Since 2004, WordPress has set out with an ambitious goal in mind — to democratize publishing and put state-of-the-art tools in front of publishers both large and small across the planet. We believe strongly in this vision because when more people have access to powerful tools on the web, that in-turn empowers them to do great things and publish amazing content. We feel the same way when it comes to democratizing, well, democracy — and in just a few weeks, citizens across the United States will have a unique opportunity to flex their political muscle and vote in the 2014 Midterm Elections.

For our part, we want to provide our US-based users a set of resources to help them make a smart, informed decision when it comes to who they will vote for. We also want to provide a toolkit so that they can get more information on where to vote, which issues are at stake and of course, after voting occurs, a way to show their pride and encourage others to go get out the vote.

We’ve teamed up with the good folks from The Pew Charitable Trusts, who, along with Google, and election officials nationwide, have developed the The Voting Information Project (VIP). Together, we’re offering cutting-edge tools that give voters access to the customized information they need to cast a ballot on or before Election Day. The Voting Information Project is offering free apps and tools that provide polling place locations and ballot information for the 2014 election across a range of technology platforms. The project provides official election information to voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and voters can find answers to common questions such as “Where is my polling location?” and “What’s on my ballot?” through the convenience of their phone or by searching the web.

The only way a set of resources will be effective is if they make it into the right hands, so if you’re eligible to vote in the US Midterm Elections, take advantage of these tools and share them with your readers.

It’s super easy using the [voterinfotool] shortcode. Just create a new post or page and drop the shortcode in (or click here to create a new draft with the embed prefilled). If you want to customize the experience a bit more you can drop in code directly from the Voter Information Tool with options like height, width, and colors and we’ll convert it to a proper embed code.

After you vote, either by mail, or in early voting, OR on Election Day, please embed the I Voted badge into your WordPress.com site or blog and share it with your audience, along with friends throughout your social network. Here’s how to install the I Voted badge:

1. Go to your blog’s dashboard.
2. Look under the Appearance menu for the “Widgets” option.
3. Locate the “I Voted” widget and drag it to the sidebar of your choosing.
4. Give the widget a title (optional) and hit the save button. Your badge will now be displayed for all your readers to see.

Voting is our most fundamental responsibility as citizens — without it, our American democracy wouldn’t exist. WordPress.com is a platform that gives everyday people the ability to share their voice and we’re asking you to take advantage of this voice — by exercising your right to vote. We’re asking you for your help to spread the word, encourage participation and get out the vote on November 4th, 2014.

If you have any questions, please let them in the comments and we’ll be sure you help wherever we can. Thanks!

Here’s the latest collection of our favorite stories from writers and publishers across all of WordPress. You can find our past collections here — and you can follow Longreads on WordPress.com for more daily reading recommendations.

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

* * *

1. Criticism and Self-Criticism (S. Li, The Kenyon Review)

Li, an associate professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology in Nanjing, China, recalls being forced by a teacher to criticize her best friend as an adolescent. “Criticism and self-criticism were required practices in every socialist social unit,” Li explains. “In the village school I attended, they took the form of trimester reports constituted by two parts: class criticism of each student and each student’s self-criticism.”

2. A Letter to Mitchell Browne, ‘Why Should Artists at Work Fund Idlers at Art?’ (Dave Lamb, School for Birds)

A Melbourne-based artist’s open letter to a journalist on eliminating arts funding: “The very best art will tell us not just who we are, but who everyone is, and will allow us to accept and understand not just what makes us different but what makes us unalterably the same.”

3. “I Promise to Never Forget Where I Came From” (Sean Sprague, Sportsnet)

“They just look at him as LeBron James, the kid from the neighborhood”: Dan Robson reports from Akron and Cleveland in Ohio, meeting with Lebron James’s fans, surrogate father, former coaches, and the residents who watched him grow up.

4. Elon Musk: How We’re Going to Colonize Mars (Ross Andersen, Aeon)

An in-depth interview with the SpaceX founder on how we could make it to Mars — and why it’s important for us to get there.

5. Why Gangsters Who Broke Every Law Still Went to Services on Yom Kippur (Robert Rockaway, Tablet)

Robert Rockaway on Prohibition-era Jewish mobsters, who — despite their criminal behavior — still saw religious observance as an integral part of their identity.

