The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging. We’ve seen ongoing growth at WordPress.com as people started using Twitter, and we expect that to continue.

Of course one of the coolest things about Twitter right now is the client applications, particularly the mobile/iPhone ones. I use Tweetie 2 on my iPhone every day. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get all your blog subscriptions and post to your WordPress.com blog from apps like Tweetie? Well here’s an early Christmas present…

We’ve enabled posting to and reading of WordPress.com blogs via the Twitter API. Any app that allows you to set a custom API URL will work. This project came out of our Quebec meetup and was developed by Team 55 (Andy, Terry, and Raphael).

For this walkthrough we’ll use Tweetie 2. To get started, launch Tweetie 2 and click the “Accounts” button. Then press the “+” button to add your WordPress.com account. Enter your WordPress.com username and password, and click on the gear icon under the password field.

For API Root, enter: https://twitter-api.wordpress.com/ and then click the Add Account button. (No search API… yet!) Save this account and after your information is verified you can start posting to your WordPress.com blog from Tweetie 2. (There’s more detailed info about setting up your WordPress.com profile to work with the Twitter API in our Support doc.)

Here’s what it looks like when I read WordPress.com blogs I’ve subscribed to in Tweetie.

You can write a status update and post to your WordPress.com blog and also have it displayed in the blog reading view.

If you’ve enabled geotagging for your posts, the geolocation data gets exposed as well. You can change what blog the posts go to under your profile.

APIs are Biz Dev 2.0, as Caterina Fake put it, our ability to connect Tweetie 2 to WordPress.com proves this out. We didn’t have to talk to Loren Brichter because he built custom API support into Tweetie 2 — thanks Loren! (As an aside, I’d love to see custom API support added to TweetDeck and Seesmic, my two favorite desktop Twitter clients.)

There are still some rough spots around the edges but the core posting and reading bits of the API are solid and the rest is coming soon. I see the Twitter API as one of the new de facto standards that as many applications should support as possible. (Amazon S3 API too, why don’t all cloud storage providers use that?) We’ll be open sourcing the server as a WordPress MU plugin, so that other people can take advantage of our work and benefit their readers and communities.

Before we get to the stats, I should mention that at the top of my thankful-for list this Thanksgiving was our growing group of Automatticians. These are the folks who bring you the awesome features and improvements that you see here every month.

Last month we launched geolocation for profiles and posts, introduced a new P2, opened up our new translation platform, GlotPress, and launched email subscriptions. We also announced proofreading support in the HTML editor, rolled out some improvements to rssCloud, launched a video contest, and had a Black Friday sale on our upgrades.

Now to the stats:

• 509,048 blogs were created.
• 6,380,052 posts were published.
• 483,127 new users joined.
• 7,245,509 file uploads.
• 4,728 gigabytes of new files.
• 865 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 1,720,604 comments.
• 7,516,584 logins.
• 1,390,120,928 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,491,289,510 on self-hosted blogs (2,881,410,438 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,385,255 active blogs and 25,596,165 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,526,632,774 words.

More stuff:

There were more than 222 million unique visitors to WordPress.com in November, according to Quantcast.

The current top three languages on WordPress.com, excluding English, are Spanish (7.6%), Portuguese (4.6%), and Indonesian (4.5%).

We made speed improvements, UI enhancements, and added video library support to WordPress for BlackBerry.

WordCamp New York had a whopping 700+ attendees. Other WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, and WordCamp Bangkok.

Upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Peru and WordCamp Orlando.

I’ve seen my fair share of snow growing up in northern Michigan. The sun was shining today, but there is a good chance we’ll have snow on the ground by the end of the week. My favorite things about snow have always been making snowmen, building snow forts, and having snowball fights.

Many of you don’t get a chance to experience the fluffy white stuff, so we’re bringing snow to WordPress.com like we’ve done the last two years. What do you like about snow?

To make it snow on your blog:

1. Go to your dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance -> Extras.
3. Check the box next to “Show falling snow on this blog.”

If you used snow last year it is automatically turned back on. If you want to turn it off, follow the steps above but uncheck the box.

Older computers may run slow or stop responding due to snow. Use the following links if you run into a problem (the options below only affect your user account):

Prevent Snow
Allow Snow

For the coders among you, you may already know that posting source code is really easy here on WordPress.com thanks to the sourcecode shortcode. You just wrap your code in [sourcecode] and you’re good to go — no code escaping or anything.

