WordPress.com now offers hotel, inn and bed and breakfast owners and managers the ability to showcase their properties with the help of a new responsive theme just for hotels. In addition, the service also today launched a special site dedicated to showing hotel owners how they can use the service to promote their properties. For WordPress.com, adding this hotel vertical is part of a now-familiar… → Read More
Automattic’s WordPress.com just launched WordPress.com for Business. The business accounts, which will cost $299 per site per year, include advanced design tools with support for custom web fonts, 50 premium themes and unlimited storage for videos and audio, as well as live chat support. Business users will also get a free domain name for their sites. Some of the features in this package are… → Read More
WordPress.com just rolled out a new classroom vertical that is meant to help educators easily create good-looking websites for their classes. Over the last few months, WordPress.com, the fully hosted version of the popular open-source WordPress content management system, started introducing a number of verticals that focus specifically on certain types of sites, be they restaurant sites, homepages… → Read More
Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, just announced that it is rolling out a vertical for portfolio sites. This, the company says, is meant to allow photographers, videographers, illustrators, painters, designers and others who want to showcase their creations on WordPress.com. → Read More
Automattic is announcing a new feature for large-scale sites hosted in WordPress.com VIP SaaS program (TechCrunch is a VIP publisher)—Featured Partners for third-party integrations. Basically, the program allows companies that have integrated their services with the WordPress platform to promote and seamlessly enable their tools for large-scale VIP sites, which account for one billion page views… → Read More
Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.
From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google: → Read More
In a blog post on the WordPress.com blog, Automattic‘s Justin Shreve this morning acknowledged his employer’s aspirations to turn WordPress.com into more of a platform than a mere Web-based blogging software service.
The company has added support for authentication protocol OAuth 2 to WordPress.com and is debuting a brand new developer portal. → Read More
Wordpress.com has revealed that someone has gained root-access (“low-level,” as in deep) to several of its servers this morning and that VIP customers’ source code was accessible. Wordpress.com VIP customers are all on “code red” and in the process of changing all the passwords/API keys they’ve left in the source code.
“Tough note to communicate today: Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in… → Read More
Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org have a little more in common this morning, as Automattic has announced Jetpack, a bridge between the two Wordpress related offerings. For those that still don’t know the difference, it’s as follows: Wordpress.com is the blog hosting platform and Wordpress.org is the open source and fully customizable CMS.
Apparently people on Wordpress.org had been clamoring for… → Read More
After recovering from the largest Distributed Denial of Service attack in the service’s history (“multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second”) yesterday morning, blog host Wordpress.com was attacked again very early this morning, finally stabilizing its service at 11:15 UTC (around 3:15 am PST).
Wordpress.com serves 18 million sites, many of them news sites like our… → Read More
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.
Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in… → Read More
A couple weeks ago, we noted that Automattic was testing out a new Top Author stat area on the Site Stats page found on WordPress.com blogs. Today, they’ve rolled out the feature with a couple little bonuses.
First of all, the widget itself has been prettied-up quite a bit from the one we shared. You’ll now see author icons next to the author names. More importantly, you’ll see a plus sign… → Read More
If 75 percent of my day is spent writing, the remaining 25 percent is probably going over TechCrunch stats. I’m obsessed with it. That’s why I do so many posts about things like Chrome getting ready to overtake Firefox as the dominant browser among TechCrunch readers (less than 1 percent away now). So I was obviously happy when WordPress.com (which hosts us) overhauled their Stats area earlier… → Read More
Does the world need more than one Twitter? How about 10,000 of them? That is how many sites are running on the hosted version of StatusNet, which went into private beta at our Realtime CrunchUp last November. Today, StatusNet is opening up its hosted service to all comers in a public beta.
You can think about StatusNet as the WordPress of microblogging. StatusNet is open-source software which… → Read More
All 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, including TechCrunch, just got more realtime. Any blog hosted on WordPress is now PuSH-enabled, meaning that new posts get pushed out to feed readers such as Google Reader the second they are published.
PuSH stands for Pubsubhubbub, a realtime protocol designed to speed up RSS which launched at our first Realtime CrunchUp last year. Instead of waiting… → Read More
As you may have noticed, TechCrunch was down for an extended period of time this afternoon. In case you haven’t read about why yet, it’s because WordPress.com suffered through some 110 minutes of downtime, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has explained just now on the company’s blog.
TechCrunch is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the… → Read More
You would think that, almost exactly 4 years after opening up to the public, WordPress.com would have a way for people to subscribe to blogs by e-mail, right? You’d be wrong, at least until today.
While there has always been the possibility to subscribe to blogs by e-mail using FeedBurner or other RSS facilitators, WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic has now added an email subscription… → Read More
We’re still at The Next Web Conference 2009 here in Amsterdam, and I just ran into Matt Mullenweg from Automattic / WordPress and immediately cornered him, put him against a brick wall outside and got him to answer some questions about the company and WordPress.
The takeaways:
- BuddyPress, which is supposed to transform an installation of WordPress MU into some sort of a white-label social… → Read More
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