Jamie Lynn Spears Fan Site

Over on the WordPress.org blog, there’s an interesting story about the growth of WordPress, the software that powers WP.com here, and the ecosystem around it.

WP.com is different from every other social platform out there because in addition to giving you ownership of your data you get ownership of the code running your data as well, you could run the same Open source software yourself, and in fact we’ll even help you do it.

Open Source is like a Bill of Rights for software that protects your essential freedoms. When you bring a friend to WordPress you can do it without worry because we’re building something to be around ten, twenty, thirty years from now.

If you’d like to learn more about what’s happening and coming in the wider world of WordPress, check out this presentation I made:

Happy blogging.

We have two quick announcements about new Stats features. The first one affects everyone with a WordPress.com blog. The second is just for those who have marked their blogs Private.

The WordPress.com Admin Bar (visible at the top of your screen if you are logged into WordPress.com) now shows a tiny stats chart called a sparkline. You will only see the sparkline on your own blogs. Here’s a screenshot of my admin bar:

The chart consists of 48 upright bars representing the last 48 hours of page views for the current blog. Darker lines indicate nighttime according to the blog’s time zone setting. This is just to give you a rough overview of recent activity. The chart is also a link to the Site Stats page so you’re that much closer to the full picture. The sparkline has been available to self-hosted WordPress.org users through Jetpack for several months.

Private blogs, which can be viewed only by users chosen by the administrator, now track the page views of all of their users. Traditionally we have omitted the views attributed to a blog’s own users because stats were meant to reflect the activity of the general public. However, this meant that private blogs had no useful stats reports. This change will be especially useful for private blogs that have many users.

How are your stats looking today? To get those numbers moving, check out Scott’s recent post on How to Get More Traffic.

1144 Comments, last updated on Friday Aug 12 by ana

Here at WordPress.com we care about making things look good. Automattic, Inc., our parent company, invests heavily in design: every engineering team has a full-time designer. We know making things look and feel great is important  and we love making things people love to use.

Over the last few weeks we’ve studied the most popular features people add to their blogs. Things like Sharing, Likes and Ratings. Previously when you turned them on it made your blog look cluttered, defeating the purpose of the features themselves. This made us sad.

After much research, prototyping and testing by Beau and Hugo, we’ve released a simplified, more attractive design. These features now appear as friends, lining up in orderly columns, sharing attractive styles and working together to get you the activity from your visitors you want to have.

You may notice the designs for individual buttons have changed. One specific difference is now the ‘smart button’ setting is now global (renamed “Official Buttons”) and not per button.  If you had mixed buttons before, you’ll now have them unified. This was a necessary tradeoff to make the larger design changes possible.

We think you and your visitors will appreciate this new design. If you haven’t used features like Sharing before, now is a great time to turn them on.

We have created a brand new theme meant to carry on the spirit of an old timer with kindness, and we are launching it today. The theme has an air of old-style appeal, semi-academic graciousness with elegant typography, while also offering an overall fresh look with room for customization and the power of the latest WordPress features under the hood. It’s called Quintus.

The Quintus Theme

Above all, whether you are creating a blog with plenty of pictures or a more text-centric blog, Quintus should suit you with elegance. It goes without saying, but it also comes with much of the newer functionality you are accustomed to, including custom backgrounds, custom menus, header images, and the option to publish short aside posts, among others.

If you like the focus to be on the content, you can even turn the blog design into a one column layout by removing all widgets from the sidebar in Appearance ? Widgets. To learn more about Quintus go to its page on the Theme Showcase and check the demo blog.