Do you love stories from around the world? Check out the work of the following nine photographers on WordPress.com and allow your imagination to take you away…

Nathanael‘s monochrome photo of the Star Lite Motel in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, conjures images of wayward romances and clandestine meetings. We loved the marquee’s message, “Forgive and forget its human to err.” (sic) which offers an almost haunting absolution. For more of Nathanael’s work, check out his blog, G’Nat’s Eye View.

Photo by P. Nathanael Gough

The image below, by UK photographer Andy Hooker, had us at hello. We love how the sign matches the woman’s red coat and how her right leg is in crisp focus just as her stride reaches the “h” above her head. Check out more of Andy’s work at LensScaper.

Photo by Andy Hooker

Bao Pham‘s photo of this graffiti sneer in bold, brilliant color lends an even more menacing effect to the shot of the motorcycle below, as if the bike’s owner is watching over you. The photo was taken in Melbourne, Australia. For more, visit Bao’s site.

Photo by Bao Pham

Below, Debopriyo Datta‘s photo of these anthropomorphic recycled robots, captured during the Durga Puja festival in Calcutta, India, will make you smile.

Photo by Debopriyo Datta

At The Film Shooter, Kutay’s photo of this young, ever-so-elegantly dressed solo violinist, as seen busking in Paddy’s Market in Sydney, Australia, captured our imagination. We couldn’t help but wonder which piece he was playing.

Photo by Kutay

From stand-still above to to photo-finish below, we loved the motion depicted in Paulo César Silva’s image of three cyclists in Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal. Visit COTTIDIANUS to see more of Paulo’s work.

Photo by Paulo César Silva

From a split second in black and white to a split second in brilliant color, check out Ren Hoeck‘s photo of an elderly lady in Lima, Perú. We couldn’t help but wonder about where she had come from and where she was going.

Photo by Ren Hoeck

From vibrant color to evocative darkness, sashnortier‘s image of a man in repose, smoking a cigarette in Cape Town, South Africa, is rather striking, wouldn’t you agree?

Photo by sashnortier

At the last stop on our world tour, we have a photo by lotof at a bar in Freiburg, Germany. The juxtaposition between the bold faces in the doorway poster and the lone contemplative figure at the bar has us wondering about the man’s backstory: is he relaxing after a hard day at work, drowning his sorrows, or celebrating? Only your imagination knows for sure.

Photo by lotof

For more amazing photographs, follow the street photography tag in your Reader.

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee suffered a stroke when she was 33, and she has written about her experience in an inspiring personal essay for BuzzFeed.

Before that, she was using a pseudonym on WordPress.com to blog about her experiences, share details about her life, and practice her writing. In 2007, shortly after New Year’s Day, Lee wrote the following in a blog post:

something in my brain burped. most of what i want to do is just out of my grasp. i feel like i know how to do them, but then when i go to do them, i just…CAN’T. day by day, i’m regaining my abilities, so i hope this is just temporary.

Lee’s commenters urged her to see a doctor, and the next day, she responded to them from a hospital bed: “I had a stroke! Will be better.”

I spoke with Lee about her experience, and what she has learned about herself and her writing.

* * *

It’s amazing that you could go through something so profound health-wise and chart a new path for yourself coming out of it. What’s the response been to your essay?

I’ve been blown away. As life-changing as my stroke was, the response, too, will probably go down in my life history as a turning point.

I had a blog — and I’ve been blogging since before it was called “blogging,” back when it was called “web journaling,” back in the days when Justin Hall was on links.net and when I wrote my posts in HTML. But before I spun up my anonymous blog, I was asked to stop blogging by a few family members. I was putting them at risk, they said, I was not to make myself so public.

Bottom line, I didn’t want to stop blogging, so I started up a blog under a pseudonym. I never told them about the blog. A few months later, I had my stroke.

The blog was one of the first places to which I turned when I had my stroke, before I knew I’d had a stroke. I wrote in my journal, too — but I turned to my blog in the wake of my stroke, which for me was a largely isolating event. I made some great friends. Got support that way. It was my village, for a time.

Also, my blog has always been a place to do some “low-stakes writing” — writing without the intention of publication, writing that is more therapeutic. That said, blogging has always been a venue for me to refine my writing voice — because after all, it is still a public space with readers.