6. Identity In Pieces: When You Don’t Know Where You Count (Jaya Saxena, The Aerogram)

Jaya Saxena, whose mother is white and father is Indian, writes about her experience with being biracial: “You’re an intruder in either space, with no right to claim one or the other without a heavy caveat.”

7. Before the Law (Jennifer Gonnerman, The New Yorker)

The New Yorker is known for its exceptional reporting. This story, about a crippled legal system that left a 16-year-old imprisoned on Riker’s Island for three years without a trial, is particularly devastating.

8. Sirte and Misrata, Libya’s Last Battle (Clare Morgana Gillis, The American Scholar)

War journalist Clare Morgana Gillis recalls her days reporting in Libya with James Foley.

9. Who Killed Bugsy Siegel? (Amy Wallace, Los Angeles Magazine)

A family’s answer to one of America’s most famous unsolved Mob mysteries.

10. On Our Traveller Perception of a Place & Finding Alternate Stories (Jessica Lee, Road Essays)

Jessica Lee, a travel writer and author for Lonely Planet, recalls her time in the Middle East, primarily Cairo.

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Photo: Mr. Marco, Unsplash

A theme named after the decade that gave us daring teen comedies and cutting-edge synth pop was bound to be a crowd-pleaser. And indeed, in the few weeks since Eighties was released, it’s garnered tens of thousands of fans who are using it on their sites.

Eighties may have been created with personal bloggers in mind, but its balance of striking visuals and flexible design makes it a good choice for anyone looking for a memorable, easy-to-customize website. Here are some of the theme’s most noteworthy features, already expertly used by our favorite Eighties early adopters.

A bold header area

Big and Splash were both huge box-office hits in the 80s. Both can also describe the theme’s header area, a full-width visual statement that draws visitors in immediately. Case in point? paper chambers, a crisply designed site by TC Shillingford, a Philadelphia-based blogger who writes on popular culture, sports, and more. TC’s gorgeous custom header images, along with a slender, modernist custom font, immediately make the site stand out.

Bilbiolkept, a literary blog by Edwin Turner, also recently made the switch to Eighties. The theme complements the site’s thought-provoking content, featuring an ever-changing roster of header images that welcome visitors with fresh visuals every time they stop by.

Tailor-made post formats

Eighties offers several unique stylings for different types of content, including the video, quote, and status post formats. Still on Biblioklept, here’s a great use of the image post format, which gives extra oomph to pictures and photos:

Featured images you can’t miss

With Eighties, you can create a powerful visual effect when you use the featured images option. Sleepy Coffee and Fables, a photo-heavy blog by a writer passionate about travel and snail mail, displays a well-chosen photo to set a distinct mood on each post.

Here, for example, is the featured image from a post on night photography:

And another one, this time from a post about journaling:

Note that the theme has the option to display full-width featured images, too.

A clean slate

With its ample, bright white space, and endless possibilities to create bespoke designs, Eighties can be turned upside-down: from a recognizably brash theme to one that recedes into the background. A great example of the latter is the professional site of Madeleine Hawks, a doula practicing in Austin, Texas.

From her About page to the Resources page, Madeleine’s site is an exercise in minimalism — but one softened and made welcoming by handmade drawings and a cheerful color palette:

Madeleine has created a website with a static front page, so all of her content — including her contact information — is easy to find for the first-time visitor.

Even more ways to customize

Eighties also lets you tuck away your main navigation with a pop-up custom menu in the header area, and includes a sleek (optional) social links menu. For the designers, illustrators, and other visual artists among you, the theme also supports our Portfolio feature.

Are you using Eighties already? Tell us what it was that made it the right fit for you.

This week, a group of hackers released a list of about 5 million Gmail addresses and passwords. This list was not generated as a result of an exploit of WordPress.com, but since a number of emails on the list matched email addresses associated with WordPress.com accounts, we took steps to protect our users.

