This year, we teamed up with San Francisco artist Coley Wopperer to spread some WordPress-themed holiday cheer. We thought it turned out so well, we wanted to share it with everyone as a collection of desktop wallpapers. Sure to bring a smile to your face, even if you’re staring at spreadsheets all day. Happy holidays from all of us at Automattic!

320×480 (for mobile devices)
1024×768
1600×1200
1920×1080
1920×1200
2560×1440
2560×1600

Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows.

November 9th 2009 is Firefox’s fifth birthday. Firefox and WordPress have grown up next to each other so we’ve always felt a brethren spirit with their team as we work toward the same goal, making the web a better place, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Just out of curiosity, I wondered how Firefox was doing in our browser stats compared to the posts I did in 2008 and 2007.

1. Firefox — 45.7%
2. Internet Explorer — 38.7%
3. Safari — 8.75%
4. Chrome — 5.2%

This is the first time I’ve ever seen Firefox pass IE in market share for a mainstream audience like WordPress.com has.

As you can see, competition in the browser market is still alive and well. Of everything available, Firefox still continues to be my primary browser for every day usage. (And Thunderbird for my email.)

Take a few minutes and wish them a happy birthday.

(The statistics were tabulated from server access logs and include WordPress.com users as well as visitors, as we no longer run Google Analytics across WordPress.com.)

Last week you guys published 1.4 million new blog posts, but you only ran the spell checker about 204 thousand times. Ahem. The two possible explanations for this are that we’re all perfect writers or that we just forget to run the spell checker. I’m in the latter camp.

I don’t blame you — spell checkers are usually pretty lame. They are bad with most proper nouns and usually my problem isn’t spelling (which my browser catches), but grammar and style.

It’s amazing to me how hard it is to edit one’s own writing. I can read something I’ve written ten times, even speak it out loud, and miss obvious errors and mistakes that an editor (often Jane) spots on their first pass. And what if Jane isn’t around?

Now there’s a solution for everybody. It’s already live on your blog, and it’s from a company called After the Deadline. Here’s a video to introduce you to it:

When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used, and it was by one guy building this thing that solves a problem other folks have teams of PhDs trying to solve. I reached out to Raphael (the one guy) to see how we could get this technology in front of WordPress users and ended up doing a deal for Automattic to buy his entire company.

The other cool thing about this new technology is that it’s getting better every day — Raphael is constantly adding new rules and heuristics, and the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter.

At its core WordPress has always been about writing — that’s why we put so much effort into things like the visual editor, revisions, and auto-save, so you never lose your work. Now you have another arrow in your quiver to help you present the best possible face to your readers and the world.

As the video above shows, you can enable and customize the way After the Deadline analyzes your posts by adjusting the new Proofreading settings in your profile, and then use the new feature by clicking on the icon in the Visual Editor toolbar that has ABC and a green checkmark on it. After the Deadline will analyze your post as you write it and highlight potential errors with an underline (red for spelling, green for grammar, blue for style), similar to grammar and spell checkers in word processing software. Clicking on a highlighted word or phrase will reveal the suggested correction, tell you why it’s suspected to be an error, and allow you to accept or ignore it.

You can read more about the story behind Automattic acquiring After the Deadline on the official AtD blog.

This feature is English-only for now (give us a little time) and available for WordPress.org as a plugin.

PollDaddy joined the Automattic team last year, and we have been working on adding some of our great features directly into the WordPress platform ever since.

Ratings

The PollDaddy rating feature that was enabled on WordPress.com last week has really started to see some use. Over 100k blog posts, pages and comments on WordPress.com are now being rated. If you need some help getting started, check out our support page for ratings.

This excellent demo video from WordPress.tv gives a good overview of how the service works.

We are working on a new sidebar widget to show your top rated posts, pages and comments which should be live by next week. We will have all of this available as WordPress.org plugin soon too.

Polls

Our polls feature has been available on WordPress now for about 8 months. About 40% of all polls created on PollDaddy are now created here on WordPress.com. You can read more about how it works over on WordPress support.

If you are a WordPress.org user then you can download our plugin from the .org plugin directory. If you have not used our polls before, this video shows you how to create a poll,  courtesy of WordPress.tv.

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.

Congratulations to Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert (that’s BD and VS to those of you who voted), the winning designers of our WordPress 2.7 icon design contest. Read all about it on the development blog and see how your votes stacked up to the rest.

Go to The Results of Project Icon.

Update: Voting has closed, and the winners will be announced soon.

If you watched the WordPress 2.7 trailer or checked out the screenshots that were posted a couple of weeks ago, you probably noticed the use of icons in the new left-hand navigation. A handful of designers have submitted icon sets in a competition to choose the new icons. Read all about it on the development blog, then cast your vote! The winning set will be announced in a couple of days, so hurry… in order to get the new icons finished and included in time, we’re only keeping the survey open for 48 hours. This is your chance to weigh in on the future design of WordPress, so we hope you’ll take advantage of it.

Go to WordPress 2.7: Project Icon Voting has now closed.

A note about comments: In the interest of making  comments on this post more valuable, we will only be approving comments that contribute to a discussion about the icons, the voting process, the redesign, etc. We will not approve comments that ask support questions (contact support instead, please), promote URLs in the comment text, or just say “Cool!” or “Awesome!” If you want the link love, please make a substantive contribution to the discussion. Thanks!

This would be our trailer. Check out some of the upcoming new features and design changes in this sneak preview video, including how to customize your dashboard, the new comment reply feature, the new navigation system, and the customizable posting screen. When you’re finished watching, take the poll below the video to tell us which feature you’re looking forward to the most.

A note on timing: WordPress 2.7 was originally scheduled to be released on WordPress.org for download on November 10th. WordPress.com would have had it installed as soon as possible thereafter. However, the launch date has been delayed due to some additional complexity and our determination to test all the new features with current users before releasing the updated software. 2.7 is expected to be released on WordPress.org by the end of November. We may be able to bring 2.7 to WordPress.com blogs slightly before the official launch date, but for now, no dates have been finalized. When we have a fixed date, we will announce it on this blog, so you all will have plenty of notice of the upcoming change.

We’re flexing our polling muscles today and conducting a little experiment in the process.

The national election for the 44th President of the United States is in full swing, and we want to know how you’re voting.

Take a minute to answer this poll and tell us who you’re voting for. Or, if you don’t live in the States, who you would vote for. All major candidates are included as options.

Tomorrow, we’ll see how your votes measure up against the actual results of the election.

Some notes:

• The options in this poll are displayed on a rotating basis to avoid biasing the top option.
• Comments are disabled on this post. We’ll enable them tomorrow when we see how the WordPress sway matches up against the actual results.

If you live in the States, we encourage you to go out to the polls and exercise your right to vote.

July was an awesome month. We released our Open Source iPhone app and rolled out updates on WordPress.com in tandem with version 2.6 on WordPress.org. Here’s the stats rundown:

• 257,163 blogs were created.
• 271,427 new users joined.
• 3,110,479 file uploads
• About 1,381 gigabytes of new files.
• 395 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 6,245,424 comments.
• 4,868,359 logins.
• 812,287,538 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 567,059,283 on self-hosted blogs (1,379,346,821 pageviews total across WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,102,039 active blogs and 13,216,843 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.

Other interesting stuff:

We signed on The Real Dan Lyons as a VIP blogger (though you may know him as the Fake Steve Jobs).

You added more tags and categories than ever before: more than 8 thousand tags and 19 thousand categories.

You made great use of our new caption feature: more than 75 thousand in its first month.

Writers for Maclean’s, Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine, now blog with WordPress VIP.