New to blogging? A new session of our introductory blogging course starts on Monday, January 5 — and all bloggers are welcome, whether you blog on WordPress.com, a self-hosted WordPress blog, or somewhere else entirely.

Blogging 101 is four weeks of daily bite-size assignments that take you from “Blog?” to “Blog!” — along with a supportive community to encourage you all the way through. At the end of the course, you’ll have a blog you’re proud and excited to publish, and that others are excited to read.
Here’s how it works:

• Assignments fall into three broad categories — publishing posts and pages, customizing your blog, and engaging with the community — and are designed to build on one another.
• We’ll post a new assignment here on The Daily Post each weekday at 12AM GMT. Each assignment will contain all the inspiration and instructions you need to complete it. Weekends are free (but we’ll suggest some ways you might want to spend them).
• Participants will have a private community site, the Commons, for chatting, connecting, and seeking feedback and support. Daily Post staff and Happiness Engineers will be on hand to answer your questions and offer guidance and resources.

You’ll walk away with six (or more!) published posts and a handful of drafts, a customized theme that reflects your personality, a small but growing audience, a good grasp of blogging etiquette — and a bunch of new online friends.

My blog has gone from being dull and plain to having widgets and all this shmancy tech stuff, and from having almost no followers to having a loyal following now!
– Microgalactic

Ready to kick start your blog? Sign up by filling out this simple form:

Registration is closed, but Blogging 101 will be back in February!

Note: you won’t receive an automated confirmation email immediately, but you will get a welcome email with complete instructions prior to the start of the course.

We’re excited to introduce Radcliffe, a crisp new free theme.

Radcliffe is a contemporary responsive theme with beautiful typography. It puts your content in the forefront, featuring gorgeous full-width header images.

Learn more about Radcliffe at the Theme Showcase, or preview it by going to Appearance → Themes.

We’re back with another collection of our favorite stories from across all of WordPress! You can find our past collections here — and you can follow Longreads on WordPress.com for more daily reading recommendations.

Publishers, writers, keep those stories coming: share links to essays and interviews (over 1,500 words) on Twitter (#longreads) and WordPress.com by tagging your posts longreads.

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1. What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Making (Tim Maly, Quiet Babylon)

After a successful “creators’ conference” in Portland, Maly asks some tough questions about whether the creators are taking into account the factories and anonymous services that help them succeed in the first place.

2. The Secret Life of Max Stern (Sara Angel, The Walrus)

The Nazis stole his family’s paintings. He emigrated to Canada and became one of the country’s foremost gallery owners. And now, twenty years after his death, he is changing the rules of restitution.

3. Interview: Vanessa Grigoriadis on Writing Fast, Putting Stories Away, and Documentary-Style Writing (Meagan Flynn, Beyond the New Yorker)

Journalist Meagan Flynn chats with New York Magazine and Rolling Stone writer Vanessa Grigoriadis:

I just really try to write fast. And I think it’s so much better for my writing. When I used to agonize over every sentence and every section, the stories were so much worse. My problem is, if the content is not interesting to me, I don’t want to go back and revise it.

4. Wasting Our Time (Jenny Diski)

The London Review of Books writer reflects on childhood diversion:

In spite of The Poet and me being pretty old, we’re still young enough to remember from our childhood being told off for watching too much television and not, like the parents, making our own entertainment.

5. Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Spreadsheet (Chadwick Matlin, FiveThirtyEight)

How Christian Rudder, the 39-year-old president and co-founder of the online dating site OKCupid, found himself at the intersection of dating and Big Data.

6. The Last Amazon (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker)

The little-known story behind Wonder Woman’s origins:

Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly.

7. Blind Curve (Debbie Hagan, Brain, Child)

A mother visits her young son in a psychiatric ward:

Kids with mental illness stand out profoundly, and, thus, become bullying targets. That’s why Connor is a victim no matter where he goes—even here.

8. The Lightning Rod (Molly Petrilla, The Pennsylvania Gazette)

Dr. Robert Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells. He also lives alone on his own island, collects dinosaur bones, and is often the subject of Good Will Hunting comparisons.