We downloaded the list, compared it to our user database, and proactively reset over 100,000 accounts for which the password given in the list matched the WordPress.com password. We also sent email notification of the password reset containing instructions for regaining access to the account. Users who received the email were instructed to follow these steps:

1. Go to WordPress.com.
2. Click the “Login” button on the homepage.
3. Click on the link “Lost your password?”
4. Enter your WordPress.com username.
5. Click the “Get New Password” button.

In general, it’s very important that passwords be unique for each account. Using the same password on different web sites increases the risk of an account being hacked. Now would be a good time for all users to go through all online services and set distinct, strong passwords for each.

It’s also a good idea to enhance account security by enabling two-step authentication on services that support the feature. Two-step authentication can be set up on WordPress.com by following these steps:

1. Browse to WordPress.com.
2. Hover over the user avatar at the top right of the screen.
3. Click “Settings.”
4. Click “Security” from the submenu.
5. Follow the instructions provided there.

We checked the accounts of 600,000 other WordPress.com users whose email addresses were included in the list. Since these users were not immediately vulnerable, we did not reset their passwords or send emails but will be enabling a notification in their dashboards so that they can assess the security of their passwords at their leisure and with all of this information in hand.

It’s time for our latest edition of Longreads’ Best of WordPress: below are 10 outstanding stories from across WordPress, published over the past month.

You can find Volumes 1, 2 and 3 here — and you can follow Longreads on WordPress.com for all of our daily reading recommendations.

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

1. The Moral Dilemmas Of Narrative (Bill Marvel, Gangrey)

Bill Marvel on journalism and the quest for empathy in telling other people’s stories:

Compassion and sensitivity thus tell us how to approach our subjects from the outside.

Empathy, the word Lee Hancock murmured that morning, is more difficult. Because empathy requires that we approach our subjects from the inside. We try to enter into the emotions, thoughts, the very lives of those we write about. We try to imagine what it must be like to be them. Only by living in their skin at least briefly, by walking in their shoes, can we begin to see that person as he or she is. This requires moral imagination. It is what the good fiction writer does. And it is, I argue, what we writers of nonfiction must do.

Read the story

2. The Battle of As Samawah (Don Gomez, Carrying the Gun)

A series of dispatches from the front lines of Iraq in March and April of 2003.

Read the story

3. The Boy With Half a Brain (Michael Rubino, Indianapolis Monthly)

Jeff and Tiernae Buttars made a difficult decision to have a portion of their son’s brain surgically removed to eliminate his seizures. The decision changed all of their lives:

In exchange for a 60 percent chance to end the seizures, William would lose a portion of his vision, forfeit use of his left hand, and might never walk without some form of assistance. He’d always be labeled “special needs,” though the doctor promised that William would grow to develop a below-average IQ in the 70-to-80 range. (Untreated, he was headed for one 40 points lower.) And there remained a chance, however small, that William might not survive the procedure.

Read the story

4. Let’s Be Real (Wesley Morris, Grantland)

Says Dana Stevens, the movie critic at Slate.com, of Morris’s review of Let’s Be Cops: “Wesley Morris on Let’s Be Cops and the shooting of Michael Brown is everything 21st-century film criticism should be.”

Read the story

5. A Tale of Two Abortion Wars (Ananda Rose, Pacific Standard)

While pro-life activists fight to rescue IVF embryos from the freezer, pregnant women in their third trimester with catastrophic fetal anomalies have nowhere to turn.

Read the story

6. Dress Your Family In Your Lover’s Shoes (Kathleen Hale, The Hairpin)

Hale recalls meeting a boyfriend’s eccentric family during a trip to Ireland:

Over the next month, I would also learn that Sam had lied to me about his parents’ jobs: they didn’t have any. They were not working artists, but had rather opted to leave behind their middle-class upbringing and good educations to live on the dole, Ireland’s form of welfare. Caro got splinters from compulsively sanding the same bedside table until it resembled a large toothpick. Sam Sr.’s days revolved around rising late, napping, bossing Caro around, and lecturing snobbishly on the superiority of natural fibers while his nipples peeked through holes in his over washed pajama tops. “Wot?” he would yelp at me a few nights later, in exactly that voice, when I stood up startled after the back on my chair fell off—“It’s a great antique piece, very nice quality, you just can’t lean on it.”

