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Say hello to our newest theme, Choco. If I had to sum this theme up in just one word, it’d be stylish.

With dark colors and stitched borders Choco will give your site a classy, contemporary feel. It is well-suited for any site but works especially well for journal-style blogs: the traditional two-column layout with a right sidebar frames your stories in familiar—yet beautiful—style.

Choco is chock-full of style.

Choose from three color schemes and further customize the look with your own background, menu, and sidebar widgets. Learn more about Choco on the Theme Showcase.

Designed by CSSMayo, Choco is now available for WordPress.com, and for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.

One of my favorite shows is How It’s Made. I love seeing how things I use every day are actually created. In that spirit, here at Automattic we’ve thought about sharing more about how we work and think. For starters, here’s a recap on a few things.

Where are we? Everywhere.

People are surprised to learn we are a distributed company. Most of our employees live in different cities and countries around the world. We have a headquarters in San Francisco, but most of our employees are elsewhere. This means we are working round the clock and we’re informed by many cultures, places, and cuisines (we like food).

How do we work?

Toni, our CEO, has written about the advantages of distributed work before. We are a publishing and services company, and we passionately believe in the power of blogs as group communication tools. We use a WordPress theme called P2 for much of our internal communication, and they function as a combination of specifications, bug reports, brainstorms, watercooler chats, and more. You can read Matt’s take on how P2s changed the company (includes of a video of P2 in action).

Everyone at Automattic is organized into a team of 5-10 people, each team focused on different areas. For example, I’m the lead for Team Social, and we work on improving things like comments, publicizing posts to social networks, and other features. We have teams for Systems, Themes, VIP services, and more.

On a daily basis, everyone works with high autonomy. We do this by choice, since we’re distributed by time as well as distance. We use P2s, IRC chat, and Skype to communicate, picking the right medium depending on how time sensitive a message is. One surprise is how little we use email. I’ve been at Automattic for 7 months and have received only a couple hundred emails, many from people outside the company.

How are new features and improvements made?

A high percentage of improvements come entirely from the WordPress.org community, the open source project WordPress.com is based on.

Here at Automattic we implement, test, and release changes to WordPress.com dozens of times a day. We do it with love, trying to make it so you don’t always know why, but definitely feel your blog gets better and better all the time.

Each team works differently, but each developer, working with a team lead and a designer, decides what changes to make and when to release them. Bigger projects like VaultPress require the work of a dedicated team for weeks or months. Other things like bug fixes or minor features are often finished in days or hours.

We get ideas from many different places. Our stellar Happiness Team constantly reviews issues and discovers ways to make things better, and they’re one primary source for what to work on next. But we also keep lots of data on which features get used, and where it seems people have problems. As a result, every day on our blogs many ideas get pitched, sketched, and prototyped. As productive as we are, we only get to a fraction of them. But when we do ship something, we get feedback instantly on what we’ve done, and often respond quickly to small things we missed, or realize didn’t work quite right, despite our best efforts.

What’s next?

We hope to share more about how we work, and how we think about the future of the web. We have opinions and ideas to share.

If we do this, what would you like to know? No promises, but we’ll sneak around here behind the scenes and see what we can do.

I am rather pleased to announce the birth of a new Automattic theme designed and developed by the Theme Team. It goes by the name of Duster and is quite an interesting theme — if I may say so myself.

Apart from the custom possibilities you’re already acquainted with in most of our themes — features like custom backgrounds, headers, and menus — Duster is also equipped with a unique Showcase Page Template that can propel your site up to a new level.

Showing how Duster looks.

With the help of the Showcase Template you can make your front page display an introductory text message, a featured post with an image —big or small, your call— at the top, a recent post column showing the latest post and a list of other recent posts below, and a sidebar with a custom widget that displays your Aside or Link posts.

It also has several details hidden all around, like a responsive and fluid design to accommodate smaller views. We hope you like it and create beautiful sites with its help. We like it so much we’re using it for our team blog, ThemeShaper. Go exploring and read more about it at the Theme Showcase!

Which comment would you rather receive?

