Jamie Lynn Spears Fan Site

Two months ago, we announced together with our friends at Windows Live that bloggers on the Windows Live Spaces service were being offered the opportunity to move their existing blogs over here to WordPress.com to join the best blogging community on the planet.

Since then, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of sites joining WordPress.com every day. With the addition of Windows Live Spaces sites moving to WordPress.com, Windows Live users who are new to blogging coming here, and word-of-mouth from our current and very passionate users, the number of people joining WordPress.com has doubled to over 900,000 per month (up from around 400,000 per month before the migration). We’re thrilled to see this explosion and to be introducing so many people to publishing with WordPress. With the recent releases of many new features and several new themes, and more of each on the way, it’s a great time to be on WordPress.com.

Throughout the transition, we Happiness Engineers have had the privilege of helping many new users adjust to a new platform and learn to take advantage of the amazing features and capabilities unique to WordPress.com. If you’ve moved from Windows Live Spaces and feel that you’re still having trouble getting up to speed, or are about to join us on WordPress.com, we’d like to take a moment to talk about a few of the speed bumps you might run into as part of that transfer process.

Photos

A sample WordPress photo gallery.

The number one question we receive after a move to WordPress.com is “where are my photos?” Because uploaded photos are part of a different service—Windows Live SkyDrive—they aren’t always brought over with your blog posts to WordPress.com.

If you had inserted some of those images into your blog posts, we’ll bring those over for you automatically as part of the upgrade process. However, if you were using the Photos module to display your albums, you won’t find your images when you get to your new site. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you can move your images over to WordPress.com galleries very easily. In fact, a user who moved here from Windows Live Spaces has written an excellent step-by-step tutorial and posted it on her site to help other Windows Live Spaces users make the move with their photos.

Drafts, Modules, and Lists

After your move to WordPress.com, you’ll notice that some parts of your Windows Live Spaces site won’t have moved with you. The upgrade to WordPress.com automatically moves your published posts and your comments to your new site.

Draft posts are just one such item, so you’ll need to make sure that you either copy them into a separate document or publish them prior to starting the migration process. Any posts left in draft will no longer be accessible once you’ve completed the migration process.

Information you had in modules won’t make the move to WordPress.com, either. Not to worry, though! You just need to make a note of the information you wish to transfer prior to migrating. Here at WordPress.com things are a bit different. Instead of modules, we use widgets to place content into your site’s sidebar. We have many available widgets which can display text, an image, your Gravatar, a tag cloud, or any one of a number of additions to help your readers find content and learn about you.

There’s one notable exception: if you’re looking for your Lists from Windows Live Spaces, we’ve worked out with the Windows Live Spaces team to find a way to retrieve that content once you’ve migrated. It won’t be moved to your new site, but you can get the info and then copy it into a new widget whenever you like. You can learn how to do this in our frequently asked questions about the move.

Where to Get Help

Change isn’t always easy. Although we think WordPress.com is the best publishing service in the world, if you’ve just come from using another platform for the last few years, it can be difficult to learn new tricks and wrap your brain around new concepts. Thankfully, we have lots of great support resources here to help you get rocking and back up to speed creating great content.

If you’re brand-new, you should of course start with the excellent Learn WordPress.com, which will introduce you to the basics.

Support
For more specific questions, move on to our Support documentation. Click around and learn more details on how to use WordPress.com, or search for your question and find an answer in one of the hundreds of pages in our knowledgebase.

Forums
Do you have a more specific question? Or would you rather talk about it with your fellow WordPress.com users and get to know others? The WordPress.com Forums are a great place to ask. Our Happiness Engineers patrol the forums, and there are a lot of very knowledgeable volunteers around who will be happy to answer your question or point you in the right place.

There are support forums available in multiple languages, also filled with great volunteers and users from the WordPress.com community. We have support forums available in Arabic, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish,French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian),Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Contact Support
If you have a question about your user account on WordPress.com, or have a problem that can’t be solved using the documentation or asking a volunteer, you can of course contact our resident team of Happiness Engineers for assistance. We’re online and answering your questions twenty-four hours a day, and nothing makes us happier than helping you to make the most of your WordPress.com experience. Don’t forget: we’re here to help.

Months ago we added the ability for readers to like your posts, and ever since thousands of people have been liking posts every day. But something was missing: there was no way for post authors to discover when someone liked something they’d written. Or even when someone new subscribed to the entire blog.

Today, these problems have been solved:  We’ve added two new email notifications, one for likes and one for subscriptions.

Post authors will receive an email notification from WordPress.com, telling them which post was liked and who it was.  And blog owners will receive an email when someone new subscribes to their blog. This gives instant feedback every time your post or blog gets some positive attention.

If email notifications are not for you, no problem. You can turn these notifications off by going to Dashboard?Settings?Discussion and deactivating the appropriate checkbox under “Email me whenever”.

And if you have a particularly active blog, we decided to leave some features off by default so you wouldn’t be annoyed. You can turn them on if you wish as described above. More details can be found in the support page for email notifications.

Picture this situation: you’re an author on a popular blog that’s published by several users; you’re wondering which author is getting the most views… Well now you can find out.

Today we’re introducing a new panel to your stats page, Top Authors.

Here’s how it works: all the posts that were visited during the day are counted up, divided by who wrote them. The author with the most visits across all his or her posts of the day, gets the top spot. Interestingly, the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits.

To see each author’s posts, you can click the little plus icon to expand and reveal just what stories earned them their points of the day. Pictured above, the wonderful Jane Wells had just posted about the exciting new WordPress 3.1 features. Because that was a popular post, it earned her the top spot.