Read the story

7. Made for China (Shawn Wen, The New Inquiry)

As American audiences tire of big budget spectacle, Hollywood has begun to tailor its blockbusters for the ever-expanding Chinese market.

Read the story

8. What My Bike Has Taught Me About White Privilege (Jeremy Dowsett, A Little More Sauce)

Dowsett explains “white privilege” through the lens of a bicycle rider:

And it’s not just the fact that the whole transportation infrastructure is built around the car. It’s the law, which is poorly enforced when cyclists are hit by cars, the fact that gas is subsidized by the government and bike tires aren’t, and just the general mindset of a culture that is in love with cars after a hundred years of propaganda and still thinks that bikes are toys for kids and triathletes.

Read the story

9. Going It Alone (Eli Saslow, The Washington Post)

In one of the poorest counties in Texas, a 37-year-old deputy named Elias Pompa addresses the U.S. border crisis alone while earning $11.50 an hour.

Read the story

10. An Interview with Elissa Schappell (Maria Gagliano, Slice)

I don’t think you can be much of a writer if you don’t read. I’m appalled by the number of writers and writing students I know who say, ‘I don’t read because I don’t have time, or I don’t read because I don’t want to be influenced by other writers’ work, or My busy reality-TV-watching schedule doesn’t permit me time to read books, only blogs.’

Read the story

We have a new free theme to announce today: Bosco!

Bosco

Amid a sea of sliders, sidebars, and huge header images, Bosco stands alone in its refined focus on content.

Your story is presented in a centered, single column, with sophisticated typography and an adaptive layout that looks beautiful on any device, mobile or desktop. There’s still plenty of room for widgets in multiple sections above the footer, while Custom Menus, Custom Background support, and unique Post Format treatments prove that Bosco is anything but lacking in features.

Give your readers the distraction-free experience they deserve with Bosco. If you’d like, give it a whirl on the demo site.

A year ago today, we joined the world in shock on learning that governments were spying on internet users around the world. Tapping internet service providers’ undersea cables, intentionally and secretly weakening encryption products,  surreptitiously collecting everything from call metadata to photos sent over the internet by US citizens — nothing was off limits.

Just as troubling as the revelations themselves is the fact that since last summer, little if anything has changed. Despite a lot of rhetoric, our three branches of government in the United States have not made many concrete steps toward truly protecting citizens from unchecked government surveillance.

Automattic has been a strong supporter of efforts to reform government surveillance. We’ve supported reform legislation in Congress, and participated in the Day We Fight Back, earlier this year. More importantly, we aim to make our own legal processes for securing the information our users entrust to us as transparent and protective as possible.

Be the change you want to see in the world — that’s why we’re joining the many other companies who are participating today in Reset the Net. In the face of intrusive surveillance, we believe that everyone in the tech community needs to stand up and do what they can, starting with their own sites and platforms. For us, that means working to secure the connection between users and our websites. We’ll be implementing SSL for all *.wordpress.com subdomains by the end of the year.

If we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that encryption, when done correctly, works. If we properly encrypt our sites and devices, we can make mass surveillance much more difficult.

We’re happy to be taking these steps and hope that the coming year brings real reform to end mass surveillance.

From a full-blown professional portfolio to a streamlined homepage, Espied, which was launched a few short weeks ago, gives you a wide variety of options to display your best work.

You can tailor the theme to suit your most exacting needs. On top of standard customization touches like a custom header image, Espied comes with four featured color palettes, different layouts to choose for your featured images, and a custom social links menu. The Portfolio feature gives you even more choices to control the way your visitors experience your site.

Let’s take a look at some of the creative uses of Espied.

CDM Productions

The graphic designer behind CDM Productions has created a lively, colorful portfolio homepage using Espied. Hooked by the visuals, interested readers — and potential clients — can easily find additional information in the fly-out side panel menu, from the designer’s blog to a contact form to a “Hire Me” page.

bryony attenburrow

British illustrator Bryony Attenburrow has taken Espied in a more minimalist direction. Her homepage follows the classic blog format, with her latest work at the top of the page. If you’re ready to dig deeper into her work, Bryony has also built portfolio pages for the different formats she works on, from illustrations to comics.