“Great post! Check out my blog at someblog.wordpress.com.”

or

“Well said! I know exactly what you mean about X, and I’m glad that I’m not the only one who thinks so. I would even say that A, B, C! Your candor is greatly appreciated.”

The second one, of course. Why? For one thing, it follows the etiquette guidelines below. But even more importantly, it was written with the intent to forge a relationship, not to self promote.

Relationship building is a much more effective and rewarding strategy for attracting new visitors to your site than spamming, so if you’re interested in boosting your readership, keep the following tips in mind when you leave comments on others’ posts:

1. Be specific. Personalized comments show authors that you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say, and that you actually took the time to read what they wrote. This doesn’t mean you need to write a long comment, just be sure to articulate why you felt compelled to say something in the first place. Did you learn something new? Did you have a similar experience? Do you want to voice a different perspective? Quote the author directly if you need to clarify what specific sentences you’re responding to.

Even if you simply want to compliment someone’s work, explain what you liked about it. Avoid vague comments like “Awesome! Thanks for sharing.” If you’re not sure what to say, consider using the Like button to show your support.

2. Don’t leave a link to your blog. When you leave a comment on a WordPress.com blog post, your name will automatically link to your blog, so there’s no need to include it twice. (This setting can be found under Users ? Personal Settings in your dashboard, in the Account Details section.) Blatant self-promotion is generally frowned upon and is likely to be ignored, so be careful not to tarnish your reputation by creating the perception that you’re a spammer.

On a related note, when you mention another author’s post on your own blog, do include a link, instead of just mentioning the post title or blog name. This will generate a pingback and inform the author that you mentioned their post.

3. Stay on topic. Take care not to diverge too far from the subject of the original post. If you end up in an off-topic exchange with other commenters, message them directly to avoid distracting from the comments left for the post author.

It’s perfectly acceptable to share relevant links, just be sure to explain how they relate to the original post.

Bonus trick: Turn text into links with HTML by using the following code:

<a href=http://en.blog.wordpress.com/feed/"link">text</a>

For example,

<a href="http://wordpress.com">My favorite blogging platform</a>

creates My favorite blogging platform when published as a comment.

4. Be nice. Even if you disagree with someone, it’s never appropriate to use insults or other offensive language. Rude comments don’t add any value to a discussion, and only divert attention away from the author’s work. It’s perfectly fine to offer constructive criticism, just be polite. If you see others writing disrespectful or incendiary comments, or you receive such comments on your own blog, ignore/delete them. Acknowledging them will only encourage the aggressor, so don’t waste your time.

5. Keep it brief. The more concise your comment, the easier it will be for others to read and respond to. In most cases, a few sentences is plenty.

But what if you feel strongly about a topic and have a lot to say — is it appropriate to leave a long-winded comment? Or should you write a response on your own blog, then leave a comment that summarizes your post?

It depends. Some bloggers feel that long comments are overwhelming and disruptive. Others prefer to keep the conversation all in one place. What do you think?

View This Poll
online surveys

Speaking of building relationships with other bloggers, it’s not too late to join the Post a Day/Post a Week challenge if you’re interested in interacting more with other members of the WordPress.com community. Check out The Daily Post for details.

Have questions about comment settings and management? Find the answers you need in our extensive support documentation on comments.

We’ve made some big user experience improvements to how the traffic building feature called Publicize works.  This feature allows you to connect your WordPress.com blog to your account on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, broadcasting your posts to your friends automatically for you.

In the past it took a few steps to figure out how to get going. Now it’s just a click away.

Starting today, when you publish a post, you’ll see a mention of the Publicize feature.

If you click Turn on the publicize feature, it will take you to the Sharing Settings page in your Dashboard. Here you can configure any of the Publicize services you like.

Pick one or more of the services you want to turn on. It’s required that you already have an account with each service you want to use, as you’ll be sent to the service and asked to log in to connect your WordPress.com blog.

Then, as seen above on the Edit Post page, WordPress.com will let you choose which services you want to send your post to. You can also customize the message you send along with the URL.

It’s now easier than ever to grow traffic to your blog.  If you have more questions, you can read more about how Publicize works here. Happy publicizing!