If you are one of those code posters, or are looking to become one, then you’ll be happy to know that we’ve updated the feature allowing more flexibility as well as adding support for additional coding languages like Bash and SVN diff.

See for yourself — here’s some HTML with a little bit of PHP:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
	<title>WordPress.com Code Example</title>
</head>
<body>
	<h1>WordPress.com Code Example</h1>

	<p><?php echo 'Hello World!'; ?></p>

	<p>This line is highlighted.</p>

	<p>This line is very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long.</p>

	<div class="foobar">
		This	is	an
		example	of	smart
		tabs.
	</div>

	<p><a href="http://wordpress.com/">WordPress.com</a></p>
</body>
</html>

Besides a completely new, easier to use look, you may notice that line number 12 is highlighted. It’s just one of the many new features offered in the new version which also includes things like first line number control and the much better toolbar (hover over the code block to make it show up).

To see the full list of available languages and configurations parameters as well as some working examples, check out our in-depth support document.

This feature was implemented using Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter package. It’s also available as a plugin for WordPress.org users.

Earlier this week, we launched a WordPress.com Video Contest all about giving thanks. No matter where on Earth you are, we invited you to submit a 30-second video all about the things that bring you joy. And it’s still on!

The new deadline for submissions is midnight Pacific time (UTC-8) on December 4, giving you an extra week to show us your awesome vids.

Remember, the winner of the contest wins a Flip Mino HD video camera, plus a one-year subscription to VideoPress!

To submit your entry, just post your video to your blog with the tag ThanksgivingContest09.

UPDATE: Winners will be notified by email!

In the US there are some strange traditions, and one of them is the day after Thanksgiving when people line up from 3 or 4 in the morning to be the first people in a store when it opens to get some item for a really good price. This is ostensibly to get a head start on Christmas shopping.

We’ve decided to replicate this experience but without the cold, the early morning, or the scramble to get to the door first.

Right now you can get 20% off on all upgrades purchased on the Upgrades page on your blog. This is our Black Friday sale and must end in 20 hours time!

For example, you can get VideoPress for only $47.98, register a domain and map it for $11.98. Custom CSS costs $11.98 right now.

20% off everything, only for the next 20 hours. Check out the list of available upgrades to see what’s on offer then visit your Dashboard and click “Upgrades”.

This is the first sale we’ve ever had, and might be the only one.

There are many ways of reading WordPress.com blogs and we’ve now added another: blog subscriptions.

This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.

If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.

All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.

HTML formatting will be used in emails, where possible, to retain the flavor of your post. This includes your images, making for attractive email photo galleries. Subscribers can also choose to receive emails in plain text, should they not have access to an HTML enabled mail client.

You can select to have an email sent each time a post is made, or to receive a daily or weekly digest of all the posts. Perfect for catching up on your reading at the weekend.

Want to keep up-to-date with all the latest WordPress.com developments? Subscribe to this very blog and get all future announcements delivered to your inbox. It really does only take a few seconds and you’ll find the form just after this text. Want to keep up-to-date without using email? Have posts sent direct to your Jabber-supporting instant messenger client, or try Readomattic to keep a list of your favourites. Remember that you can also subscribe to an individual post by checking the ‘notify me of follow-up comments via email’ when making a comment.

We’ve got a lot more plans for email so stay tuned!

Full details of the subscription feature can be found on the subscriptions support page.

Announcing our first-ever video contest, brought to you by turkey, stuffing, and that gelatinous stuff that grandma calls cranberry sauce. Yes, that’s American Thanksgiving. Appropriate to the occasion, the topic is giving thanks.

While it’s inspired by the holiday, it’s in no way limited to residents of the U.S. Whether you’re in Jacksonville, Jakarta or Johannesburg, you’re invited to take stock of all that you’re thankful for, and share it with the WordPress community through video.

To enter the contest, embed your video in a blog post tagged with ThanksgivingContest09, any time between November 23 and 27. We’ll announce the winners the following week.