9. How to Teach a Young Introvert (Kate Torgovnick May, TED)

A conversation with Susan Cain, who speaks out about what we need to do to make classrooms more accommodating for introverted students.

10. The Women of ENIAC (Walter Isaacson, Fortune)

A look back at the pioneering group of women who worked on one of the earliest computers:

Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: “Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer.”

* * *

Photo: dennissylvesterhurd, Flickr

Join us as we explore the world through the street photography tag on WordPress.com. Here you’ll find no airport lineups, no grumpy customs agents, and you never get the middle seat.

On belgianstreets, photographer Andy Townend recently shot “stripfeest,” an annual comics festival held in Brussels, Belgium. We loved how Andy captures this young reader fully ensconced in his comic book. An avid photographer, Andy is also a regular contributor to The Daily Post‘s Weekly Photo Challenge.

Photo by Andy Townend

We were intrigued by the untold stories in Michael Wilson’s photo, “the flower seller,” on his site, BrooklynBystander. Taken in Adelaide, South Australia, the photo below documents a brief moment of commerce. We look at it and wonder: who is it that these gentlemen bought flowers for — perhaps a friend, a relative, a lover, or maybe themselves?

Photo by Michael Wilson

Speaking of untold stories, the following moment of domesticity in the middle distance at Plebs Street Photography caught our eye. A woman, and a man working on a laptop, are both enjoying a bit of stolen warmth during Copenhagen Indian Summer. What is she doing? What is he working on? We love the way this photo allows us to imagine their story.

Photo by Plebs Street Photography

Matt Weber, a photographer who has documented New York City’s fleeting moments for the last 25 years, captured this subway performer’s serious glare and the polarizing effect this “subterranean gymnast” had on the passengers around him. If you were on this train car, would you be appreciative or apathetic?

Photo by Matt Weber

Another quick spin through the WordPress.com Reader takes us from New York City’s subway to the following quiet moment in Venice, Italy, courtesy of photographer Kyra Betteridge. Kyra captured these gondola drivers in repose, as they waited for their next customers. We love how the light in this photograph draws your eye directly to the drivers, in their bright, striped shirts. Check out more of Kyra’s work on her site, Kyra Betteridge Photography.

Photo by Kyra Betteridge

At Life is a Vacation, Sangeeta wrestles with her emotions over the following photograph she took in Mandu, India, post-monsoon. The elderly woman struggling up the muddy, slippery incline reminded Sangeeta of her own nonagenarian grandmother.

Photo by Sangeeta

Jessica Heckinger Nowak captures a different sort of solitude in this image of an accordion player in the streets of Paris, France. We love how if you focus your gaze on the player, the graffiti scribbled across the low wall resembles the flurry of musical notes we imagine emanating from his accordion. Interested in seeing more? Check out Jessica’s work at National Geographic.

Photo by Jessica Heckinger Nowak

Finally, we couldn’t resist these two cats in full relaxation mode in Athens, Greece, courtesy of the the blogger behind evinaseyes.

Photo by evinaseyes

Tour the world from the comfort of your favorite comfy chair, courtesy of the photographers who share their work on WordPress.com. For more, take a spin through the street photography tag in your Reader.

Last year, we looked at the art and science of getting good WordPress support.

Now, let’s jump into some of the more advanced troubleshooting techniques you can use to tackle the trickier problems you might come up against.

Have you heard the old joke:

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Then don’t do that!

With advanced troubleshooting it’s exactly the opposite! You want to be able to reliably reproduce your symptoms. Knowing exactly how to recreate the problem will be a huge help in figuring out how to fix it.

Your visual editor isn’t loading! You can’t drag-and-drop widgets! Your sticky posts aren’t sticking!

Finding the cause of a WordPress.com problem is like detective work. You look for clues. You find likely suspects. You narrow down the perpetrators.

The first question to usually ask yourself is: What did I change most recently? Undoing your last action very often finds the culprit immediately. But sometimes it’s not that easy, and you need to roll up your sleeves and hunker down in troubleshooting mode.

Most problems fall into one of several distinct buckets. With experience you’ll start to guess which bucket yours falls into. Let’s look at them.

