will blog about every friend and publish posts nearly every day.” So that kept me moving forward. I could have made a diary of the project using Facebook or Twitter, but that would not have allowed for the kind of reflection that comes with blogging. A blog requires me to think about what I’ve done, what I’m going to do, and what I’m going to write.

How did it feel to put yourself “out there” on your blog for the world to see? What was the actual writing process like?

ArLynn: It took me all day today just to figure out how to encapsulate my experience with Facebook friend #298. I like to bring out the best parts in people I meet so I really choose my words carefully. As for putting myself out in the world, I think the only thing we can do is embrace being vulnerable and hopelessly flawed. I’ve learned to say, “Sure, I’m a total screw-up, but I accept it. If you want to read about it, fine by me.” I’m now fifty-one years old so it’s time for me to be liberated from worrying about what others think of me.

What advice do you have for people who are thinking about using a WordPress.com blog as a tool to help them achieve their goals?

ArLynn: I truly believe that if something doesn’t at first appear to be impossible then it’s not worth doing. I advise people to blog every day or nearly every day. It won’t just push you to reach your goal, it will completely overtake you. Last year changed me completely.

Do you still consider yourself agoraphobic?

ArLynn: Yes, but it’s gotten easier for me to leave the house and travel. I used to be terrified of getting on planes, and sometimes just thinking about leaving the house could induce a panic attack.

What are you up to now?

ArLynn: This year, I continue to travel and see friends, but I am focusing more on meeting those who have trouble getting out from behind their computers, whether because of agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, or other anxiety disorders. You can find out more by checking out my blog at ArLynnPresser.WordPress.com.

Thanks for sharing your story, ArLynn!

Retro-fitted can be personalized in a variety of ways. Customize the look of your blog by uploading a header and background image. Take control of you navigation by configuring the dropdown menu. Add widgets to the sidebar for a two-column layout or leave it empty for a single column design.

Check it out in the Theme Showcase.

If you’re using threaded comments, you’ll see if someone responded directly to you, right in the notification.

You will see Approve, Spam, and Trash links in your comment notification if you have permission to moderate comments, allowing you to moderate the comment from within the notification:

Clicking Reply automatically approves a comment and displays an area for you to type a reply in. When you’re done, just click Reply and you can get back to whatever you were working on, without having to navigate to the dashboard to manage your comments.

You can still manage comments in your dashboard, but we hope you’ll find the comment notification a convenient shortcut.

For more information about comments and comment moderation: Comments, Manage Comments.

Our first theme, Splendio, dazzles with an unconventional yet stylish design from Design Disease that pops out of the box — literally.

How you use this theme is limited only by your imagination! It comes loaded with features: six widget areas (one in the right sidebar and up to five in the footer), featured header images, and a custom background. In addition, there’s a showcase page template (pictured in the screenshot above) that includes a featured slider for sticky posts, and a nifty compact listing of your latest posts. For details on how to set up the Splendio theme on your blog, consult the Theme Showcase.

Our next theme, Suburbia, is as orderly and minimalistic as Splendio is eccentric and playful. Designed by WPShower, Suburbia’s attractive arrangement of posts inside a grid make it an excellent choice for magazine-oriented sites.

Suburbia makes use of featured images to display your posts in a clean, refined style. If you’d like a post to have a larger featured image, mark it as a sticky post. In this manner, you can highlight your most important content. In addition to featured images, Suburbia supports five optional widget areas (four in the footer and one in the sidebar on single posts and pages), a custom background, and custom header image. As always, you can click on over to the Theme Showcase to read more about Suburbia.

We look forward to seeing how you use these two great themes.

The VideoPress upgrade, which allows you to upload and embed your own videos on your blog, now comfortably handles videos from iPhones and iPads. You can shoot vertically or horizontally, and we’ll take care of rotating it for you so that your video looks great when it’s published on your site.