What are the odds that a person could suffer a stroke at 33?

According to the New York Times, about 10 to 15 percent of strokes happen to people under the age of 45. That’s supposed to be about 1 in 1,000. And oftentimes, young people who have had a stroke are misdiagnosed and sent home.

I was the youngest person in the DCU (aka “stroke unit”) in the hospital by about 30 years during my stay. Most doctors were astonished by my age. They certainly didn’t suspect I’d had a stroke until they saw the MRI and its uncontested results. I could see how I could have been sent home and had to shoulder a mysterious ailment. I was lucky in that they figured it out and I got the care I needed to ensure the recovery I eventually had.

Can you talk about some specific posts that led you on a path both during and after your stroke?

Definitely, the post during which readers told me to go to the hospital!

I’m not sure where I found my voice after the stroke, really. I think there were people out in the internet reading — Carolyn Kellogg, who writes for the LA Times, had a blog called Pinky’s Paperhaus at the time, and she linked to me as a writer recovering from stroke. So there was definitely interest in my story and situation.

I really don’t think I found my voice regarding my stroke until years later. I wasn’t able to write about it until my post for Nova Ren Suma, who did a Turning Point series on her blog, to which I contributed with a reference to my stroke.

Not only has blogging my stroke experience refined my voice, it was also life-saving. And anonymity provided sanctuary.

What is your life like now?

It is as normal as I imagine it to be. It’s, honestly, better than my life pre-stroke. I’m following my dreams and choosing very carefully what it is I want to do each day, each month, each year. While in recovery, I had very limited energy, and had to be particular about my priorities; I decided to keep doing that, go forward.

And what about your writing?

Once you go through something like that, when so many of your abilities are taken away, your life is pared down to what it is you really want to get back.

I went through a very dark place at some point in my recovery — and although I don’t look upon that phase with fondness, I did learn what was most important to me, and what it is I most desired out of my life. And my writing became a front-and-center goal. I’d always known writing was important to me, but after the stroke, I knew I would channel everything I had to get back to writing.

Now that I’m writing again, I’ve more a sense of structure with regard to my writing projects; in fact, I’m obsessed with structure, because recovery is so much about stages and regaining structure. Because my brain was injured, I understood how writing happens, in my brain at least — that stories are modular, that I need quiet, that layers come with each retelling.

Automattic is a distributed company — we all work from wherever we are. Right now, “where we are” is 197 cities around the world: New Orleans, USA. Montevideo, Uruguay. Tokyo, Japan. Vilnius, Lithuania.

Once a year, we get together somewhere in the world to meet, work alongside, learn from, and laugh with one another in an exhilarating, exhausting week called the Grand Meetup. This year, 277 Automatticians descended on Park City, Utah, for seven days in mid-September.

We introduced ourselves to new colleagues, reconnected with coworkers we haven’t seen since last year, and worked on ways to make WordPress.com even better. And of course, lots of us blogged about the experience, in words and images.

We were blown away by the brilliance and generosity of our colleagues…

I’m grateful to have met so many Automatticians from around the world who brought such kindness, curiosity, patience, fierce intelligence, creativity and humor to the time we had together. I’m grateful to have learned about their hobbies, families, personal journeys, quirks, pet peeves, amazing skills, unmitigated geekiness, and brilliant senses of humor.

- VIP Wrangler Chris Hardie

We marveled at the range of conversations we had, from the sublime to the absurd…

Here are some of the things I talked about this week:

• Scottish independence
• Taylor Swift
• Goats
• Sexism
• My children
• Other people’s children
• Infertility
• Tattoos
• Swing dancing
• Whiskey
• Javascript
• Waffles (lack thereof)
• VideoPress
• Houston
• Leadership
• Fake morning talkshows
• Mario Kart

Happiness Engineer Zandy Ring

We soaked in the natural beauty of Utah…

Early morning takeoff, by yours truly.

And some of us got up close and personal with the wide Utah sky…

Happiness Engineer Jeremey DuVall realizes he’s just jumped out of an airplane.