Theme

You can rule out a theme-specific issue quickly by temporarily switching to a different theme. Picking a rigorously-tested default WordPress theme like Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen, or Twenty Fourteen is a good bet. If you don’t see the problem with one of those, you know the issue is likely related to your theme.

Heads-up: once you switch back to your original theme, you may need to reset theme-specific settings under Appearance → Theme Options, or Appearance → Customize → Theme Options. If you have custom CSS, you may need to restore it from your revisions.

Post

Sometimes the content of a specific post is enough to mess up your site. Often, this happens if you paste content from another program, like Word or an email app, without turning it into plain text first. A typical sign of bad code in a post is that your sidebar has dropped below the rest of your page content. It can be tricky to figure out which post is causing the problem, but one way to troubleshoot is to temporarily set your blog to display one post at a time and turn off Infinite Scroll, both under Settings → Reading. Now you can easily navigate through one post at a time until you find the culprit.

If you’re comfortable looking at HTML code, you can also try validating your site’s HTML using a tool like the W3C markup validator. It can show a stray or unclosed tag that’s throwing your layout off.

Heads-up: if you paste plain text into the post editor, be sure to add back formatting and links using the buttons in the Visual Editor.

Custom CSS

The ability to add your own custom CSS opens the doors to a huge array of customizations you can make to your site.

If you suspect some CSS might be picking a fight with your site, try removing all your custom CSS temporarily. If your problem goes away, then you know the culprit is living somewhere in your CSS. Add back one or two CSS styles at a time, checking your site after each bit, until you find the culprit.

Browser

Very often, an issue is specific to one Web browser. Fortunately, verifying this kind of problem is pretty easy to do, and doesn’t require touching your site. All you need to do is check your site in another browser. It’s always a good idea to have at least two or three popular browsers installed on your computer to make sure your site looks right, since not everyone uses the same browser as you. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari (for Mac) and Internet Explorer (for Windows) are popular browsers. You can quickly find the latest versions over at Browse Happy.

If you do see that the issue is only happening on one browser, what then?

Browser Cache

Clearing your browser cache as a solution to all woes is a bit of an inside joke within tech-support circles, akin to asking someone to turn their computer on and off. Here’s the thing: it often works!

So, what does clearing your cache actually do?

Browsers save files from sites you’ve already visited to make it quicker to load it the next time. But sometimes those files didn’t get loaded fully, and may prevent the site from working properly in the future.

Clearing the cache is like cleaning off your plate before putting more food on it. You won’t taste garlic on your chocolate cake if you clean it in between courses!

Browser Extensions/Add-ons/Plugins

Many people run extensions, plugins, or add-ons to add extra bells and whistles to their browser. They sometimes interfere with the proper display or functioning of your site – for example, an ad-blocking extension might mistakenly see a banner on your site as an ad, and hide it.

Turning off all browser extensions to see if your issue goes away is a quick way to rule them out as the cause. If the problem does disappear, you can turn them back on one at a time to find the culprit.

In some browsers like Firefox you can turn off all extras quickly by running the browser in “safe mode” – this temporarily returns your browser to a basic state by deactivating all the fancy stuff.

Heads-up: remember to reactivate your browser extensions after you’re finished troubleshooting.

Browser Cookies

Removing individual browser cookies just for your WordPress.com site can sometimes solve a sticky issue, particularly those related to login problems.

Setting your browser to not accept third-party cookies can also cause issues, particularly when previewing posts on a site with a mapped domain.

Heads-up: Try to avoid clearing all cookies, since this can remove saved login info for all sites you regularly visit. Most browsers let you pick and choose which specific cookies you want to clear.

Platform and Operating System

Remember that not everyone uses the same platform you do – there are all manner of Macs, PCs, Linux, Android, and iOS devices floating around. Sometimes a site will work fine everywhere except one particular OS – say, iOS 7.0.4 on iPad minis. Knowing on which specific setup your site is running into trouble can be a huge help.

For example, some older versions of Internet Explorer don’t support responsive-first design techniques, so more recently crafted themes designed to look good on mobile platforms simply aren’t going to display properly.