At this blog here, we don’t actively compete for the top spot (or do we!?), but other blogs might find these statistics mighty fascinating.

Because we liked the grouping feature so much, we also added it to your referrers box, which now bundles up links from the same domain.

The new panel is available for all blogs on WordPress.com. It will appear automatically if you have two or more authors with traffic on their posts. In the not-so-distant future, “Top Authors” along with the new look for stats, will be available for self-hosted blogs running the Stats plugin.

If you want a simple and clean blog theme that you can customize to suit your needs I think you’ll like the one we’re introducing today. It’s called Pilcrow.

The Pilcrow Themes default look

Pilcrow is an upgrade to the older PressRow theme we’ll begin phasing out next week. But Pilcrow isn’t just a simple replacement. We’ve pulled out all the stops to make sure it’s a better theme all around.

Pilcrow keeps the familiar, simple and clean PressRow look but we’ve expanded its basic design over six possible layouts and up to four sidebars and widget areas. The choice of theme layout is all yours.

Pilcrows six possible layouts

In addition to multiple layouts you also have your choice of four different color schemes, light, dark, red, and brown. If you visit Appearance ? Background you can customize the background of any of the color schemes and upload your own custom background image.

Pilcrow with the three-column layout, brown color scheme, hidden header image, and a custom background

Pilcrow also has a fully customizable header. From Appearance ? Header you can upload your own header image, change the header text color, or even choose to hide the header text altogether. If you want a special header image for a particular post or page, you can upload a Featured Image from the post and page edit screens!

The Pilcrow theme is available today in Appearance ? Themes and will soon be available in the WordPress Themes Directory, for self-hosted WordPress.org users.

With the holidays appearing thick and fast from now until next year, it’s a great time for meeting up with the people who are important to us, giving and receiving gifts, relaxing and indulging ourselves. But while you’re doing that, give a thought to your poor neglected blog this holiday season.

For blogs, this can be the loneliest time of year, the time when our posts grind to a halt and our readers drop off like flies. But don’t shed a tear, there is a solution.

Blog From Your Phone!

Sure, the last thing you want to do is sit behind a computer as turkeys emerge from ovens, gifts are ripped open and grandma busts her moves on the kitchen table. But you don’t have to be tied to the computer to blog —  not only does WordPress.com have the option to phone in a blog post, or email pictures and posts from any device you have on hand, but we also offer easy-to-use apps for several smartphones.

Let’s take a look at each of these options, starting with our super-cool phone apps.

WordPress Mobile Apps

If you’re packing a Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad or Android phone, you can download a free WordPress application to write and edit posts and pages, check stats and even moderate your comments. This gives you a comprehensive way of managing your blog on the move. You can find it on your phone’s app store/market, or find out more at these sites:

• WordPress for iOS (iPhone/iPad)
• WordPress for Android
• WordPress for Nokia
• WordPress for Blackberry

Post by Email

Love email and use it all the time — even on your phone? Then you’ll equally adore our Post-by-email feature. While it doesn’t offer as much flexibility as the WordPress mobile app, it’s a swift and handy way to update from anywhere. To enable Post-by-email, you first just need to do a little tweaking from your computer. Simply:

1. Head to the Dashboard menu and hit the My Blogs option:
   
2. Enable your blog or blogs for Post-by-email:
   
3. Copy-paste (or download the vCard for) the secret email address and send it to your mobile email address for later use:
   

Then, Post Via Mobile Email

1. Now, from your tablet, phone, laptop or other email-enabled thingy, just bash out an email. The email subject line turns into the post’s title.
2. If your device supports it, attach photo(s) to the email. Single photos appear in-line, more than one turns automagically into a gallery
3. Address it to the secret email address you found in the My Blogs menu
4. Hit send – and that’s it, your post is live!

Phone It In

But that’s not enough! What if you want to record audio of your carol singing antics, or the cat landing suddenly on your uncle’s sleeping face? You’ll need Post by Voice. Here’s how to dial in your call:

1. Head back to the (you guessed it) Dashboard > My Blogs menu:
   
2. Activate the Post by voice Enable button next to one or more blogs:
   
3. Jot down the secret phone number and your own private code (they’ll appear in the same place you pressed Enable)
4. You’re ready to start posting audio

Dialing in an Audio Call

1. Call the number you jotted down (smallprint – doing this outside of the U.S. may prove costly, as calls are charged at standard U.S. rates)
2. Enter your secret code (you wrote that down too, or committed it to memory, remember?)
3. Record audio of your talking, singing, shrieks of merriment or incidental seasonal sound effects. You have up to an hour to do so.
4. Hang up. Your audio post will hit your blog almost right away.

Bonus Round: Automatic Posting to Your Favorite Social Networks

Why go to the hassle of sending out multiple updates, when you can do it all at once? Before you take off for the holidays, be sure to set this up — and every time you publish a new blog post with your phone, it will automatically get sent to your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts.

Just:

1. Head back to the Dashboard > My Blogs menu:
   
2. Next to the blog or blogs you want to activate, under the Publicize column, check the services you want to automatically send updates to:
   
3. You’ll need to authorize the accounts to sync with WordPress:
   
4. Done! If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, check out our support docs all about Publicize.

So, yep, that means just new post can send five updates out to the world in the space of a second or two. Leaving more time for you to get on with some seasonal chillaxing.

You’re All Set

Hopefully between the apps, post-by-email and the voice-powered blogging feature, we’ve got your mobile needs covered this holiday season. Happy moblogging holidays!