If you don’t already have VideoPress on your WordPress.com account, head on over to VideoPress.com, we’ll get you up and running in no time. And don’t forget to install the free WordPress App on your iPhone or iPad!

Duotone: Now Video-Friendly

If you’re a photoblogger, you’re probably familiar with the cool Duotone theme, which changes color to match the first image in every post and page. The big news is that Duotone now seamlessly supports VideoPress videos, so now you can engage visitors with photographs and videos!

Learn More about VideoPress

If you use VideoPress on your self-hosted WordPress site, keep an eye on the VideoPress Blog – we have some exciting annoucements coming out soon, just for you!

You can find more details about VideoPress by checking out the following resources:

• VideoPress.com
• WordPress Support: VideoPress

Designed by Andy Rutledge, Currents, is a responsive, minimal yet attractive premium theme from WooThemes.

Currents is perfect for news driven sites. The phrase, “less is more” couldn’t be more true. This clean and minimal design maximises your reader’s focus on the content. Having said that, the theme is packed with many customization options — a wide featured post slider, custom news areas, six alternative color styles, and more. Together, all of these features help you to control how to present current events you want to share with your readers.

Think your readers might check your site on a mobile device? No problem! Currents makes your site look great on an iPad, iPhone or any other mobile device.

This is not all about this great theme, Currents — so be sure to read about it on the Theme Showcase.

Next up is Debut – a beautifully designed theme by Luke McDonald of Press75.

Debut is a mobile-ready theme custom tailored to present your content in a professional and eye-catching manner. Five beautifully designed post formats provide you the flexibility needed to display media of all types. Musicians may be specially interested in the audio post format which expands into a multi-track playlist. Highlighting specific content couldn’t be easier with Debut’s Home page template which includes an innovative, customizable content slider as well as a featured area that can display in both grid and list styles.

Read about its features in detail in the Theme Showcase!

Authenticate with Tumblr

To bring your tumblelog’s content to WordPress.com, head to Tools → Import in your WordPress.com dashboard and look for the Tumblr importer. If you don’t already have an account here on WordPress.com then head over and sign up first.

Click the link to get started and then enter the email address you used to sign up to Tumblr, your Tumblr password and click Connect to Tumblr.

Start the Import

The importer will then fetch a list of your blogs and let you pick which one to import. Click Import this blog to get going.

Once you have started, the import progress will be shown on the import page and you will be sent an email when the import is finished. We try super hard to make sure that all your Tumblr content, including your Videos, are imported into your WordPress.com blog. Videos you had uploaded to Tumblr are imported into VideoPress and other embeds are converted to use shortcodes. Sometimes the importer finds an embed it can’t convert and a list of these is included in the import completion email for you to check.

If your Tumblr site has a custom domain (like you.com instead of you.tumblr.com), then you’ll need to disable the custom domain temporarily while the import is processed. You can do this by going to your Tumblr Dashboard, clicking on the Settings button and then un-ticking the “Use a Custom Domain” checkbox:

Then you’ll want to set up Domain Mapping on your WordPress.com blog so that your readers can use the same domain to reach your site as before.

Style Your New Site

WordPress.com supports Post Formats which allow you to distinguish between the different types of content you post on your site. While you wait for your content to be imported why not customize the design of your site by picking one of our post-format-enabled, Tumblelog-ready themes.

If you have any trouble importing your blog  you’re welcome to contact support where one of our Happiness Engineers will be glad to help out. To learn all about WordPress.com’s features, we encourage you to check out our handy tutorial. We also provide comprehensive feature documentation at our support site.

Add the new WordPress.com extension for Chrome and as soon as you get a new follower or a new like on one of your posts, a notification will appear in your browser:

Simply click the icon to view your latest WordPress.com notifications:

Start following new blogs without visiting WordPress.com

The Chrome extension also makes it easy to follow sites from your WordPress.com account by displaying a Follow button whenever you’re browsing a site that has an RSS feed.

Clicking the Follow button will add new posts from the website to your reader, and send you an email each time an update is published. (You can change your default email settings if you like.)