Heads-up: remember to tell support staff on what platform and OS you saw an issue, particularly if it’s a mobile OS. If you’re not sure what operating system you’re running, visit Support Details.

Security Software ­

Some anti-virus and other security software can interfere with the proper display of sites, whether it’s blocking images or not connecting with WordPress.com’s servers at all. This sometimes crops up at large organizations that aggressively restrict what sites can be viewed by their employees. Try varying where you view your site, whether it’s home/office/school/library. If you can, try turning off your security software temporarily to see if the problem persists.

Heads-up: remember to reactivate your security software after testing.

Computer

Sometimes an issue is specific to the settings on one machine. Think about whether you recently changed anything on your computer? Did you upgrade the operating system? Install anti-virus software? Fiddle with your network settings? Change them back to how they were before and see if your site issue goes away. Try your site on another computer – ask a friend or colleague, visit the library, or make a pilgrimage to the Apple Store.

Heads-up: if you have both a laptop and desktop machine, test your site on both.

Network

I won’t lie. Networking issues can be some of the trickiest ones to diagnose and fix. Often they affect not only your site, but all sites running on WordPress.com.

Symptoms of possible network-related issues include a slowly-loading site, certain elements not loading at all, or images looking fuzzy.

Suspected network issues can require a bit of work on your end to get support staff the information we need to get to the bottom of the cause. We may ask you to so something that might be a little scary-sounding, like run a traceroute or check the JavaScript console – but don’t worry, we have guides on how to do those things and we’ll walk you through it if you have any trouble.

Heads-up: Be sure to provide all the information you’re asked for by support staff. It may seem like a lot, but the more complete your info, the more efficiently we’ll be able to help you.

The more troubleshooting you do, the easier it gets to recognize potential causes of different kinds of issues – and their solutions. A great way to get experience is by moseying through the WordPress.com support forums regularly and watching how experienced volunteers and staff help others. Once you’ve dipped your toes in, try answering few questions yourself. You’ll probably discover you know more than you think!

Scott Berkun is the author of four previous books and a sought-after speaker. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, National Public Radio, and The Huffington Post. From 2010 to 2012 Scott led Team …

Happy Theme Thursday, all! Today I have two fantastic new themes for you to enjoy.

First up is Newsworthy by WP Themes, a brightly-hued theme designed for news, magazine, and personal blogs. Its striking colors are sure to grab your readers’ attention at first glance! Newsworthy supports multiple authors, post formats, widgets, custom colors, and custom headers.

Check out Newsworthy on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site by going to Appearance → Themes.

Next is Visual, a dark, elegant grid theme by Devin Price. The responsive layout allows for a seamless user experience across all screen sizes, and the clean, subdued design makes it perfect for putting your art or photography front-and-center.

Read more about Visual on the Theme Showcase, or activate it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes.

Though nothing stays still for long with WordPress, the design of your blog’s dashboard hasn’t changed much lately. While we’ve added new features and made some adjustments along the way, the dashboard has been looking forward to a refresh for some time. With that in mind, seven weeks ago, a scrappy gang of web designers and developers teamed up to explore how to do just that. We asked ourselves the question: “What should a modern version of WordPress look like?” We decided that:

• It should have a simple, uncluttered design; free of excessive decoration and focused on your content.
• It should use webfonts for beautiful, legible typography that’s consistent in every browser.
• It should have a responsive design that’s tailored to PCs, tablets and smartphones.
• It should do all this while retaining the familiar, user-tested dashboard interface that millions of users already understand.

We’ve drawn new icons, increased contrast and font size, and generally modernized the design from top to bottom. We’re still working on it, but you can preview it starting today! To step into the future, head over to Users → Personal Settings in your blog’s dashboard and check “Enable experimental admin design (MP6),” then Save Changes.

We’d love to have you preview the new design and let us know what you think. You can use this feedback form to send us your ideas. Since it’s a work in progress, you may see some things that don’t look quite right or aren’t working just yet. You can instantly switch back and forth between the new and old dashboard design during this test period. We’ll switch on the new design for everyone later this year.

