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.

Last week you had fun with the WordPress logo. We received nearly 100 entries and many of you have been patiently waiting for news. You don’t have to wait any longer. Here are our favorites split into 5 categories. Cast your votes to pick the final winners. Voting will close on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 12pm EST. Click an image to see the large version displayed in the user’s blog post.

Brownie Bites

Needle Cushion

Anime

Superman

Multiple Choice

Scrabble

Hollywood

Starry Night

Balloon

Beach

As strong believers in open source technology, we were excited when Firefox started supporting the new HTML video tag this past summer. It has the potential to transform the future of online video.

While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video can be played directly on browsers that  support HTML 5, such as Firefox 3.5 and Chrome. Watch this video in Firefox 3.5.

*You can embed HD-quality videos into your blog using VideoPress.

As technology advances, mobile devices are playing a bigger role in our lives. Thousands of you have been using the iPhone and Blackberry applications to post and edit content for your blog, and over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices. New smartphones do a great job with most web sites, but older phones have many problems and may not display anything at all.

Today we’re launching a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone.

The first theme is a modification of WPtouch and will be displayed to phones with modern web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones. The second theme was developed from an older version of the WordPress Mobile Edition and will be displayed to all other mobile devices.

Mobile visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives. They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading. If you are using a custom header image, it will be scaled to size and displayed at the top of your blog. When viewing your blog on other phones, the focus will be on loading the blog quickly while displaying the important information about your content.

If you would like to disable mobile themes on your blog, go to Appearance->Extras in the Dashboard and uncheck Display a mobile theme when this blog is viewed with a mobile browser. For more details, be sure to check out the Mobile Themes support page.

Our team loves photography and we hope you do too. While taking countless photos in Quebec, we thought it would be an appropriate time to update the image templates for all of the WordPress.com themes.

If you are using galleries or inserting one image at a time into your posts, you can take advantage of the updated image templates. Make sure to click the Post URL button in the Link URL area when inserting your images or configuring a gallery. When you do this, the images will then link to the image attachment page.

When viewing an image attachment page:

• The image will automatically be displayed to fit the content width of the theme.
• If set, a caption and description will display beneath the image.
• Small thumbnails with links to the previous and next image are shown.
• If the image is part of a gallery, the title will provide a link back to the gallery permalink URL.

Redoable Lite Image Template

White as Milk Image Template

We dig Twitter over here at WordPress.com (check us out at @wordpressdotcom). With the launch of our newest Publicize feature, we dig it even more since you can now tweet your WordPress.com posts automatically.

You can stick with the default, automatically generated tweet, or customize it to your heart’s content.

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Twitter account.

Just like the Yahoo! Updates Publicize feature, these connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Twitter accounts separately.

More details can be found on the Publicize support page.

As Matt mentioned in the September Wrap-Up, the Automattic crew is heading to Québec City to work on some top-secret projects. It worked well when we closed the email support system for our London Support meetup, so we’ve decided to do it again.

Support will be unavailable from 10 a.m. EST on Friday, October 9 to 4 a.m. EST on Monday, October 19.

Of course, our team will still be monitoring servers and services while we’re out to keep you blogging smoothly and safely. In the meantime, we encourage you to read through the Support docs and make use of the WordPress.com forums (which are full of friendly users like you) if you need a little help.

While we’re away, we’ll be running a contest to see who can use the WordPress logo in the most creative way. Take advantage of your camera, graphics applications, crayons, and anything else you have at your disposal. Create a post on your WordPress.com blog, upload your image or images, and leave a comment here with the URL of your post. Please make sure to leave the URL to your post in the comment text or the entry will not be accepted.

We’ll get you started by providing some official WordPress logos, but the rest is up to you. I’m sure you can do better than the photos I’ve included here. We’ll keep an eye on submissions and post some of them to the @wordpressdotcom Twitter account during the week.

The deadline for submissions will be 4 p.m. EST on Monday, October 19.

We’ll create categories based on the best submissions and run polls to let you select the winners. Prizes will include WordPress.com upgrades, swag, and maybe other surprises. Good luck!

We all love adding great images to our blog posts, and today we’ve enabled a new WordPress.com Shortcode that adds millions of available premium images to the mix, all for free.

The Shortcode is for a service called PicApp, which offers up to the minute sports, news, and celebrity images from some of the top photographers and agencies throughout the world.

Looking for that shot of Eli Manning of the NY Giants throwing a perfect pass during this weekend’s NFL game ? A search for “Giants” brings up a few good ones:

What about a photo for your political post about Obama:

Or do you need a recent photo from Stella McCartney’s fashion show in Paris this week?:

To add these and other great images, just locate the “For WordPress.com” Shortcode when viewing an image on PicApp and paste it into your post:

Here is also a brief video overview of how it all works:

The related-images strip you see embedded at the bottom of each photo links to pages on PicApp.com that help support the photographers and agencies involved with these images. For more details on the related-images strip, modifying the image size, and how to copy the WordPress.com Shortcode, please read the documentation in our support area.

And for self-hosted WordPress sites, be sure to grab the plugin at WordPress.org.