When you visit a WordPress.com site, you’ll notice that the extension icon will turn blue, but keep in mind that you can follow blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, and other services, too.

Quickly post cool stuff you find while browsing the web

Press This is a lightning-fast way to publish content on your blog without ever visiting WordPress.com. Click the WordPress.com extension, then select Press This whenever you find something on the web that you’d like to share on your blog, and a pop-up editor will appear:

Select the blog you’d like to post to, then hit publish to share a link to the site. Your blog will be updated, and you can continue browsing the web from wherever you left off.

If you’d like to publish an excerpt of text along with the link to the site, simply highlight the material with your cursor before clicking Press This:

And it will appear in the editor for you to publish along with the link:

We hope this makes it easier for you to share cool stuff on your blog quickly! If there’s anything you’d like to see in future versions of the extension, be sure to let us know.

With the WordPress.com front page evolving into a one-stop shop for posting, exploring, following and reading blogs, it seemed natural to put your blog stats there, too.  Stats are becoming more and more about interacting with your readers and other bloggers.

You’ll still see your summary stats and chart on your main dashboard, and the full stats page in your dashboard will remain for a while, but the My Stats tab on the WordPress.com front page will soon become the home for the most comprehensive view of your stats.  Stats will also continue to be available by clicking on the sparkline in the admin bar at the top.

While adding the My Stats tab to the front page, we also gave it an updated look by making the panels regularly spaced, using rounded gravatars for your commenters, and giving it an overall lighter feel:

We’ll be adding even more features to your stats and the WordPress.com front page soon.  We’re working on adding country stats of your visitors, which many of you have requested.

If you’d like to attract more visitors to your site, check out these great resources on boosting your blog readership:

• Learn WordPress.com: Get Famous
• WordPress.com Support: Getting More Traffic

(Note to Jetpack users: Your stats will still be available in your wp-admin dashboard. However, you may still enjoy viewing your stats on WordPress.com.)

We’ve also brought the reblog button back to the toolbar that appears at the top of the screen when you’re logged into WordPress.com. Note that you’ll only see the like and reblog options while you’re looking at individual posts.

For example, you’ll see this on the left side of your toolbar while viewing http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs:

And your toolbar will look like this while you’re browsing the home page of en.blog.wordpress.com:

How does reblogging work?

Reblogging is a quick way to share posts published by other WordPress.com users on your own blog. People have been reblogging others’ posts since blogging started, but our new reblogging system enables authors to retain greater control over their content.

When a post is reblogged, it shows up with a link back to the blog it came from, the first image in the post, an excerpt of the post’s introduction (if it contains text), and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains. It also shows any comments left by the person who reblogged the post:

Reblogs published on blogs you follow will also appear in your reader:

What happens when my posts get reblogged?

An excerpt of your post will be published on the reblogger’s site (with a link back to your original post), and you’ll receive a reblog notification in the post comments (you might need to approve it first):

You’ll also receive an email notification of the reblog.

Do I get credit when someone else reblogs one of my posts?

Absolutely! All reblogs contain a link back to your original post, so the more people reblog your posts, the more likely it is that you’ll attract new visitors (and perhaps new followers, too!).

What happens if I reblog a reblog?

If, for example, Stephane reblogs a WordPress.com announcement on his site and Lori reblogs Stephane’s reblog, Lori only re-publishes any comments Stephane made about the announcement. If Lori wants to share the original announcement, she should reblog the post from en.blog.wordpress.com, not from Stephane’s reblog. But if Stephane leaves a really clever comment, Lori might want to share it by reblogging his reblog on her site.

Can I edit a post I’ve reblogged?

You can go back and edit the comments you left when you reblogged a post, but you cannot edit any parts of the original post excerpt (including the post title). If you like, you can add categories or tags to the post. Reblogs show up under Posts → All Posts in your dashboard, and they can be edited the same way you edit your own posts.