If you’d like to learn more about how the new design was created, or you’re a designer or developer who would like to contribute, please join us on the Make WordPress UI blog.

Happy Theme Thursday! I’d like to introduce you to our newest free theme, Adelle. I hope you’ll make her feel welcome.

Adelle Front Page

Designed by BluChic, Adelle would love to adorn your blog. It doesn’t matter what you write about — technology, arts, crafts, food, fashion  — Adelle can handle it, with elegance and sophistication.

Adelle comes with some great features — a right sidebar for widgets, a full-width page, and support for post formats. She also knows that you like to stay connected with your friends, so she’ll display optional links to your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube at the top of the sidebar.

Adelle is responsive — she knows that your readers may visit your site on their smartphone or tablet, so she’s flexible enough to look good no matter where she’s viewed.

Sound like a theme you’d like to get to know? Read more on the theme showcase, or go ahead and see her in action.

Have fun!

You know what I love? The sound of the first pitch on Opening Day.

As a huge baseball fan, I’m thrilled about the start of the season, and as a WordPresser, I love the Major League Baseball themes — Fan, Modern, and Retro — that you can activate on your own blog to get you in the spirit of the game.

Fan is loud and vibrant — the online equivalent of waving your rally rag in the air.

Modern is classic, offering a more minimal look so your content is front and center, ready for any curveballs thrown its way.

Retro is a throwback to old Major League Baseball logos, for nostalgic fans and bloggers who want to give their sites a proper old-school look.

You can customize each of these MLB themes with your favorite team’s logo and colors, so whether you’re a Red Sox, Yankees, or Giants fan — we’ve got the right theme to get your fans cheering.

To get started, head over to the Theme Showcase to activate one of these themes.

In your dashboard, go to Appearance → Theme Options to select your team.

Hit the road with some MLB blogs

Follow some of your favorite players, managers, and commentators! Here are some blogs to check out:

• Hot Stove: The latest news in the baseball world from MLB.com reporters.
• Brandon and Brandon: The blog of Giants first baseman Brandon Belt and Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford, both in their third major league seasons with the current World Series champions.
• From the Corner of Edgar and Dave: A beyond-the-headlines look at the Seattle Mariners.
• Phillies Insider: Notes, quotes, and anecdotes from Larry Shenk at the Phillies.
• Ozzie Speaks: The blog of former shortshop and manager Ozzie Guillen.
• Dodgers Photog Blog: The blog of Jon Soo Hoo, the official photographer of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
• Baseball Nerd: The blog of commentator Keith Olbermann.

Want more? Browse the top 100 MLB.com blogs.

Let’s play ball!

Every year the WordPress team proudly unveils a new default theme, increasing by one the collection now known affectionately as the Twenty Somethings. Serving as the flagship theme for a year, it has big shoes to fill. The theme should work well for a blog or a website, be carefully crafted under-the-hood to support essential WordPress features, and—of course—it should be aesthetically pleasing and exciting.

Say hello to the new default WordPress theme for 2012.

Twenty Twelve is an elegant, readable, and fully responsive theme that makes your site content look its best on any device.

A key component of this theme is a special homepage template. Recently, it’s become even more evident that WordPress is heavily used as a content management system (CMS) with many more sites now using it to organize any kind of content rather than purely as a blog. The homepage template meets this need by allowing authors to craft a perfect introductory page—it’s the first thing visitors see. Homepage content (text, images, video, anything you’d like) lives in the upper area, and below it you can arrange specific homepage-only widgets.

What makes this theme really shine are the design details. Starting with a thoughtfully crafted mobile-first layout, Twenty Twelve is intended to be viewed on any size device from smartphones and tablets up to the latest and greatest HiDPI/retina screens. No matter how your readers decide to visit, it’ll remain usable and good-looking.

To increase readability and attractiveness, Twenty Twelve features the gorgeous Open Sans typeface. Refreshingly different from the basic web fonts of yesteryear, this font spruces up your prose and gives your content a modern, clean look.

Since I already mentioned the Twenty Somethings, I’d also like to highlight how this one is different. Here are two key departures from previous default themes.

