Real Estate News

Earlier this month, during Responsive Theme week, Cheri highlighted Beatroute, a Canadian alt-monthly focusing on local music.

Within Automattic’s Editorial team, we feel pretty lucky — we get to spend a fair amount of time each week reading your posts, in a constant bid to find strong, original writing and photography and share it with the WordPress.com community via Freshly Pressed. Here are just a few posts that resonated with us this week.

Today, I’m excited to announce the two latest additions to our ever-growing collection of free themes.

My Life

My Life is a cool, serene blogging theme by Justin Tadlock. With subtle colors, readable typography, and a vintage feel, it offers a classic look for your personal journal or blog.

We’ve launched themes especially for people planning and documenting their weddings, like the elegant themes Forever and Ever After, and the charming, playful Lovebirds and Blissful Blog themes.

Last month, we shared tips from WordPress.com users who use Custom Colors to spice up their sites. You can also personalize your online home with Custom Fonts, which is another feature of the Custom Design upgrade.

Welcome to a new feature on WordPress.com News. Every couple weeks, we’ll sit down with an Automattician to help you get to know the people who work behind the scenes to build new features, keep Automattic’s wheels turning, and make WordPress.com the best it can be. Mr. Tim Moore suggested this new feature and so we thought it only fitting that he should be first. Everybody, say hey to Tim!

We were floored this week by the posts we came across on WordPress.com. This community is full of different voices: bold, opinionated, and honest. You take risks and put yourselves out there. You offer perspectives on issues that matter to you. You use your blogs and websites as platforms to share your insights and musings with others.

If you’re looking for reading material, here are four recent posts to consider:

Do you shoot photographs or video? Illustrate, paint, or draw? Design things? If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above, WordPress.com is the perfect place to show your stuff. We’ve just launched WordPress.com/portfolios to help you build an online portfolio you’re proud of.

A simple way to add visual variety to your site’s front page is to publish your content using Post Formats. Over 50 of our themes support Post Formats, which means they can display various types of content — including images, videos, quotes, links, audio, and short snippets called “asides” — with different formatting, adding subtle but nice touches to your site.

Merry band of comrades seeks nice, hard-working, diligent, motivated, fun-loving people to join their mission: to democratize publishing and make WordPress.com the best it can be. Work with us.

Last year at Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company) we hired 48 people:

If you ever had a question about WordPress.com, chances are you’ve visited our Community Support Forums. Forums are a great place to search for solutions and get answers to your questions. One cool thing about the forums is that while Happiness Engineers help out there, WordPress.com enthusiasts — people who have a strong interest in WordPress.com and helping other people — provide the majority of answers.

As Story Wranglers here at WordPress.com, we love getting to spend time every day in the Reader exploring the incredible breadth of topics you’re writing about. Here are three Freshly Pressed posts from this past week that we think are must-reads:

We’d be remiss if we didn’t include a brand new responsive theme for responsive theme week!

This week, we’ve highlighted the responsive themes on WordPress.com. In our Theme Showcase, we have more than 50 responsive themes designed to provide a tailored layout depending on which device you’re using.

Today, two of our premium themes with responsive layouts are in the spotlight: Gridspace and Just Desserts.

Yesterday, we highlighted two themes, Ever After and Sight. Today, we continue with our responsive theme showcase with two more beautiful themes designed to make sites look their best on any screen, from a desktop computer to devices like an iPad and iPhone.

Lots of you have been asking about website verification for Pinterest — the process that tells Pinterest that you own the website listed in your profile. Once your site is verified, your blog’s URL appears on your profile and in search results alongside the nifty little “Verified!” checkmark.

A new year. A new beginning. A new theme?

This week, we’ll highlight our responsive themes on WordPress.com. Maybe you’ll find a new design that’s perfect for your site in 2013.

After we announced media changes on WordPress.com, some of you asked when these new WordPress.com features would be available for self-hosted WordPress sites.

For us, WordPress.com is our labor of love — we’re continually releasing new themes, upgrades, and features to help you create the best website and/or blog you can. In addition to great tools, we publish articles, prompts, and writing and photo challenges to inspire you to start posting and keep posting.

At the end of November, we gave shout-outs to bloggers and artists who participated in month-long projects like NaBloPoMo and NaNoDrawMo. As 2012 comes to a close, we also want to highlight writers and photographers who challenged themselves all year — who posted each day or each week, or have established an ongoing project on their sites.

These bloggers caught our attention:

We’re continually blown away by the posts published on WordPress.com. Week after week, we discover content that’s original. Bold. Honest. The most notable posts make us stop and think.

Looking for something to read? Consider these recent posts:

Last night I got an email informing me, “you lost a follower.” That’s when I found out that Dawn Hochsprung followed me on Twitter; she followed only 70 people. I was shaken.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a handy tool to separate the presentation from the content of your website — you write the content, and the CSS controls the look and formatting. CSS is great for giving your website a custom look, but it can also become complicated to maintain.

The solution to this? CSS preprocessors.

Happy Theme Thursday! It’s a great day to share our two newest free themes, both designed especially for your writing (and reading) pleasure.

First off, we have Book Lite, a beautiful theme designed by Chandra Maharzan.

Book Lite: Home Page

If you had any doubt that WordPress.com makes a great online home for your band, the range of artists who are now using it to promote their work and grow their fan base should put that to rest.  New musicians are signing on every day, making WordPress.com the go-to for artists who want sleek, functional, engaging sites without investing a ton of money or time.