Happy Holidays! To spice up the coming weekend I’m here to present you with Duotone. Duotone is the successor to our highly popular photo blogging theme, Monotone. Duotone is very similar, but comes with lots of under the hood enhancements.

Duotone, a Photo-blogging Theme

Background color options

Along with an enhanced color algorithm that automatically picks the best colors to accent your image, Duotone carries some nice options for choosing a static color background.

Duotone also sports a nice widget area down at the bottom of the page. Perfect for three widgets of your choice.

And to appeal to the avid photographers, EXIF data is now shown for photographs if it exists.

We hope you enjoy Duotone!

Check out the demo over at http://duotonedemo.wordpress.com

Check out the widget areas and EXIF data!

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.

If you haven’t already tried our post by email feature then it makes blog publishing as simple as sending an email. Configure your blog, write an email, and we’ll do the rest. You can add photos and videos in your email and they’ll all be included, regardless of whether you send them from your home computer, your office, or a cellphone.

Last month we introduced a great geotagging feature that allows you to identify where you’re located when writing a post. This has now been linked in with post by email so you can send a photo, via email, from any GPS-enabled device and we’ll use that information to automatically set the location of your blog post. If you have an iPhone, for example, then take a photo, email it, and you’re all set.

As we roll out more geotagging features you’ll be able to use this information to show friends where you’ve eaten, to show places you’ve visited on vacation, or if you’re forgetful, to remind yourself where you’ve been.

Naturally you may not want your location to be public and the geo information will only be used if your personal profile allows it. Additionally, you can include the [geotag on] and [geotag off] shortcodes in your email to override your profile defaults.

Full details of all post by email shortcodes can be found on the support page. This includes how to include category and tags.

Happy holidays from the WordPress.com Happiness Team! We’re working hard getting ready for the holidays and sheltering from the snow.

We will be closing support for one week in order to spend time with our families whilst trying not to overcook the turkey, coping with relatives, and staying sane.

Support will be unavailable from 2pm EST on December 24th to 5am EST on January 2nd.

If you’re stuck, we have some great documentation, videos, and of course the wonderful volunteers over in the forums.

We will, however, be around in the forums as usual in case of any problems or urgent questions. We will also be working on documentation and generally improving WordPress.com support over the break. Stay happy!

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.