First, you’ll see in the styling for post formats that the design remains consistent on both list and single views. Links, quotes, asides, and images that you select to be formatted as such in your post editor are shown a bit differently than standard blog posts—and they’ll retain their unique look-and-feel across your site.

Second, you’ll notice that a custom header image is not visible when you first activate the theme. Unlike Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven, this theme doesn’t come with a set of hand-chosen header images, nor does it use featured images as large banners at the top of posts and pages. A header image is supported by the theme, though this time the feature will be turned off until you choose to upload your own.

Learn all about these features and more on the Theme Showcase.

Designed by Drew Strojny and built by many hands in the WordPress community, Twenty Twelve is now available in your WordPress.com dashboard at Appearance → Themes. Self-hosted WordPress.org users will have access very soon via the WordPress.org Extend theme directory, and the new theme will be bundled with the official 3.5 software release later this year.

I hope you enjoy the new theme and the new look.

I want to let you in on a little secret: when we launched Lovebirds and Ever After almost two weeks ago, we reached 200 active themes on WordPress.com! With so many amazing new themes coming out, we thought it was time for an overhaul of the Theme Showcase.

More Visual

I always judge books by their covers and themes by their screenshots, but the old Theme Showcase’s tiny screenshots made that last one really hard. That problem is now just a fading memory:

And, like everything on WordPress.com these days, these screenshots are HiDPI/retina-ready!

Faster

We now only show the first 20 or so results, loading more as needed with Infinite Scroll. This, and a bunch of other behind-the-scenes improvements will keep things nice and snappy while you look for the perfect theme for your blog. To top it off, all your searches and filters are quickly returned on the same page.

Happy theme browsing, and here’s to the next 200 themes!

Looking for a new and exciting way to share your images with the world? Well, look no further! Avid is an innovative premium theme for photographers from The Theme Foundry. With a unique photoblog layout, beautiful gallery, and retina-optimized interface, Avid makes it easy to share all of your snapshots, photographs, and creative work.

Every detail of Avid is carefully crafted with photographers in mind. Avid gives you the power to quickly and easily showcase your images, galleries, videos, and blog posts in a beautiful, responsive layout. Read more about Avid in the Theme Showcase and then take it for a test spin by visiting the live demo.

Avid was designed by Dave Ruiz of Foundation Six.

We’ve made a minor change to the dashboard menu to help tidy things up a little.

We figured that the Polls and Ratings menus were taking up too much space as top-level menu options. So we decided to move both Polls and Ratings under Feedbacks to minimise the amount of dashboard space these options take.

Poll settings are now under Settings->Polls.

Rating settings are now under Settings->Ratings.

Custom poll styles are now accessed via the poll editor.

We hope this update will make the dashboard a little more streamlined for you this summer.

We’ve just released two improvements that will make WordPress.com even more efficient for you, leaving you more time to create content.

Site Stats

If you get a lot of traffic to your blog, your stats were sometimes slow to load.  We know you like to look at your stats often, think about how all those seconds added up.  Now, your main stats page loads all of its data in parallel:

This loads your whole stats page two to three times faster, which means less time spent staring at a spinner and more time for interacting with your readers and creating content.

Of course, if you’re a Jetpack user, you can partake in the speedy stats goodness on your WordPress.com stats page as well!

Toolbar Notifications

We’ve made your Toolbar Notifications faster to interact with also. Now you can navigate the Notifications menu from your keyboard.

Keys:

• n : Open/Close the notifications menu (make sure you aren’t currently typing in a text box first).
• j / k (or up and down arrows) : Navigate through your notifications
• r : Start replying to a comment notification.
• a : Approve/Unapprove a comment.
• s : Mark as Spam/Unspam a comment.
• t : Trash/Untrash a comment.

If you’re logged in, hit n now and try it out.

At the beginning of 2012, we launched our wedding theme Forever and let you in on how you can use WordPress to document and share your wedding experience with your friends and family. Now we’re doing it again. Get the rose petals and bubbles ready, here come our two new wedding themes, Lovebirds and Ever After.

