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 soon to be available for download from the WordPress.org theme repository.

During the Automattic company meetup, Team 21* holed up in a cottage outside Québec to create a new set of features for a blog near you (literally!). Have you ever wondered where in the world a blog post was written? Where a commenter was located? If there were other WordPress.com bloggers near you? If so, hold on to your hat, because you’re going to love the geotagging and geolocation features we’re introducing.

Starting today, when you log in to write a post, you have the option of identifying your location. For browsers that support it, we can get this information automatically through the magic of 21st century technology and you just have to double-check to make sure the location is correct. You can also enter your location manually. This feature is opt-in, meaning that if you don’t want anyone to know where you were when you wrote a post, that’s okay.

Enter an address, click the map, or auto detect your location

In addition to geotagging posts, you can also geotag your profile. Interested in reading blogs by other people in your area? A quick search will find them, and in the future could even be used to organize local WordPress.com user meetups.

Right now, we’re only collecting and exposing geodata for posts and profiles. Geotagged posts get marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds.

This is all machine readable data: hidden from display. What good is it if it’s hidden? It tells search engines where your posts are located, and with browser plugins like Operator and Geo, you can view geo information on any web page (not just WordPress.com geotagged posts).

The machine readable data is cool and geeky, but what about something for us humans? Right now, we don’t display geo data anywhere in a human readable way. Don’t worry, though. We’ll be launching theme integration, various maps, widgets, and shortcodes soon.

This is just the beginning. Building on this platform, we’ll gradually roll out more geotagging features, such as showing the location of your commenters, the location of poll votes, a live map view of blog updates on WordPress.com, or an annual report showing you where your posts were written and where your comments came from — kind of a blogger’s version of the Dopplr annual travel report.

For now, we’re pretty psyched about the geotagging and (the upcoming) search of posts and profiles and hope you’ll all give this new feature a try! If there are other geotagging features you’d like to see built on this foundation, suggest them in the comments!

For more information, check out the Geotagging support page.

Note: We’re holding off on launching the geo search feature until we start getting some data (from you!). So start geotagging

*Team 21 consisted of Jane, Jon, Mike and Stephane.

This weekend, November 14-15, a whole bunch of the friendly faces from Automattic and WordPress.com will be in New York City to attend WordCamp NYC. If you’re a NYC area local (and really, with Acela service being what it is, doesn’t that almost mean anywhere from Boston to D.C.?), we hope you’ll join us at what’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting WordCamps of all time.

(Okay, I’m one of the organizers, so of course *I* think it will be awesome, but in this case, I’m right!)

What’s so great about this WordCamp? Allow me to tell you:

• 8 tracks of content, to cover every WordPress-lover’s area of interest/expertise*
• Over 50 confirmed speakers for Saturday’s sessions
• Sunday morning unconference
• Sunday afternoon “Best of WordCamp NYC” Ignite-style recap
• Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com
• Theme/Plugin Competition, Project Runway style
• Fantastic shirts
• Yummy lunch on Saturday
• Door prize raffle
• Genius Bar to help people with their WordPress woes (meet the Happiness Engineers in person!)
• Hacker Room for hardcore developers who want to contribute to the open source project

We’re being hosted by Baruch College, a great venue in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. We will not be streaming WordCamp NYC online due to bandwidth limitations, but we hope to post videos from the event on WordPress.tv after it’s over.

It’s like 2 days of WordPress Paradise for less than going out to dinner (thanks to generous sponsors like Microsoft, Media Temple and other great companies). Over 550 people have already signed up. What are you waiting for? Get your ticket now and come meet us there!

*Tracks are: Newbies, Bloggers, CMS, Beginning Developer, Advanced Developer, BuddyPress/MU, Academic, and Open Source Community.

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.)

Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.

Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.

An issue that was specific to WordPress.com also came up. Under certain conditions it was possible to get a cached version of an RSS feed that didn’t have the most recent post in it, even after receiving a rssCloud ping that the feed had been updated. Now we make sure the feed cache is updated before sending out an update ping.

Enough of the technical bits, how about some stats! More than 135,000 blogs hosted on WordPress.com have at least one rssCloud notification registration. During the first week of October WordPress.com sent an average of 83,000 update pings per day. Today we average more than 105,000 update pings per day.

We’re just at the beginning of the trend towards push notifications, keep an eye out for more announcements in this area.

October was another busy and productive month. We released Publicize for Yahoo! Updates and Twitter, and upgraded the Theme Viewer for WordPress.com. Coming out of the Automattic team meetup in Québec City, we launched new image templates and mobile themes, and open sourced our After the Deadline proofreader. We also shipped WordPress 2 for iPhone and added support to VideoPress for Ogg, an open video format.

Many of us will be heading out to the Big Apple this month for WordCamp New York, and we hope to see you there!

Here are the stats for October:

• 467,107 blogs were created.
• 6,690,017 posts were published.
• 494,186 new users joined.
• 7,623,730 file uploads.
• 4,986 gigabytes of new files.
• 842 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 9,281,146 comments.
• 7,856,864 logins.
• 1,405,459,558 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,474,457,685 on self-hosted blogs (2,879,917,243 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,509,895 active blogs and 25,386,866 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,600,608,549 words.

More good stuff:

Almost 100 of you heeded the call to get creative with the WordPress logo.

There were 23,458,553 mobile views last month.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched Investor.gov on WordPress.com VIP.

WordPress was cited as one of the leading open source content management systems in the 2009 Open Source CMS Report.

Wired magazine’s digital presence is now run entirely on WordPress.

October WordCamps: WordCamp Spain, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Kyoto, and WordCamp Netherlands.

WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, WordCamp New York, WordCamp Bangkok, WordCamp Mexico, and WordCamp Peru.

When we announced After the Deadline, the proofreading tool used on WordPress.com, many of you asked us to add proofreading to the HTML Editor.

The HTML Editor lets you edit the HTML in your posts and pages directly. It is also very lightweight.

We’ve been hard at work and now you can check your spelling, style, and grammar from the HTML Editor. Here is a screenshot:

The proofreader for the HTML Editor has the same features as the one for the Visual Editor.

Click to check your post for errors.

Click to resume editing your post.

You can learn more about the proofreading feature on our support page.

For self-hosted blogs, the After the Deadline WordPress.org plugin has this new feature as well.