Hot Mug

The website of book cover designer Hot Mug is a lesson in economy. Consisting of little more than a gallery of the designer’s previous work, visitors can enjoy the artist’s beautiful covers without distraction. A splashy (pun intended) custom header image adds a sleek individual touch to the site, while a Terms and Conditions page provides interested parties with all the information they might need.

If you’d like to see some other great uses of Espied, be sure to check out these sites:

• True East, a beautifully designed travel blog.
• The whimsical portfolio of dutch illustrator Merel Barends.
• Flaneur, a minimalist Japanese photoblog.

Stay tuned for more examples of sites using recently-added themes — and if there are any particular themes you’d like to see featured, feel free to leave us a comment.

GoDaddy’s Quick Blogcast service is being retired, and will shut down permanently on June 25th, 2014. Nobody likes to lose the content they’ve spent time creating, though. If you’re a Quick Blogcast user, we’re happy to offer an easy, quick way to bring your account over to WordPress.com. (Don’t have an account with us yet? Signing up for a new one is a breeze.)

Ready? Set? Go!

To start the process, you’ll need to create a Quick Blogcast export file. In your GoDaddy Quick Blogcast dashboard, head to Blog → Export posts.

Then, select all the items you’d like to export, and save the file.

Now it’s time to bring the file home to WordPress.com. Head to Tools → Import in your blog’s dashboard and choose the GoDaddy Quick Blogcast option. From there, just find the export file you’ve just created and upload it.

In the last step of the import you’ll have the ability to assign authors to your new WordPress.com blog.

That’s it — your content is now safe at WordPress.com!

Please note that while content exported by June 25th (when GoDaddy Quick Blogcast will be permanently retired) can be imported any time, your linked media must be imported to WordPress.com before that date or it will be lost.

Welcome to your new hood

With your imported blog in place, you can start exploring all the possibilities WordPress.com users enjoy. Easy tutorials at Learn.WordPress.com cover all the basics, from changing your blog’s name to adding personal touches like widgets or custom header images to your blog.

You can explore our 200+ themes, and start thinking about customizing the design of your new blog. If it’s community you’re after, you won’t be alone for long: head over to The Daily Post for a constant fix of writing prompts, weekly challenges, and blogging courses.

If you’d like more guidance, we’ve created a support page especially for new users arriving from GoDaddy Quick Blogcast. And if you’re encountering a problem while learning the ropes, a friendly Happiness Engineer is a short click away.

Welcome to WordPress.com — we can’t wait to hear your story.

This week we’re pleased to introduce you to two new themes: Kelly and Arcade!

Kelly

Kelly, a delightful new free theme, was created by Automattic designer Kelly Hoffman. About creating Kelly, she says, “I really wanted to keep it simple but fun, which is why I went with bold splashes of color and large type.”

Kelly‘s discerning typography and single-column layout makes reading an absolute pleasure, while multiple widget areas in the footer give plenty of space for related information. Let Kelly be your next beautiful blog canvas.

Arcade

Arcade, a new premium WordPress.com theme by Montréal designer/developer c.bavota, features both a fun flair and refined aesthetic. Boasting a full-screen background and five widget areas, it also gives users unique access to a full library of icons for their own creative use. Suitable for blogs and modern-minded businesses alike, Arcade can convey your message to the world.

Kelly is a free theme, while Arcade is a premium upgrade. Check out each theme’s showcase by clicking on its screenshot above, or preview it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Summertime
And the livin’ is easy

—George Gershwin

The hot months will soon arrive in the Northern Hemisphere and if you’re like us, you’re planning a little time off from your regular routine. We’ve got some sites to inspire you to make new dishes, read new books, and even appreciate an age-old form of entertainment. No matter your passion, there’s an active WordPress.com community talking about your interests.

Simple Provisions

If you’re looking for easy and delicious meals, Amelia Crook, the blogger at Simple Provisions, has you covered. According to Amelia, “Food does not need to be fancy to be celebrated,” and we couldn’t agree more. We’re planning to celebrate her grilled kale and chickpea salad for starters and could easily lose ourselves in her culinary wonderland.

The Savvy Reader

Is time spent with a good book part of your summer agenda? Check out The Savvy Reader for book reviews and recommendations for teens and adults. If you’re still looking for your beach blanket book, don’t miss their Top Ten Summer Reads, 2014.