Lovebirds, a sweet theme with whimsical illustrations by our very own Caroline Moore, allows you to inform your guests about your journey and upcoming celebration — in style.

The lovely cursive font adds just the right amount of garnish to the clean layout, providing you with a beautiful, clear frame in which to tell your story. Where did you meet? How did the proposal occur? Who’s in the wedding party? Where will the wedding take place? Spare none of the details! Take the demo for a spin or learn more about Lovebirds on the Theme Showcase.

Next up, we have Ever After, designed by Takashi Irie, another one of our own. Ever After makes effective use of subtle textures and ornaments to add elegance and grace to your wedding site.

Ever After’s wide, one-column layout is ideal for sharing photos and videos of your wedding, in addition to all of the details surrounding your special day. It can transform your site into an online wedding album as you relive the memories of your wedding and subsequent journey, hopefully to end with a happily…ever after. As usual, take a look at the demo, and read more about the theme on the Showcase.

Personalization
Lovebirds and Ever After both feature a responsive layout that resizes to fit smaller screens, ensuring that your guests stay informed even on the go. Personalize your site with your own custom header and background images. If you want even more customization, our Custom Design upgrade gives you access to oodles of fonts, unique color palettes, and a custom CSS editor — all the tools you need to create a look that matches your wedding.

Our new wedding themes also allow you to add an RSVP form, a guestbook Page template, and our special Milestone widget that shows how much time remains before the Big Day!

Introducing Weddings.WordPress.com

Now that we have 3 themes for weddings, we wanted to show them off and show how easy it is to use WordPress for your wedding, all in one place.

Visit weddings.wordpress.com to learn about all of our features, and to sign up for a free wedding site today, using one of our wedding themes. We hope this will be a great resource for you.

Have you been paying attention to all the hubbub online about the proposed U.S. legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that threatens internet freedom? I wrote about it last week over on WordPress.org, but the gist is this: there’s a bill in the U.S. Senate that if passed would put publishing freedom severely at risk, and could shut down entire sites at the whim of media companies. Fight for the Future created this nifty video to sum it up better than I can.

On January 18, 2012, sites all over the internet will be blacking out to protest and try to mobilize more people to speak out against this bill coming up in the Senate next week — S. 968: the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — in an attempt to let U.S. lawmakers know how much opposition there is. WordPress.org, Wikipedia, and even WordPress.com VIP I Can Has Cheezburger? will be participating in the blackout to raise awareness and spur you to action.

Here on WordPress.com, we want to participate as well. Freshly Pressed will be blacked out during the strike.

Sorry to take away your daily fix of yummy web content, but this bill threatens to do that on a much wider scale. You don’t want that, do you?

More importantly, we are making it possible for you to participate in the protest. There are two options: a “Stop Censorship” ribbon and a full blackout. The blackout portion will be in effect January 18 from 8am to 8pm EST, while the ribbon will be displayed until January 24. Here’s how to join in:

1. Go to Settings → Protest SOPA/PIPA in your dashboard.
2. Select if you want to join the blackout or show a ribbon.
3. If you choose to join the blackout, you can edit the message that will be shown on your site during the blackout.
4. Preview what your protest will look like.
5. Click “Save Changes” button to activate your protest.

That’s it! Easy-peasy activism right at your fingertips.

The “Stop Censorship” ribbon will display in the upper corner of your site and links to americancensorship.org. It will display until January 24, 2012 (the Senate vote date).

If you choose to do the blackout in addition to the ribbon, then we will black out your site from 8am to 8pm EST along with the official strike. You can customize the message that will appear on your blacked-out site to tell people why this issue is important to you. Your site will return to just displaying the ribbon after the strike is over.

I hope that a significant number of you on WordPress.com will join in this protest. Publishing freedom is a right we must protect.

And one last pitch: whatever you decide to do about your site, please take a few minutes to head over to americancensorship.org and take action. It only takes a few moments of your time to be an agent of change!

Update, 1/18/2012: For about an hour and a half of the blackout, our blackout option was down because it was not showing the blackout screen and some sites were returning blank error pages. We disabled it until we could make it work properly, which it is now doing, so anyone who chose the blackout option should now see the corr