WordPress

Retro MacOS WP.com Theme Enabled

My colleagues worked overnight on making this theme available to all of WordPress.com, and I just enabled here on raanan.com:

Yesterday one of the tributes I noticed was the website Boing Boing (WordPress powered) switched their theme to one reminiscent of the original Macintosh interface, one of the several times Jobs would make a ding in the universe through his work. It seemed fitting, and we wanted to make it available to all of you, so our theme team worked through the night and here it is:

More details on the announcement post

TechCrunch relaunched on WordPress.com VIP

From Dave Feldman of TechCrunch/AOL:

THE CMS
One of my favorite things about WordPress is its extensibility. We’re on the same platform today as yesterday, but have built new tools for writers and editors. Featured and pinned articles get expiration dates, so editors don’t have to go back and manually un-feature things. Selecting a post layout is as simple as clicking a button. Automated resizing of images means faster load times and fewer distorted photos. And choosing which articles go on the home page is a single-click affair.

Impressive work by everyone involved. More details on the announcement post Redesigning TechCrunch: We Picked This Logo Just to Piss You Off

Major League Baseball Blogs Migrate to WordPress.com

Very cool to see this live. All the blogs from MLBlogs.com are now on WordPress.com, including ones from players, fans, and commentators such as Keith Obermann. These blogs were previously on a MovableType installation.

In addition, three new MLB branded baseball themes are available today to over 20M publishers on WP.com via the WP.com theme gallery.

Play Ball ! And check out the full announcement post here for all the details.

Linkedin Share features live on WordPress.com

Linkedin is one of my all-time favorite services, and continues to generate great value ever time I use it and rolling out innovative features such as Linkedin Today. Their iPhone app is pretty cool & useful too.

Back in November 2010, Linkedin launched dynamic share buttons and have been steadily driving traffic to various publishers — something Business Insider noticed recently:

So the other day, the team at WordPress.com took a lot, and decided to add the Linkedin share buttons to our Sharing feature:

It’s enabled on my blog as well right now — just look an inch below this line of text.

WordPress.com Now iPad Optimized

Super excited about our new launch of the Onswipe theme/plugin today.

Here is Matt’s food blog viewed from an iPad:
.

A few more details:

There are some fun options to play with too. If you browse to Appearance -> iPad in your Dashboard you can:

– Have the theme use an image from your recent posts as a cover.
– Upload a logo to showcase your brand or personality on the cover.
– Upload an image to be used as a loading graphic when visitors add your site to their home screen.
– Switch fonts.
– Choose from 9 different skin colors, to best match the feel of your site.
– Enable or disable the whole thing.

So fire up raanan.com on your iPad and let me know

Read more on the announcement post on WordPress.com.

raanan.com 2010 in review

Pretty cool summary below, which each user of WordPress.com received recently. Interestingly, I posed 42 times in 2010, with my overall goal of posting once per week — so a bit off that pace — but fairly close.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 41,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 259 posts. There were 26 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was October 9th with 1,772 views. The most popular post that day was Two Factor Authentication.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, ma.tt, automattic.com, twitter.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for google apps personal, google apps personal use, blackberry numbers letters, raanan bar-cohen, and gps.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Two Factor Authentication September 2010
5 comments

2

Quick Tip For BlackBerry Users When Calling Phone Numbers with Letters February 2008
21 comments

3

Sync Skype Chat History on Multiple Machines With Dropbox June 2009
11 comments

4

Switched to Google Apps for Personal Email January 2008
37 comments

5

Upgraded to iPhone 3GS from 3G. Veridct: Worth it ! June 2009
4 comments

Paul Maiorana Joins Automattic

I’m really excited that Paul Maiorana, formerly CTO of Mansueto Ventures (FastCompany & Inc Magazine), is starting his first day today at Automattic as Director of Platform Services. He’ll be working to help expand and support the fast growing WordPress.com VIP services program.

For those who are wondering, as part of the VIP program, we support and (for about half of them) host WordPress sites for amazing organizations such as CBS, Time Warner, Conde Nast, Linkedin, New York Times, National Post, NFL, NBC Sports, Yahoo News, Dow Jones, Red Hat, and many others who are using WordPress for all their blogs and vertical sites, and increasingly to run their entire sites, as CBS is doing.

Some of these VIPs are hosted with us on the WordPress.com grid, and others run their own WordPress in-house or at a 3rd party providers such as Rackspace or Amazon.

Paul is based in NY, and as a current Drupal user promises to launch his own WordPress site soon 😉

And yes, to answer the obvious question, I will be relaunching this blog on WordPress (but only because I want to, not because I have to!)

New Linking Feature in WordPress.com

This morning WordPress.com users woke up to a handful of new features including a linking feature that is something I’ve wanted to see in WP for quite some time.  The idea now is that you have a nice little tool to assit you in linking to content that you’ve already created inside your WordPress by simply searching using keywords:

These new features are part of WordPress 3.1, which is still being tested, but as a developer you can grab via SVN, or just fire up your WordPress.com site to see it now.