The Circus Diaries

If you’re looking for a diversion for the whole family, consider the The Circus Diaries — a site dedicated to critical commentary on circus performance in the United Kingdom and beyond. Peruse great book reviews dedicated to circus performance, check out their show reviews, and be amazed by video snapshots of circus performances.

Share your favorites

When you get a bit of downtime, what are your go-to sites on WordPress.com for diversion and entertainment? Tell us about your favorites in the comments.

If you’re looking for a theme to showcase your creative work — be it your words, images, or multimedia projects — Illustratr, launched last month, might be just what you’re looking for. It has a distinct, effortlessly cool look, but is also easy to customize to create a tailor-made design.

The theme (designed by Automattic’s own Thomas Guillot) lets you take full advantage of the Portfolio feature, so you can create beautiful showcases for your best content. Even if you opt for a classic blog layout, splashy featured images and other custom touches (like social icons in your custom menu) will draw your readers in.

Looking for some inspiration? Here are just a few of the thousands of striking sites already using Illustratr.

Derek Roczen

With a name like Illustratr, it comes as no surprise that visual artists of all stripes flock to this theme. Illustrator and animator Derek Roczen, based in Cologne, Germany, is one such artist. The theme’s readability and generous white space give an extra pop to his creations (including a cute squirrel in the custom header image), while the menu provides visitors with one-click access to Derek’s work across media.

Le Mehograph

With the option to display full-width images and sleek tiled galleries, Illustratr is a natural choice for photographers and photobloggers. The site of Quebec-based photographer Meho shows what happens when great shots are presented with care. His minimalist approach keeps the focus on his work, but makes it easy for visitors to find all the information they need about his gear and copyright policy.

Nolan O’Malley

On his personal, poetry-heavy blog, Nolan O’Malley shows how a theme geared toward visuals can be just as effective for writing. His blog’s crisp design keeps the reader’s eyes zoomed in on his words, while his custom header image (featuring an orange) adds a dash of color and playfully interacts with his site’s tagline, “Made from Concentration.”

If you’d like to explore other directions in which artists and bloggers have taken Illustratr, take a look at these:

• Elijah Wade Artefacts, the portfolio site of a Scotland-based multimedia artist.
• The online home of Australian fashion and lifestyle store The Dressing Room.
• The art blog of print- and papermaker May Babcock.

Stay tuned for more examples of sites using recently-added themes — and if there are any particular themes you’d like to see featured, feel free to leave us a comment.

The comments poured in on our last two posts highlighting new books by WordPress.com authors. We’re happy to host such a prolific literary bunch! For those of you interested in using a website to promote your books, take a look at three authors on WordPress.com who do this well — each with very different designs and approaches:

H. G. Robert

We found H. G. Robert’s website from a comment he’d left on a previous post. I clicked on his link and was delighted to find a simple, clean, and effective homepage for his self-help book:

The black-and-white design is crisp and stylish, and with just a few elements to focus on, you can’t miss anything. A highlighted “Read more” button takes you to another clean, concise page with a book synopsis, excerpt, and reviews.

His menu at the top right includes just two links, to his bio and blog.

H. G. Robert uses the premium Portfolio theme, which offers a number of features; it’s interesting to see how users interpret themes to fit their needs, including stripping them down.

Stewart O’Nan

Award-winning author Stewart O’Nan, based in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, includes links to his writing and important information in his header:

Using the free Typo theme, Stewart includes a virtual shelf of his books right up top — it’s the primary element you see when you first visit his site.

He also has a custom menu for various modes of writing — from fiction and nonfiction to essays and book reviews — as well as audio and interviews. In this space, Stewart offers navigation to everything you need to know. While he uses a traditional blog format — with his recent posts listed first — his menu displays the right details to follow all of his work.

Pandaemonium

The website of author, lecturer, and BBC Radio broadcaster Kenan Malik is visual and dynamic. Pandaemonium, which uses the image-oriented Gridspace theme, is a great example of a non-photography-focused site on a photography theme.