We’re looking for creative interpretations on the topic, not confessional-style orated lists. Maybe it’s a montage of tiny moments that fill you with joy, a mini-documentary of your family traditions, or a strange stop-motion adventure about the things you treasure most. Check out our announcement video for even more ideas:

While there’s no limit to the ways you can express yourself, we do have two requests:

• Keep it rated G (obviously).
• Keep it under 30 seconds. It sounds short but, trust us, you can fit a lot of amazing things into that timeframe.

Videos that don’t meet those two requirements will be disqualified.

The first place winner will receive a one-year subscription to the VideoPress upgrade (or an additional year, for those who already have it), along with a sleek new Flip Mino HD camera!

For the runners-up, there’s lovely WordPress apparel and mugs, plus a very special WordPress Moleskine notebook, not available in our online shop.

The contest ends at midnight Pacific time (UTC -8) on November 27. To translate that to your timezone, you can calculate it on The World Clock.

If you aren’t sure how to embed video on WordPress.com, check out our handy Support resources. You can even upload videos straight to your Media Library, with the VideoPress upgrade.

All best to our contestants. We look forward to seeing what your brainy brains come up with!

The full translation of WordPress.com is an ongoing process, of which you are a great part and whom we thank for the patience and assistance. Thanks to you, WordPress.com is now available in 60+ languages (and, yes, before you ask, esperanto, too). As you know, any text that shows up on your dashboard, widgets or (most) themes can be shown in one of the supported languages, by specifying a different language in the Language Settings of your blog’s dashboard.

Up to now the platform used for translation was simple and worked, but not only did it lack features that have been requested over time, but also made the approval and deploy process slow at times. Given the accelerated pace at which new features have been rolling out, we have been working on a new and improved translation platform that will make life easier for all involved.

Enter GlotPress, the new open source GPL project from Automattic, that is now the engine behind WordPress.com translations. Here are the most important changes:

• Filters for everything,
• Pagination! (no more filtering through thousands of strings),
• Faster, optimized process of string validation and deployment,
• Much easier to add new languages.

In the future we will bring in other cool stuff like keyboard shortcuts, more social functions (user profiles, comments, tags). We are pushing GlotPress live without them, because we were so impatient to deliver something better than the old system, that we focused on the most important features only.

Be sure to read the support pages on internationalization and on GlotPress, then dive into your language’s strings to make sure WordPress.com displays your language the way it should.

A few notes:

• Translations were generally approved by one of us at Automattic, but we can only validate so much as we don’t speak all the languages (we try, though!), so that we now support “validator” profiles on GlotPress, for those users who want to help out in semantic and consistency validation (and not just technical). If you feel this is something you might want to sink your teeth into, please drop us a line in the forums.
• Remember that for the 10 or so most spoken languages, we import those language communities’ translations directly, overwriting existing strings, at every new release. We strongly encourage you to get in touch with the .org translators for your particular idiom.
• If you are a programmer and wish to contribute to the GlotPress code self, there’s a Trac for the project, where you can browse the code and contribute with patches and additions.

The New P2

For those of you who haven’t yet tried it, P2 is an awesome micro blogging theme with quick front end posting, live ajax updating, and inline threaded comments. It already packs a big punch.

P2 Options Page

So how can an already great theme be taken to the next level? That was the task of Team 34 at this year’s Automattic retreat.

One of the first areas we thought could be improved was the ease of customization. Most people like to add their own personal touch to a theme, currently P2 is hard to customize beyond the standard design. We’ve added new options to allow you to hide the sidebar and even set a unique header image. All these options allow you to personalize your own P2 to match your tastes.

Post Types

We’ve also introduced post types into P2. Now you can post different types of content and have them formatted and displayed in a way that fits the content beautifully. There are settings for standard posts, single images and galleries, as well as links and quotes. Selecting which post type to use is as simple as clicking the correct tab above the post box.

P2 Single Column View

We also decided to go a step further and rework P2 so that it could easily be used as a parent theme and extended with child themes. This will allow theme designers to create awesome new theme designs without having to duplicate all of the existing P2 features. We’ve streamlined the HTML of the theme so that it is much more flexible for creating new designs using CSS. We’ve also added a large number of template based hooks that will allow plugin developers to hook into the theme and output extended functionality.

The new P2 theme is now live on WordPress.com, and also available for download from the WordPress.org theme repository. However for .org users, P2 requires WordPress 2.9 beta or greater.