Jamie Lynn Spears Fan Site

There is a saying among writers: to write more, write more. The hardest part of blogging isn’t the tools – it’s what goes on between your ears. Many people start blogs with excitement, but lose courage when facing the blank post page, or chicken out before hitting publish. Here at WordPress.com, we know. And we’re here to help.

Announcing DailyPost.WordPress.com

Starting today, you can go to dailypost.wordpress.com for inspiration, encouragement and advice about blogging. We’ll be posting every day so you can get regular boosts of motivation to blog more often.

The Post Every Day challenge

Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing.

As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:

• Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
• Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011

If you’re thinking big, sign up for PostADay. If you’re haven’t posted in ages, or have never posted at all, PostAWeek might be your speed. Still noble and bold, but perhaps more your style.

And of course, feel free to set your own goal – sign up as if you were doing PostAWeek, just so we can keep tabs on what you’re up to.

How to Join:

Signing up is simple – do the following:

1. Post on your blog, right now, that you’re participating
2. (You can grab a sample post from dailypost.wordpress.com)
3. Use the tag postaday2011 or postaweek2011 in your posts (tips on tagging here)
4. Go to dailypost.wordpress.com
5. Subscribe to dailypost.wordpress.com- you’ll get reminders and inspirations every day to help you bring your full potential to your WordPress blog!

If you need a new blog, go here first to get one fast.

That’s all for now. For more, check dailypost.wordpress.com real soon!

The holidays make for a crazy time of year. You’re spending time with family, traveling, maybe enjoying some winter weather. All of this can help you create wonderful blog posts.

Here are a couple tips on how to let your blog shine as you head into the new year.

Blogging made easy

Press This is a great way to simplify your blogging experience. It lets you grab content from any blog post, article, website, or photo you find on the web. If you can you see it in your browser, you can use Press This to blog about it on WordPress.com!

It will automatically insert an image, quote, video, or link on any website directly into your blog post as well as include a link back to the source. No more having to copy and paste 5 different things. With Press This you can share great content quickly.

Drag the bookmarklet (the link that says “Press This”) from the Tools page of your WordPress.com Dashboard into your browser’s bookmarks bar to get started. This adds a handy link you can use to post content.

The next time you want to share a link, photo, or video on another site just press the bookmarklet. You’ll see a window pop up where you can add photos, video, and quotes straight from the site.

The two icons next to “Add:” let you choose which photos or videos on the page you want to insert into your post.

Combine all of that with the mobile options we featured last month and you can really blog from anywhere on the web or anywhere in the world.

Let your photos shine

After many lovely days spent with family during the holidays you probably have dozens (hundreds? thousands?!) of photos from trips, meals, adventures, and lovely winter weather. WordPress.com makes it easy to showcase these right on your blog.

Using our built-in photo galleries or slideshows you can share the best moments from the holidays. Here’s a few from my trip to Yosemite National Park in the winter a few years ago.

Click to view slideshow.

Between Press This and showcasing your photos you have some great toys to play with as you make your blog even better in the new year. Enjoy the holidays!

The short version of this story is that the contact form on WordPress.com has been upgraded. But that leaves out so many of the juicy details

A couple of months ago we took a step back to look at what sort of things the contact form needed and what it could be. While this is still technically a contact form, it is now so much more.

First up, the new interface. Typing in the shortcode still works fine, but we wanted to provide a graphical way for people to manage the form. To do this you click on the ‘Add a custom form’ button:

Add a new form

That will bring up our new custom form builder:

Form Builder

The form builder gives you a simple, but powerful, set of controls on how your form will look and behave.  Common changes you can do that we think you’ll find handy:

• Add and remove fields
• Re-order the field list (drag and drop)
• Select from several types of fields (text, drop down, checkbox, radio button, textarea, etc.)
• Mark fields as required
• Enter a specific email address you want the form results sent to
• Custom subject line for the form results email

Clicking on the ‘Add this form to my post’ button will insert the shortcode for the form into your post.  If  you forgot something you can either edit the shortcode by hand, or simply click the ‘Add custom form’ button again and the form builder will re-load the form details and allow you to change them.

Now if we had stopped there, this would still be a great upgrade, but we decided to turn the volume up to 11.

In addition to emailing out the form results, they are now also stored in the WordPress database.  You’ll notice a new menu item called ‘Feedbacks’, just below ‘Comments’:

Feedbacks

The feedback management is patterned after the style of comment management.  Form submissions that Akismet marks as spam are under the ‘Spam’ section.  If for some reason Akismet made a mistake you can click the ‘Not Spam’ action and the details will be sent back to Akismet so that it can learn from the mistake.  And because you indicated that it wasn’t spam after all, the form results are emailed out again.  You can delete, restore, and permanently delete each entry as well.

For more details check out the updated support documentation on the contact form. For WordPress.org powered blogs we have released this as an update to the Grunion Contact Form plugin, version 2.0.

Last year we started a little tradition, commissioning an illustration to give away as desktop wallpaper during the holidays. This year, Spanish artist Gary Fernández has created a wintry forest scene filled with curious characters who have great taste in blogging platforms. Friends in the southern hemisphere, we love you too, but if you haven’t already noticed, we really have a thing for snow. We hope you enjoy — and happy holidays from all of us at Automattic!

• Large (2560×1440)
• Small (1280×720)
• For Smartphones (640×960)
• For Tablets (1024×1024)

A tip: Choose an image larger than your screen size, and set the position to “center” or “fill screen” (not “stretch”). For smartphones and tablets, we recommend only using the background image on your lock screen.

Need help changing your wallpaper? Here’s instructions for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you were a fan of last year’s illustration, you can find it in this post.

10 Comments, last updated on Monday Dec 20 by army