Woothemes has just announced a new theme for musicians called Unsigned. To build the theme, the company worked with band managers and promoters as well as real, actual musicians in order to make a “rockin’” theme that is both “classical” and “jazzy” with a little but of “afro-beat” thrown in.
The theme includes modules for events, discographies, and SoundCloud comparability for uploading music. You can also use a sales widget to sell music and merch instantly. The theme supports “tours” and events separately, so you can plan your cross-country van trip and your tour of the Baltic states using the same system.
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Appifier is a new service, previously in beta, that turns WordPress sites into mobile apps. That’s not mobile websites, mind you, but actual mobile applications complete with push notifications, offline access, Twitter and Facebook sharing, plus a native look, feel and speed.
Unlike many DIY app creators (and there are many), Appifier isn’t doing a freemium offering. You can test out your app for free, but if you want to publish it in the app store, there are fees involved. → Read More
After 14 million downloads of WordPress 3.2, WordPress 3.3 is being released to the wild today. Codenamed “Sonny” in honor of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress, which had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, has a number of new features and bells and whistles, including UI improvements. The new version includes a revamped welcome screen and improved contextual help UI. → 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
Can’t get enough of that Facebook Timeline? Want to copy it wholesale in your own Wordpress blog? Do you want to support an “Italian boy” named Julian? I bet you do.
We just got this excellent tip from Julian describing the process by which he created this very own theme, the aptly-named “Timeline-wp.” He wants no beef with Facebook and, while I find the adoption of an established megacompany’s brand and image slightly unbecoming and/or dangerous even for a private blog (and a bit shortsighted as Facebook will probably tear this design up by the time the next f8 rolls around), you can download and install the theme today at no cost to you. → Read More
A few weeks ago, we heard that the San Francisco Port Authority had red-tagged Pier 38 — putting up warnings that the space was unsafe. This is a big deal because Pier 38 is something of a tech hub. It’s home to tenants including Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs, EGG HAUS, and more.
While Robert Scoble grabbed some pictures showing just how serious these notices were — it’s never good to see a big red sign with the word “UNSAFE” on the door to your business — Polaris’ Ryan Spoon downplayed the warnings. Here’s what he said to us at the time: → Read More
Blogging software WordPress is announcing a number of impressive growth stats today. WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. These stats apply to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.
You can also check out Founder Matt Mullenweg’s ‘State of the Word’ adress at WordCamp San Francisco last week. In July, WordPress.com blogs passed the 50 million mark. At the time, WordPress revealed that each month, 287 million people account for 2.5 billion pageviews on WordPress.com blogs. → 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 3.1 was downloaded over 15 million times in less than 5 months. But time marches on, and so does the music. Yesterday, Wordpress 3.2, also known as “Gershwin”, was released to the public, and in just 24 hours, the latest iteration of the website and blogging platform has been downloaded over 330,000 times. They grow up pretty quickly these days. → Read More
The latest stable version of WordPress, 3.1, was first released on 23 February 2011.
Now, less than 5 months later, the blogging software has been downloaded over 15 million times according to a tweet posted mere minutes ago.
Just yesterday, WordPress parent company Automattic published a blog post, announcing that the next version, WordPress 3.2, will be released ‘very soon’. → Read More
According to BuiltWith, of the top million websites using content management systems (or CMSes), three systems own more than 75 percent of the total market share: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. (All of which are open source, by the way.)
Many are likely most familiar with WordPress, which TechCrunch has covered quite a bit (and uses to power most its sites, for full disclosure). WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Web, running 62 percent of the top million websites that use a CMS, according to BuiltWith, with Joomla now ranking second at 10 percent and closing. → Read More
Following in the footsteps of commenting systems Echo, Disqus and Intense Debate, WordPress.com has launched Wordpress, Twitter and Facebook authorization and identity systems for its own commenting platform, in that order. The blog host didn’t even have the Wordpress.com option before.
Coming before Facebook on this is another albeit small) win for Twitter, who yesterday became the first social platform to be fully integrated into an iOS.
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg tells me that the Twitter and Facebook comments are a lot more “flexible” than just Twitter and Facebook, and that we also should probably consider them here at TC. (Check in on this post in an hour or two for statistics what is being most used.) → Read More
It’s not a great day for the Internet, folks. Web services seem to be dropping like flies. For several hours today, WordPress.com’s back-end was nowhere to be found, causing several TechCrunch writers to consider writing on legal pads and posting on Craigslist. Some even considered posting on HuffPo. Don’t worry, they’ve been fired.
On top of this, and much to the chagrin of the video-on-demand watching public, Netflix went down for what seemed like a century. I subscribe to Netflix Instant, and as you can see from the message above, I was not allowed to watch my “programs” this evening when I wanted to. Not cool, Netflix. Not cool. → 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 both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. → Read More
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Schneider were interviewed by our own Alexia Tsotsis at Le Web 10 today. Our live notes (paraphrased):
How big is the company right now?
We’re about 74 people. In terms of revenues to sustain our growth, I’d say we make a little under $1 million a month from all our services combined. → Read More
Last September at TechCrunch Disrupt, Microsoft announced that all 7 million Windows Live Spaces blogs would be transitioning to Wordpress.com. It turned out that number was inflated, and a subsequent internal email put the real number of transitioned blogs at 300,000.
Well, the number of Windows Live Spaces blogs which have transitioned over to Wordpress.com is now at “over half a million” and another half a million new Wordpress blogs have been created by Windows Live users. So that brings the total new Wordpress blogs created as a result of the partnership to one million. → 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, which, when clicked, presents a drop down that shows you exactly what stories by that author are brining in traffic on any given day. WordPress.com also removed the number of posts area, after that caused some confusion. “the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits,” they note. → 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 this year. But it was always missing just one thing.
WordPress.com’s Stats area gives you a solid overview for how your blog is doing overall. And unlike Google Analytics, the data is up-to-the-minute fresh. You can see your top posts, top referrers, top search engine terms, top clicked links, and a few other things. One thing it doesn’t have though is the ability to see how each author is doing in terms of traffic to their posts. In other words, it’s lacking in the vanity department. But that’s coming shortly. → Read More
Back in May, Twitter unveiled a small tool called Blackbird Pie. Essentially, it was a way to the process of using a Tweet in a blog post easier. Rather than having to take a screenshot of the Tweet, you could just copy the URL into Blackbird Pie and out would pop some dynamically generated code for embedding the Tweet in your post, complete with working links. It was an interesting idea, sadly, no one uses it. But a key WordPress integration today should change that.
As they note on their own blog, WordPress has just enabled Blackbird Pie for all WordPress.com blogs. It works in posts and in comments too. All you have to do to bing a Tweet in is copy the URL for it and put it somewhere in your post on its own line. Says the company: → Read More
