For those new to the WordPress.com family, every year we allow our users to spread a little holiday cheer by having snow appear to fall on their sites, which especially looks cool on sites with darker color schemes.

If you’d like to make it snow (not like making it rain) on your blog, follow these easy instructions:

1. Go to your dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings » General.
3. Check the box next to “Show falling snow on this blog.”
4. Roast some chestnuts.

If you had it on last year, it’ll still be on for this year.

If you’re anti-snow, for reasons we won’t judge, you can make sure you don’t see it on your personal settings page.

We hope you enjoy! And now for some Sinatra:

WordPress.org users can watch for a future release of our favorite plugin.

Basically the idea is that the pixels are so close together you can’t even see them, even if you put your nose right up to the screen. (Wipe off your screen now.) My mind was personally blown when I first saw the new Retina Macbook Pro — basically Apple took the clarity of the retina screen and brought it to full 15″ laptop (which also has amazing other specs) and the result is remarkable. So much so that it ruins you, like the first time you saw a HDTV and then had to look back at a regular one again.

The one disadvantage is that many apps, and most websites, don’t have high-resolution equivalents of all their graphics to take advantage of the new screen, so they get “doubled” and look fuzzy, they stand out like a sore thumb.

You may have noticed that we’ve been going bit by bit through the entire WordPress dashboard, the reader, and all of our sites updating them to take advantage of this new capability, often crafting new icons and graphics by hand. (Go by an Apple store and check out WordPress.com if you want to get a taste of it, but I warn you it’s hard to go back.)

But for you guys we can go a step further. All of your blog posts will now serve high-resolution images for users that can see them, at least the images that we host. Since we create all images dynamically on the fly, what we do is if you’ve uploaded a higher resolution photo and sized it down, we’ll serve a double-size so it looks super sharp to those visitors — they’ll think you’re ahead of the game.

We’ve also completely revamped Gravatar to be Retina-ready, and made it so that all Gravatars across WordPress.com are HiDPI as well.

Here’s how sharp things look on a HiDPI device compared to a regular display:

P.S. We just launched the same available for Jetpack users, our second simulaunch.

• Images are served double-resolution (Retina!) for visitors on capable devices, like the iPad 3 or Retina Macbook Pro. (Best, laptop, ever.)
• Comments! Visitors can now comment directly on each photo.
• Likewise, you can now like or reblog every individual image.
• You can now select a light or dark theme for your photos to be showcased on.
• If your camera includes EXIF metadata, like aperture, lens, and shutter speed, we now show that next to the photo. (You can toggle this off under Settings → Media if you prefer.)
• We’ve improved performance so it loads and moves faster on browsers old and new.

Want to see it in action? Here are some photos I’ve taken on recent travel, including some from a Nikon D3S, a Nikon D4, and a Sony NEX-7:

But wait, there’s more! This update is simultaneously being released for Jetpack users, our first time doing a release for both at the same time. WordPress.org users can download the latest Jetpack and try out Carousel right away. On stage at WordCamp San Francisco last year I said I wanted a world where there was feature parity between the WordPress.com service and WordPress.org installs, and I’m glad we’re taking this important first step in that direction, in the future we’ll have more and more of the simultaneous launches.

But wait, there’s more! Have you ever wished that when you’re on Twitter and come across a link to someone’s blog post, like this one, you could see a preview of the post without having to click on the link? Now you can, our friends at Twitter have made it so that all wp.me links can be previewed, including snippets of posts and photos, directly on Twitter.com. In addition to this being something I’ve personally wanted for a while, we think it’ll get a lot more people visiting your blog.

Finally, if you link your Twitter account on your Gravatar profile we’ve made it so it’s easy to follow you right from that page.

Now go forth and tweetify.

P.S. You can follow me on Twitter here, and WordPress.com here.

The Long and Short of It wp.me/pf2B5-2pL

—
WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) December 08, 2011

That’s right, it’s that special time of year where you can show off your holiday cheer with a little special blog flair — falling snow. To get it started:

1. Go to your dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings » General.
3. Check the box next to “Show falling snow on this blog.”
4. Roast some chestnuts.

Even Texas boys like me who only saw snow a handful of times growing up can enjoy it all month long, until we turn it off on January 4^th.

If you are a terrible Grinch or if the snow just slows down your computer or confuses your cat, you can go to your personal settings page and hide the snow everywhere you go.

Yesterday one of the tributes I noticed was the website Boing Boing 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:

Dress up your blog with retro, chunky-grade pixellated graphics and evoke some serious computer nostalgia. This theme is a whimsical homage to the days in black and white, celebrating the magic of Mac OS. It displays your menu items, year archives, and categories as folders and icons on the evoked desktop.

For all the memories it brings — and its throwback design — this theme has modern functionality under the hood. Create your own custom menu to replace the first set of icons in the sidebar, upload a custom header image to display below the blog title, or set a custom background. Also included are two footer widget areas and a full-width page template that drops the sidebar.

Originally created by Stuart Brown, Retro MacOS is now available in your WordPress.com dashboard. You can activate the theme there as usual, from Appearance → Themes, or directly from the Theme Showcase.

I want to leave you with two quotes:

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

And finally:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Do something great.

WP.com is different from every other social platform out there because in addition to giving you ownership of your data you get ownership of the code running your data as well, you could run the same Open source software yourself, and in fact we’ll even help you do it.

Open Source is like a Bill of Rights for software that protects your essential freedoms. When you bring a friend to WordPress you can do it without worry because we’re building something to be around ten, twenty, thirty years from now.

If you’d like to learn more about what’s happening and coming in the wider world of WordPress, check out this presentation I made:

Happy blogging.

We have been diligently reviewing logs and records about the break-in to determine the extent of the information exposed, and re-securing avenues used to gain access. We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.

Based on what we’ve found, we don’t have any specific suggestions for our users beyond reiterating these security fundamentals:

• Use a strong password, meaning something random with numbers and punctuation.
• Use different passwords for different sites.
• If you have used the same password on different sites, switch it to something more secure.

(Tools like 1Password, LastPass, and KeePass make it easy to keep track of different unique logins.)

Our investigation into this matter is ongoing and will take time to complete. As I said above, we’ve taken comprehensive steps to prevent an incident like this from occurring again. If you have any questions or concerns, please leave a comment below or contact our support.

Anything less than 100% availability drives us to work harder. Rest assured that behind-the-scenes here at Automattic we’re learning as much as we can from these incidents so we’re even better prepared and more able to adapt next time something unexpected comes our way. (We weather DDoS attacks every day on WP.com and 99.9% of them have no user impact.)

In a previous post I wrote about downtime I ended with the sentence, “For those following along at home, we’re now powered by 152 physical processors, 511 gigabytes of memory (RAM), 174 hard disks with several terabytes of storage, and we’re adding new servers constantly.”

That last part about “adding new servers” was especially true, for WP.com we’re now at 8,921 CPU cores across 2,475 physical processors, 8,200 gigabytes of memory (RAM). We’ve changed how we’ve done storage, but now that layer includes on its own 1.3 terabytes of RAM, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and 8.9 terabytes of solid state disks. (Plus Amazon S3, which we use as backup to our internal systems.) Also, we’re adding new servers constantly.

Keep blogging, and we’ll keep doing our best to make sure you never have to think or worry about this stuff.

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: