WordPressers, day in and day out, you entertain us, you make us think, you make us laugh, and you make us grateful to be exposed to so many voices all over the world. It’s a pleasure to read what you’re writing. Like everyone in the community, we value that feeling of connection that comes from reading something that speaks to you, that resonates, that makes you feel not so alone.

For this edition of Freshly Pressed Faves, we’re looking at three posts that do just that, all around the idea of “busy-ness.” Modern society seems to embrace the idea that unless you’re “swamped” or “super busy,” you just aren’t being productive enough. Free time? Fill it up, preferably with something that pays! This attitude permeates children’s lives, too, with scheduled after-school dance classes and soccer practices and violin lessons and foreign language tutors. The idle hours that once allowed kids to daydream seem to be no more. When’s enough enough, though?

Doing more only to do less — do we glorify busy?

Author Tim Kreider believes ‘Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.’ We feel we are nothing, not worthy, unimportant or left out if we have nothing to do.

But there is another aspect to it. Perfectionism – that shadow from our childhoods. We want to be excellent – because if we are, we will be worthy of love. So we take on anything and everything that is thrown us. Even when we are aware we are overwhelmed, we find it hard to say ‘NO’. Because we fear that if we do – people will think less of us. So we end up doing more than our fair share.

Sofagirl at Campari & Sofa writes eloquently about her own fight with the “busy” beast and the scary personal episode that drove her to question it all. Weaving in others’ research on the topic, she presents a compelling argument for taking a step back — and a deep breath — and for refusing to participate in the tyranny of “busy” any longer. Bet you’ll find it difficult to disagree.

The Quiet Contemplation of Inactivity

As kids we could come up with 16 ways to put our lives on the line using the jungle gym in ways no designer ever intended. They were days when we simply looked at clouds and imagined animals (or teachers or, for the juvenile delinquents, body parts) hiding in the puffy expanse of the heavens. … We were bored, but no one was ever bored enough to learn something.

Except it appears, according to recent research, that boredom is good for the brain. Evidently, boredom switches our brain’s little buttons and the synapses and neurons start firing on more cylinders, pushing us to creativity and intellectual growth.

John Wegner of Consistently Contradictory harkens back to a time when “boredom” and free time were acceptable and even encouraged, when we didn’t rely on technology and scheduling quite so much, and when we allowed our brains to wander. Are we losing the benefits of this today? Should we re-introduce some “slack” into schools? Read John’s convincing and thought-provoking post and you’ll probably be answering “yes.”

The Kid Stays in the Picture

When I was a kid, Dad made it clear that ‘mere play’ was being idle—something lazy people did. And boy, you couldn’t get lazier than me.

Michael Maupin from Completely in the Dark takes us back to his childhood and the lasting effects of not being encouraged to “play.” He explains, “As a shadow, it darkened the room, filling me with anxiety and self-doubt: ‘What am I doing now? Is it practical? Is it useful? Shouldn’t I be ashamed?’ … For years that sound, that shadow, was all around. It blocked up my writing, my artwork, my self-esteem — everything. I was psychologically held at gunpoint by an ethic that carries little currency in my world.”

Not one to be bullied, however, Michael has found ways to protect and embrace his natural tendencies towards “play and reverie.” Read his post, and you’ll be inspired to do the same.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Where I live, it seems winter is refusing to loosen its grip, holding back a long-awaited spring. With two feet of snow still on the ground and frigid, breezy days, it’s nice to sit inside (by the fire) and lose myself in the delights of the Reader. Forget Calgon. Reader….take me away! Here’s just a few Freshly Pressed posts that gave us pause this week.

Roger Ebert, RIP

Yesterday, the world lost more than a prolific film critic when Roger Ebert died of cancer at age 70. In Roger Ebert, RIP, science fiction author John Scalzi hails Ebert as one of his most important writing teachers, a fair, incisive film critic, and above all, a man who refused to allow a devastating disease to take away his humanity:

In these later years and after everything that he’d been through with cancer and with losing the ability to physically speak, I read and was contemplative about the essays and pieces he put up on his Web site. Much of that had nothing to do with film criticism, but was a matter of him writing… well, whatever. Which meant it was something I could identify with to a significant degree, since that is what I do here. It would be foolish to say that Ebert losing his physical voice freed him to find his voice elsewhere. What I think may be more accurate was that losing his physical voice reminded Ebert that he still had things he wanted to say before he ran out of time to say them.

Lean Together

Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, Lean In, challenges ambitious women to seek leadership positions to help shake off the ever-competitive socio-political status quo and reshape the world of work for the better. At The Purpose of Work, Mike Gammage suggests Lean In‘s fatal flaw is that Sandberg should be addressing society’s “all-pervasive competition” to always be “on” and working in Lean Together:

Almost wherever we look, the workplace is becoming relentlessly competitive. It’s an assumed ‘passion’ that jeopardises family life. And as work becomes more hyper-competitive, women’s opportunities shrink. Pregnancy and maternity leave especially become huge issues. Sandberg acknowledges her own fears that – even at her level and with her talents – her job and prospects at Google would be diminished if she took ‘too much’ time off [that is more than a week or two] after her first child was born.

What if we try instead to slow down and step off this devilish hamster wheel that we’ve created?

First off, I think, we would want to reflect on the culture of contest that is embedded into our societies and so into our working lives. We have to recognise the myth of the inevitability of all–pervasive competition.

Cursi

At Vocabat, author Katie gives us a reflective Spanish lesson on the word cursi, which in English means “cheesy.” Katie transcends simple translation, meditating on the cultural nuances between Latino and American culture, finally embracing cursi as an unfettered expression of love:

In sum: What is love if not cursi? Love is supremely sentimental and gushy and ridiculous. And love means leaving your self-consciousness at the door, as well as your ego. I feel like you’re not really in love if you’re not regularly making a fool of yourself! But why hide our cheesiness within the safe confines of relationships? I admire people who can unblushingly own their feelings, hopes, and even disappointments without pussyfooting or pretending to not care all that much anyway. Although cursi people could use some work in the originality department, at least they care in the first place. There’s a lamentable epidemic of nonchalance and numbness and self-absorption these days, and cheesiness is a much better alternative to these terrible modes of subpar living.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Your blog’s design should reflect your personality, and we want to make that as easy as possible. That’s why, today, we’re releasing three big upgrades to the Theme Customizer on WordPress.com that make customizing your blog faster and easier.

1. A more-focused Customizer.

We’ve made the Customizer more compact; open it via Appearance → Themes → Customize, and you’ll notice that you have more room to view your customized design in the live preview. The panels open when you need them, and they slide out of the way when you’re done.

2. Your Custom Design tools, inside the Customizer.

Change your fonts

What does this mean? Instant live previews of your CSS, font, and color changes. See your creativity immediately instead of repeating the old cycle of “edit-save-preview, edit-save-preview.”

Add some pizzazz

3. Custom Design Snapshots.

Design Snapshots make it possible to save all of the Custom Design changes you’ve made in the Customizer, together, so that you can reapply them in the future as a group without having to recreate them. Save a snapshot of any customization combination you like; there’s no limit on the number of snapshots you can save.

All of these features are included in the Custom Design upgrade for just $30 per year, and you can try them out before purchasing. If you don’t have the upgrade yet, just look for the “Custom Design” option under Appearance → Themes → Customize.

Looking for inspiration? Check out what other WordPress.com members have made in the Custom Design showcase.

WordPress is an elegant solution for education professionals looking to create a website for their class, and today we’re excited to announce the launch of WordPress.com Classrooms. Whether you need a group blog for your high school history project, or to keep your 3rd grade students’ parents up to date about the next field trip, you’ll find the solution here at WordPress.com.

WordPress.com Classrooms

Get up and running — fast

We know you’re busy educating the world’s young minds, so we’ve made the site creation process as easy as 1-2-3: Register your site, customize your theme, and start posting — that’s it! No more excuses about how the dog ate your homework website.

Connect and collaborate

We’re all about engaging discussion. Invite students to post their thoughts on your latest lecture and submit their reaction papers as comments. Or maybe you just need a place to get the word out about class happenings — turn off comments entirely and make your site an informative online newsletter. You can even share class forms and documents with parents by using the media uploader.

Collaborate in comments

Your privacy is paramount

We get it — not everything can be public, especially in education. With blog privacy and password-protected pages, you control who sees your content.

Protect your class’ privacy

Dozens of education themes

Maybe your English Grammar class needs a formal, college-ruled look — Runo Lite should do the trick. Or perhaps your kindergarten website needs a whimsical touch-up — enter our newest theme, Chalkboard:

New Theme: Chalkboard

Designed by Edward Jenkins, Chalkboard is the perfect theme for a K-12 classroom website. It looks just like its namesake, complete with bottom-resting eraser and chalk, and supports multiple widget areas, custom header, background, and more. Read more about Chalkboard on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your blog by going to Appearance -> Themes in your Dashboard.

Whatever style you seek, we’ve got your class covered.

Beautiful, functional themes

Your lessons come alive

Add images and photo galleries to your posts with our easy-to-use multimedia interface. Quickly embed videos from services like YouTube or Vimeo. Want to make your class even more dynamic? Consider adding VideoPress and a Space Upgrade so you can upload video and audio, too.

Easily embed images, galleries, and videos

Customize your site

Sticking to your school’s brand? No problem. Set a custom header or background with your logo or colors, or use the Custom Design upgrade to change your site’s colors, fonts, and CSS. Finally, add Domain Mapping to point your existing domain to your blog.

Plentiful customization options

At the head of the class

Check out these awesome classes, educators, and schools already taking advantage of WordPress.com’s great features:

The Coop

West Des Moines Community Schools Technology

CRS 5th Grade

What are you waiting for? Get a head start and build your class website now!

WordPress is an elegant solution for education professionals looking to create a website for their class, and today we’re excited to announce the launch of WordPress.com Classrooms. Whether you need a group blog for your high school history project, or to keep your 3rd grade students’ parents up to date about the next field trip, you’ll find the solution here at WordPress.com.

WordPress.com Classrooms

Get up and running — fast

We know you’re busy educating the world’s young minds, so we’ve made the site creation process as easy as 1-2-3: Register your site, customize your theme, and start posting — that’s it! No more excuses about how the dog ate your homework website.

Connect and collaborate

We’re all about engaging discussion. Invite students to post their thoughts on your latest lecture and submit their reaction papers as comments. Or maybe you just need a place to get the word out about class happenings — turn off comments entirely and make your site an informative online newsletter. You can even share class forms and documents with parents by using the media uploader.

Collaborate in comments

Your privacy is paramount

We get it — not everything can be public, especially in education. With blog privacy and password-protected pages, you control who sees your content.

Protect your class’ privacy

Dozens of education themes

Maybe your English Grammar class needs a formal, college-ruled look — Runo Lite should do the trick. Or perhaps your kindergarten website needs a whimsical touch-up — enter our newest theme, Chalkboard:

New Theme: Chalkboard

Designed by Edward Jenkins, Chalkboard is the perfect theme for a K-12 classroom website. It looks just like its namesake, complete with bottom-resting eraser and chalk, and supports multiple widget areas, custom header, background, and more. Read more about Chalkboard on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your blog by going to Appearance -> Themes in your Dashboard.

Whatever style you seek, we’ve got your class covered.

Beautiful, functional themes

Your lessons come alive

Add images and photo galleries to your posts with our easy-to-use multimedia interface. Quickly embed videos from services like YouTube or Vimeo. Want to make your class even more dynamic? Consider adding VideoPress and a Space Upgrade so you can upload video and audio, too.

Easily embed images, galleries, and videos

Customize your site

Sticking to your school’s brand? No problem. Set a custom header or background with your logo or colors, or use the Custom Design upgrade to change your site’s colors, fonts, and CSS. Finally, add Domain Mapping to point your existing domain to your blog.

Plentiful customization options

At the head of the class

Check out these awesome classes, educators, and schools already taking advantage of WordPress.com’s great features:

The Coop

West Des Moines Community Schools Technology

CRS 5th Grade

What are you waiting for? Get a head start and build your class website now!

This week’s Freshly Pressed posts continued to impress us with the range, depth, and honesty of the material being put out into the world by WordPress.com bloggers. As a community, you’re bold, not afraid to put yourselves on the line, and committed to chewing through important questions, even if you don’t always have the answers to them. That makes for heady reading, and passionate, opinionated conversation in the comments afterwards.

Image credit: “Frozen Pizza” by Eric Leamen.

If you’re looking for something to read this week, we’ve picked three posts that share a preoccupation with trying to be authentic in a high-speed world that often demands that we’re anything but. How do you stay true to yourself when the world around you so actively encourages vapid, “phony” responses to seemingly inescapable situations? In three very different posts, this week’s selection of bloggers tackle that question in their own way.

I Confess. I Cheated.

We face these kinds of tough decisions every day, sometimes without even considering the moral and ethical significance. Cheating and getting ahead is the easy decision. Choosing not to cheat is the tough one. However, cheating does, after all, imply getting a competitive advantage. What if you are at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t cheat because everybody else is? It’s easy to justify it in our own heads when we are pursuing our goals to be successful and respected.

DF Salvador’s expansive post on the ethics of cheating to get by, or to become successful, spans from gaming online Scrabble to Lance Armstrong’s dubious decisions on the road to sporting success. At the heart of this post is the thorny question of how, and when, to stay true to oneself even when everyone around us is using artifice and underhand tactics to get ahead. It’s not an easy question, and there are no easy answers, but DF Salvador’s post explores and examines the motivations and societal pressures on all of us to sell ourselves short in the pursuit of success.

The Psychology of Workplace Dynamics: It’s ok to be a phony, as long as it is authentic

Everywhere we turn these days we hear about people “keeping it real.” But which real-self are they keeping true to? This sense of “keeping it real” could in actuality be about projecting that self that is dependent on the social world–An identity that has been constructed just for a public image. So, in reality one would “be keeping it fake real.”

Psychologist Mimi’s post tackles the problem of striving for authenticity in a personal and professional context, when authenticity is very much a social construct that falls apart at the drop of a feather. In a world of mediated experience and media-saturated personalities, is it foolish vanity to attempt to be the “real me”, and if not, what separates that from something altogether more “phony”? From Catcher in the Rye to Kim Kardashian, Psychologist Mimi interrogates our universal quest for authenticity and draws some interesting and unexpected conclusions.

Frozen Pizza: How Instagram And Vine Are Fuelling The Frivolous

Just like my Instagram photos were starting to feel meaningless, so too were most of the “first Vines” I saw posted yesterday. Vines of people Tweeting about Vine. Vines of people making coffee. Vines of people drinking coffee. Vines of dogs. Vines of cats. Vines of people dressed like cats. Vines of a dying Tweetie Bird. Vines of people eating food. I’ve yet to post a Vine, because I feel as if I have nothing Vine-worthy to record.

In Eric Leamen’s post for CE, he reflects on the dangers of the medium becoming the message. Leaman draws on his experiences with Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter’s new 6-second video service Vine to reflect on the impact of feeling perpetually pressured to post something, anything, to social media services. When posting becomes more important than having something significant or meaningful to share, to what extent do we end up sharing vapid, empty, and arguably inauthentic nothings before wondering why nobody seems particularly interested. Eric Leaman explores this idea by way of a piece of frozen pizza.

Did you read something in the WordPress.com Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Last year we launched wordpress.com/restaurants, giving restaurants the ability to quickly and easily build a site with menus, maps and directions, an OpenTable reservations widget, and more, along with an elegant new free theme. Since then, we’ve seen restaurants from venerable favorites to underground supper clubs using WordPress.com to entice customers with websites as beautiful as their signature dishes. Here are a few whose sites (and menus!) we love:

POSH

POSH is an “improvisational restaurant” in Scottsdale, Arizona where Chef Josh Herbert creates custom menus for each evening’s crowd based on seasonal ingredients and personal preferences. Using the Confit theme developed especially for restaurants, he’s able to give potential patrons a feel for the restaurant with a custom background photo showcasing the restaurant’s interior while maintaining a clean overall feel.

We particularly like the way he’s loaded up the left sidebar with all the key things a customer wants to see — links to information about the chef and his food, the restaurant’s hours and location, the OpenTable reservations widget — while using the rest of the page as a blog to highlight well-loved recipes.

(And Confit doesn’t have to be just for restaurants — it also works for secret supper clubs, rental properties, and more. Visit the Confit page for instructions on configuring all the restaurant-specific features.)

The Elephant Walk

The Elephant Walk, a popular French-Cambodian restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a “benefit restaurant” — 3% of its profits go to non-profit organizations dedicated to fighting poverty. Using a customized version of the premium Duet theme, they’re spreading the word about their food and mission.

They’ve souped up their site with a custom header (which they carry over into an image widget, to keep the look consistent), and custom navigation that quickly shepherds readers to menus, FAQs, and information on the non-profits they support. As with POSH, they’ve also kept the most popular information in the sidebar, so readers can get directions or make a reservation no matter which page they’re on when the mood strikes.

Canapé

Friends Matthew and Sean run Canapé, a pop-up restaurant, every Sunday night, taking over an existing restaurant space to present a new 11-course menu. Their site, using a customized version of the free Forever theme, uses stunning close-up photographs of their inventive, refined food to great effect.

Their custom background and header hint at their elegant but playful style, but it’s the slider of featured images that really steals the show — it showcases ten of their perfectly composed dishes, leaving each on the screen just long to activate your Pavlovian response before shifting to the next. Above, a custom menu takes visitors to more information (including a whole page dedicated to food photography, if the slider images weren’t enough for you) while below, blog posts keep followers up to date on upcoming menus and other news.

Some of these sites use premium themes or other upgrades, like a custom domain name or custom design – but not all. The Confit theme is free, as are its options to use a custom background and OpenTable widget. Many other free themes can be customized with a header, slider, and menus, and image widgets are always available for adding more visual interest.

Are you a restaurant owner who needs an upgrade, or just a happy customer whose favorite taco joint has a website from 1997 and wants to help? Welcome to WordPress.com!

Welcome to a new feature on WordPress.com News. Every couple weeks, we’ll sit down with an Automattician to help you get to know the people who work behind the scenes to build new features, keep Automattic’s wheels turning, and make WordPress.com the best it can be. Mr. Tim Moore suggested this new feature and so we thought it only fitting that he should be first. Everybody, say hey to Tim!

What’s your role at Automattic?

Tim Moore

At Automattic, I’m a member of Team Social. We handle projects like Publicize, Post by Email, Sharing, the new WordPress.com comments UI, and Gravatar, among others.

I also do a lot of work on Automattic’s Jetpack plugin. I have a toe in each part of Jetpack; I started out doing mostly development, though now I help with support, maintenance, and any aspect of the plugin that needs work.

What sort of work have you done in the past? What did you learn from it?

For development work, I maintained virtual machines. Usually, beyond the basic web server software (LAMP or similar), I didn’t get involved in other software packages that could be run (email, for example). I used to do this, but haven’t in a long time.

In light of some of the recent privacy policy rigamarole that has been going around in the tech world, I decided to brush up on my skills to see what I could do. I ended up setting up my own email server to handle email for several of my domains that, until then, I had piped into a Google Apps account. Because they’re low volume email accounts, I don’t need Google’s vast data centers. I ended up with a functional email server and I learned that email, a thing we take for granted, is a complicated beast.

If you have an interest in how something works, take the time to learn about it. It’s going to be frustrating (My email server certainly frustrated me!), and you’ll probably feel like you’d be better off leaving it to someone else (I felt like that too).

When you’re done, you’ll have learned something new, you’ll understand a service you’ve (maybe) taken for granted in the past, and you’ll have a new appreciation for how hard folks work to make these things available.

What do you love most about working at Automattic?

I love having instant access to some of the best brilliant minds in the field. I’m an autodidact* and love to learn; there’s nothing better than being able to jump on IRC or Skype to ask a question or have a discussion about something I don’t understand and coming away having learned something new.

I also like that my commute to my office can be different each day. Not just in, “Let’s take a different route to the office today,” but in that I can stay in bed and open the laptop, I can work in my home office, I can go to the café or restaurant. My commute can be different each night, too, if I choose to work at night.

What should the people know about you, Tim?

In my spare time (hah!), I write fiction (speculative fiction or science fiction or fantasy) and read just about anything that captures my interest. I currently have a novel and several short stories in progress and I usually read about one book a week (this week I’ve knocked off Gun Machine by Warren Ellis, the B-Team by John Scalzi, and am working on the Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey).

I’m also a family person. I like to spend as much time with my wife, Caroline (also an Automattician!), and two daughters (ages four and one) as I can. One of the things I like to do with them, to relax after work, is cook dinner for the family.

*Fun fact: Leonardo da Vinci is one of the world’s best known autodidacts.

Did you know that Automattic is hiring? We want people who are willing to work hard, share their ideas, learn from their colleagues, take initiative to get things done without being told, and those who aren’t afraid to ask questions. Think you fit the bill? Work with us.

A simple way to add visual variety to your site’s front page is to publish your content using Post Formats. Over 50 of our themes support Post Formats, which means they can display various types of content — including images, videos, quotes, links, audio, and short snippets called “asides” — with different formatting, adding subtle but nice touches to your site.

The types of Post Formats you can choose from depends on your theme. To see what Post Formats your current theme supports, go to Posts » Add New in the dashboard and look for a Format module on the right, with various options like the one below:

Using Post Formats is optional — if your theme supports them, you don’t have to use them, since the default (standard) format works well with any content you publish. Using Post Formats is also free: you don’t need to purchase the custom CSS upgrade to enable different Post Formats.

Our Top Themes Now Support Post Formats

Recently, we made our top 25 themes — from popular free themes like Pilcrow, Manifest, and Bueno to premium themes such as Elemin — look even better with Post Formats. Here’s a sampling of how Post Formats look different, using the Elemin theme as an example:

Image Format:

Video Format:

Quote Format:

Link Format:

Audio Format:

Aside Format:

Graphic icons spice up this particular theme, while other themes have different design or textual elements appropriate for their layouts. Browse the themes that support Post Formats in our Theme Showcase.

Start Posting Now

You can publish instantly using popular Post Formats right in your dashboard. Just click on “New Post” on the top right, then select one of these popular formats to publish instantly to one of your sites:

Alternatively, you can go to Posts » Add New in your dashboard to create a new post. Just select the appropriate Post Format in the Format module, and you can use the “Preview” button to view the post before publishing it.

Merry band of comrades seeks nice, hard-working, diligent, motivated, fun-loving people to join their mission: to democratize publishing and make WordPress.com the best it can be. Work with us.

Last year at Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company) we hired 48 people:

• 19 developers/systems folk — those who write code and make sure servers are running.
• 14 Happiness Engineers — those who support our users in the forums and answer requests for help.
• 6 themers and designers who create beautiful themes and sites.
• 8 in business and operations — those who work internally with Automatticians and with our VIPs.
• 2 in editorial curating Freshly Pressed, and inspiring bloggers to keep on blogging.

We expect to hire 60 new Automatticians in 2013. We’re a distributed company: Automatticians work from home, their local coffee shop, co-working spaces — the location in the world where they’re most comfortable and productive. Our hiring pool is planet Earth.

We need developers, designers, themers, support folks, and more. Are you a mobile developer? Apply. Are you smart about WordPress, incisive, and compassionate? You might be an awesome Happiness Engineer.

What qualities do we seek? We look for people who are willing to work hard, share their ideas, learn from their colleagues, take initiative to get things done without being told, and those who aren’t afraid to ask questions.

To help you get to know your future colleagues a little better and learn about the awesome people who fuel Automattic, we’re starting a new series here at WordPress.com News called “Five Minutes with an Automattician.” First up, on Monday, January 21st, Mr. Tim Moore.

Think you’ve got the right stuff? Work with us.

For us, WordPress.com is our labor of love — we’re continually releasing new themes, upgrades, and features to help you create the best website and/or blog you can. In addition to great tools, we publish articles, prompts, and writing and photo challenges to inspire you to start posting and keep posting. While we’re never, ever done making WordPress.com better, we wanted to look back at some of the goodies we brought you in 2012.

We’ve got the look: 65+ new themes in 2012

We released themes at a rate of more than one a week in 2012. These beautiful themes look great no matter which device your visitors use to see your content. What’s more, if you’re a musician, restaurateur, bride-or-groom-to-be, or a civil servant looking for a simple way to share information with your audience, we’ve got you covered.

Tae Phoenix is a Seattle-based singer-songwriter who recently released her first album, Rise. Her site takes full advantage of everything WordPress.com and the Soundcheck theme have to offer, with embedded audio and video, a tour calendar, her Twitter feed, links to her new album, and press mentions.

Custom Design puts you in charge

Have design chops or an eye for contrast, color, and composition? With the Custom Design upgrade, you can tinker with your site’s CSS, compose a unique color palette for your site, and choose from among some awesome Typekit fonts to create the specific look you desire for your online home on the web.

New and improved for 2012

No matter whether you’re just starting to blog or are a seasoned web designer, here’s a sampling of how we made WordPress.com better for you in 2012:

• We doubled the space we offer in the space upgrade.
• We introduced SASS and LESS for those who’ve got the Custom CSS upgrade.
• We added unique visitors and countries to all WordPress.com stats pages.
• We created importers to help you bring your Tumblr blog or your Splinder site to WordPress.com.
• We released tiled galleries that allow you to get creative with photos on your blog.

We made a lot of progress in 2012 and we’re already working on bringing you more awesome in 2013. Happy New Year from WordPress.com!

At the end of November, we gave shout-outs to bloggers and artists who participated in month-long projects like NaBloPoMo and NaNoDrawMo. As 2012 comes to a close, we also want to highlight writers and photographers who challenged themselves all year — who posted each day or each week, or have established an ongoing project on their sites.

These bloggers caught our attention:

Jump For Joy!

JUMP FOR JOY! Photo Project

An inspiring international project focused on play, fun, and the positive in our lives, JUMP FOR JOY! presents Eyoälha Baker’s vision of a world united by our expression of joy. Eyoälha has taken nearly all the images on her blog — with the exception of the photos of her. Her jumping subjects are captured in locations around the world: at the beach in Kauai, at a park in Vancouver, or even between city skyscrapers . . . while holding a ninja sword! We love how she showcases the beauty of the human spirit — in mid-air.

A Year of Reading the World

In 2012, writer and editor Ann Morgan planned to read her way around as many of the globe’s 196 independent countries as she could, sampling one book from every nation. The result? Her thoughtful, sophisticated blog, A Year of Reading the World. In each post, she focuses on a particular book and digs into the country’s history and culture. Recent places included Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, and the Maldives.

Hope Street

Hope Street

Kurt Blumenau’s grandfather kept month-to-month calendars — 15 years’ worth! — on which he recorded significant events that affected him, such as the flight of Apollo 17.

These calendars remain in Kurt’s family, and each Monday on his blog, Hope Street, Kurt picks an interesting calendar entry and writes something about it. ”It might be a reflection on my grandfather’s life,” writes Kurt, “or my family’s history and tradition . . . or American life of the 1960s and 1970s . . . or my own life today.”

The blog celebrates his grandfather and family and is a unique, thoughtful project of personal and American history.

Sketches From Memory

We admire the sketch-a-day regimen of comic artist Chuck Cottrell. Chuck posts simple sketches to mini comic strips, mostly in black and white (with some random yet effective bursts of color). We recommend you dive in, as he lets readers in to his personal world — including sharing stories of married life — in a fun, candid way.

Ian Spagnolo Photography

Outdoor landscapes. Dramatic long exposure shots of the sea. Light painting sessions. Follow photographer Ian Spagnolo‘s “365 Project” to sample his work, especially if you enjoy seeing a photographer play around with exposure, light, and other elements. Ian is from Coffs Harbour, a coastal city in New South Wales, Australia, which means he certainly won’t run out of stunning subject matter to shoot.

52 Brand New

52 Brand New

For 2012, the personable blogger behind 52 Brand New promised to try 52 new experiences with her children, from tasting new cuisines to attending a family yoga class to collecting rocks. In each “new experience,” she includes playful Polaroid-style images and links to other experiences her family has undertaken, as well as external resources offering ideas for family activities. 52 Brand New is a fresh, creative take on a parenting blog.

Instamatic Gratification

A daily photoblog, Instamatic Gratification succeeds because of its simple and focused approach: one image per day. (We also love the daily quotes that accompany each photograph.) In January 2010, Caryn launched the blog and successfully posted 365 images in that first year. In 2011, she wasn’t quite as diligent, so this year, she decided to challenge herself once again. She writes: “I’ve come to realize that, for me anyway, quantity (or rather the consistency of daily practice) is the surest and most direct route to quality.” We totally agree!

Dar’s 52 Mondays Blog

Dar’s “52 Mondays” project compiles photographs as well as her thoughts on nature, art, education, creativity, and more — a space in which she can share her ideas in one place. We appreciate her weekly dedication to “make Mondays more marvelous,” and think her approach is inspiring.

Since the New Year is just around the corner, we encourage you to start your own 365-day or 52-week project in January. If you have big, exciting plans for your site in 2013, let us know in the comments.

Happy New Year!

If you had any doubt that WordPress.com makes a great online home for your band, the range of artists who are now using it to promote their work and grow their fan base should put that to rest.  New musicians are signing on every day, making WordPress.com the go-to for artists who want sleek, functional, engaging sites without investing a ton of money or time.

Here are just a few of the acts who are taking advantage of features like the gig calendar and embedded tracks from SoundCloud and Bandcamp.  They’re all using the Soundcheck theme, developed specifically for musicians, but they’ve used custom touches to build sites with unique looks and personality.

Tae Phoenix is a Seattle-based singer-songwriter who recently released her first album, Rise. Her site takes full advantage of everything WordPress.com and the Soundcheck theme have to offer, with embedded audio and video, a tour calendar, her Twitter feed, links to her new album, and press mentions. She’s lightened up the basic Soundcheck color scheme with a bold header image that echoes her album cover, and her first single is front and center on the home page, ready to be heard.  Her site is polished, professional, and ready for the big time — just like her.

Finnish DJ Radical Effect is a 180 from our Seattle singer-songwriter, and it shows. He uses his WordPress.com site to support the October release of his debut single and his quest to “conquer the Finnish nightlife.” A rotating selection of header images gives the site its industrial feel, while a more washed-out palette creates a chill, laid-back vibe. In addition to the music-specific features, Radical Effect also houses a blog on the site, to post news and give fans insight into his creative process.

Canadian pop-punk outfit Letterbomb proves that you’ve never too young to rock — already performing together for three years, they range in age from 14 to 18. They’ve given their site a youthful edge with a moody color scheme, the repeated use of their bulls-eye logo, and plenty of photos. Their newest track is embedded on every page, begging to be heard, and plenty of links let fans buy music and merch. And as they grow, their WordPress.com site can grow with them, giving them more space for music and video and helping them keep track of tour dates.

Fifteen-year-old twins and Oklahoma natives Grace and Sophia chose WordPress.com to build the site that supports their growing careers as folk singer-songwriters. A colorful yet muted palette, capped off with custom header images and a craft-inspired background, give the site its personality. They’ve added social media sharing buttons to the main navigation bar, encouraging their fans to connect with them across a variety of platforms.

These four artists have opted for the new premium Soundcheck theme, but there are 200+ themes available on WordPress.com, many of which — like Oxygen (a freebie!), Shelf, and Debut — were either designed for or lend themselves well to music sites. With affordable upgrades like custom design, your band’s own URL, and plenty of storage space for your music and videos (coupled with WordPress.com standards, like rock-solid security, unlimited bandwith, and the world’s best Support team), making WordPress.com your band’s online home is a no-brainer.

Is there an act you love on WordPress.com? Share a link in the comments!

Following the recent notifications refresh, we’re super excited to announce that you can now get comment Push Notifications on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Stay connected to your blog and moderate incoming comments wherever you happen to be at the time.

Push Notifications
WordPress.com contributes to many Open Source WordPress apps, and we recently enabled notifications for the WordPress for iOS app. As soon as you get a new comment on posts you’ve published, a notification is sent to your phone. You will see the name of the commenter as well as a short excerpt of the comment, as much as we can fit. Swipe over the notification to view the comment.

We’ve also added a new “Swipe-to-moderate” feature in the comments list. This enables you to quickly Approve/Unapprove, Trash, Spam, and reply to new comments – it’s all just a swipe away. Of course you can still tap Edit to bulk moderate comments and tap the comment to view it in all its glory. In the detailed view you’ll see the post they commented on, their Name, Email, and URL, as well as an array of buttons for simple moderation.

Read Blogs on the Go
Did you also know that you can read your friends’ blogs with the app? When you open WordPress for iOS, tap “Read” to launch the mobile version of the Reader. You can read up on blogs you follow, see posts you’ve Liked, browse Freshly Pressed, and peruse popular Topics to find new sources of inspiration. When you find something interesting, you can Like or Reblog it to your own blog. You can even comment on posts you find right on your phone. And here’s the best part: it’s all synced back to your regular Reader.

Of course it’s also a great way to share quick photos when you’re out and about, write a post or two, update your About page, and check your daily Stats. It’s like having a mini-version of your blog in your pocket.

Get the Update
Already have WordPress for iOS installed on your phone? All you need to do to get Push Notifications is to update to the latest version and allow the app to send you notifications when asked.

New to WordPress for iOS? No problem, you can learn more about the app on its website, or click here to download WordPress for iOS directly! WordPress for iOS is available in most common languages and works on all newer iOS devices.

What’s Next?
This is the first time we’ve enabled Push Notifications in the iOS app, and we’ll continue to add more notification options so you’ll be able to have a full WordPress.com experience from your device. We’ll also make sure you get the notifications you want, when you want them. You’ll be able to toggle what Push Notifications you want to receive and which ones you’d rather not get notified about.

Learn more about the app and what’s next on the WordPress for iOS Blog, and make sure to follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter to get the latest news first.

So, hurry up and update your WordPress for iOS app to the latest version, and start using those notifi

Say hello to the future of reading on the web. We’re happy to introduce a new feature for WordPress.com home pages: infinite scrolling.

Speed and performance are key on the modern web: new content loads in quickly without a full page reload. Instead of the old way of navigating down a page by scrolling and then clicking a link to get to the next page, waiting for a page refresh — the document model of the web — infinite scrolling pulls the next set of posts automatically into view when the reader approaches the bottom of the page, more like an application.

See this in action on Matt on Not-WordPress—Matt’s moblog. When you get to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a loading icon display briefly as the next posts load below.

Back? Now that you are drooling along with the rest of us at the wondrous food photos he posts there daily, you’ve experienced the power of reading without clicking “next”—it means reading through many posts without friction. Imagine your visitors doing the same with your content. Pretty cool, eh?

We’ve taken care of the details like integrating with your theme design as seamlessly as possible and supporting sites with footer widgets. We’ve also refined the basic footer appearance; as you scroll down a subtle footer pops up containing your blog title, which readers can click to scroll back up.

Many of you have already seen this in action on your site. To those of you who’ve sent in feedback, thank you—we’ve incorporated your suggestions to improve the experience. The metrics from infinite scrolling are conclusive: people are reading more posts and spending more time on your sites. As you might guess, people are more likely to just scroll down than they were to click the old style links—the new way is faster and better.

If you prefer the old-school way, and disable the feature in Settings → Reading, you’ll instead see a “Load more posts” button at the bottom of the page, which loads the next available content quickly after the button is clicked—avoiding a full, slow page reload.

We’ve also automatically enabled the click-to-load button for blogs where there might be important information in footer widgets, so your visitors always have access to the entirety of your content. The number of posts loaded with the button can be changed in your “Blog pages show at most” reading setting. Learn more about the settings.

Infinite scrolling is already enabled for over 30 themes to date, and in the coming weeks we’ll be rolling it out to the rest of our themes.

Now to investigate how to make ourselves a neverending breakfast—that would be amazing, too.