Reminiscent of book covers, the front-page thumbnails draw you in — the grid layout is professional, allowing Kenan to showcase images that complement his work. (On Gridspace, you can also toggle between a grid and list view — look for the icons near the top right of the homepage.) He also has a custom menu to his About and Events pages, as well as a Books section that echoes the layout of his front page:

Here, the strong imagery and unified design create a cohesive website.

You can promote your books and writing in many ways. We hope these examples offer some inspiration to build your own website — or expand on your existing one.

Lots of us start blogs with the intention of writing regularly, but quickly find ourselves struggling to sit down at the keyboard. Cultivating a consistent writing habit isn’t as easy as starting a blog — but we can help!

Writing 101: Building a Blogging Habit is a write-every-day challenge designed to help you create a writing habit, publish posts that mesh with your blog’s focus, and push you a bit as a writer. It’s also a great way to make new friends and find new favorite reads. All bloggers are welcome, whether you use WordPress.com, are self-hosted, or use another platform entirely.

Here’s how it works:

• We’ll post a new writing assignment just for Writing 101 each weekday in June on The Daily Post. Assignments will publish at 10:00 AM EST (14:00 PM GMT). You can follow The Daily Post to get assignment notifications.
• There are no weekend assignments — you’re free to expand on a weekday post, write something unrelated, or (gasp!) spend some time away from your blog.
• Each assignment includes a writing prompt and an optional “twist.” Prompts are your inspiration for the day, while twists push you to experiment and stretch your writing chops.
• You can mix assignments up however you’d like. Respond to the prompt, and ignore the twist. Try the twist, but write on your own topic. Use both the prompt and the twist.  The only goal is to get you writing every weekday.
• There’s no need to publish every day if you don’t want to — publish the posts you’re happiest with, and use the other days as private writing practice. How much you publish is up to you.

Participants will also 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.

Interested? Fill out this quick form to register. You’ll receive an email before the challenge begins with the above details, along with instructions on how to access the Commons and connect with other participants. Get ready to get writing!

Twenty Fourteen is this year’s default theme, and the first magazine-style default theme — something y’all were waiting for, judging by its skyrocketing popularity.

We’ve already looked at how a few early adopters customized it, as well as how some bloggers have stripped it down for a minimalist take. Here are four more great sites powered by your creativity and Twenty Fourteen’s versatility.

champagne&backpacks

Along with its magazine-style layouts, Twenty Fourteen allows you to opt for a simpler homepage that makes one post — and one photo — the star. That’s the layout the duo behind champagne&backpacks chose to give their travelogue some serious punch:

The dark but warm gray background and spare collection of widgets make navigating easy but keep their posts in the spotlight. (Their stunning photos don’t hurt, either!) Swapping Twenty Fourteen’s sans serif fonts for the elegant lines of LTC Bodoni 175 and Minion Pro creates the feel of a sophisticated travel magazine, and pops of pink draw readers’ eyes while injecting fun.

City Cyclery

The proprietors of Windsor, Canada’s City Cyclery looked at the bones of Twenty Fourteen and saw beyond a blog or magazine — they saw their business’ new homepage:

Their imagery instantly lets you know they’re all about bikes. The clean lines of their logo and header are a perfect match for Twenty Fourteen‘s default fonts, and their bright but complementary menu color ensures that visitors focus on the most important element of the page: their navigation.

A Good Sports Hang

The bloggers at A Good Sports Hang chose simple colors and bold lines that mesh with Twenty Fourteen’s magazine-style grid layout, using the theme’s default options to achieve a tailored look:

The lines running across their header do double duty: they echo sports uniforms, then blend right into Twenty Fourteen’s menu, which also relies on horizontal lines. A post grid gives readers an instant sense of the range of topics they cover, and the basic black-and-white palette creates a bold yet readable blog.

Veggies Don’t Bite

One simple change — taking menus, background colors, and accents from dark to light — helps Sophia at Veggies Don’t Bite  put her own whimsical spin on this normally neutral theme:

Keeping the color scheme light and bright lets her colorful, hand-drawn header breathe. Fun fonts in the same tones carry the look down the page. Every part of the page reinforces the idea behind her blog: eating fresh foods.

Want to give Twenty Fourteen a spin? Take a look at its details and demo site, or head to Appearance → Themes to preview it on your own blog.

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