We learned from one another, and had fun doing it…

I learned how to analyze data in Python with Carly, and went skydiving with Prasath. After discussing common security vulnerabilities with Anne, Cami and I plotted a podcast about absolutely nothing, and recorded part of our first episode…

If you asked me four years ago if I thought it were possible to enjoy working, I’d be dubious. If you asked me whether one could ever genuinely love and respect all their coworkers, I’d hesitate.

Over the past four years, the people of Automattic have demonstrated to me that it’s possible to do work you love with people you love. It’s not common — not yet — but it’s possible.

- VaultPress Eclectic Happiffier Chris Rudzki

We burned the midnight oil…

We worked, we played, we ate, we drank, we slept very little. We tried to make the world a better place, and if you think that’s me being dramatic you don’t know the people I have the honor of working with.

- Dot Organizer Cami Kaos

We took a lot of photos…

(Images above from Happiness Engineers Stephen McLeod, Pam Kocke, Andrea Badgley, Dennis Hong, and Andrew Spittle; Creative Director Dave Martin; Code Wrangler Allen Snook; Designamagician Dan Hauk, Mobile Maker Aaron Douglas; Growth Explorer Luca Sartoni; Spline Reticulator Dennis Snell; and Chief Semicolon Advocate Michelle Weber, AKA me.)

On the final day, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg led us in a toast that summed up the reason we’re all here…

I’m really grateful that I get to work with the people I do, and on the problems that we work on together. It’s far from easy, in fact each year brings new challenges and I make mistakes as often as not, but it is worthwhile and incredibly fulfilling. A few hours ago I gave a closing toast and teared up looking around the room. So many folks that give their passion and dedicate themselves to jobs both large and small, visible and unseen, to help make the web a better place.

- WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

And when the week was over, heading home was bittersweet…

This morning was filled with so many hugs (and maybe a tear or two). I told myself that I was looking forward to returning home. To my own bed (although the sleep I got in the silence of the Park City night was the best I may have ever experienced). To regular exercise and home cooking. To the routine of my everyday life. And I was looking forward to that. And even though I knew I would miss my colleagues (it’s happened every time I return from a trip), the weight of the fog of sadness still surprises me when it descends.

I read their blogs. I like their Facebook posts. I retweet their Tweets. And I miss them.

- Happiness (w)Rangler Lori McLeese

If you think you might want to work with this motley crew and join us in 2015’s mayhem…

… we’re hiring. (And yes, you’ll get to make up your own job title, too.)

The WordPress for Android 2.9 release is now available in the Google Play Store. This release includes some exciting new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

Blog Discovery

Blog discovery is a new feature in the Reader that lets you:

• Find new blogs (based on recommendations).
• Preview a blog and read posts before following it.
• Manage your tags and blog subscriptions.

Publish Icon Button

We replaced the publish icon button with a contextual text button. Whether you’re saving a draft, publishing or scheduling a post, or updating one, this new button will display your action, depending on your current task.

Faster Notifications and Stats Refresh

We updated the Notifications feature to use Simperium technology, which will sync your notifications quickly and efficiently.

We also know you love viewing your Stats, so we improved them to refresh faster than ever before.

Interface Improvements

• Reintroduction of the refresh button in all refreshable views, along with the pull-to-refresh gesture.
• Pull-to-refresh tip bar has been replaced by a less aggressive, self-hiding message.
• Save dialog has been removed, and all posts are now auto-saved when you close the edit post view.
• Reblogging interface redesign in the Reader.
• Sharing image, video, text, or link via WordPress for Android now remembers the previous choice.

General Changes

• Posts and pages auto-save feature has been improved.
• Fixed bugs related to statistics (only affecting Jetpack users) and image handling.
• Reader improvements to fill gaps in time between two syncs.
• As we announced earlier, we dropped Android 2.3 support. Current (2.9) and later versions need Android 4.0 or later.
• New translations: Hebrew and Basque.
• SNI (Server Name Indication) support.
• Minor bug fixes.

What’s Next?

You can keep up with the development progress at http://make.wordpress.org/mobile and can also follow the app on Twitter @WPAndroid. If you need support or want to send us suggestions, please visit our forums.

Bring a fresh, sophisticated look to your blog with two new themes, Bloggy and Oslo.

In our Early Theme Adopters series, we focus on bloggers creating great-looking sites with the most recent additions to our Theme Showcase. Today, let’s visit some of the sites that are already using Ubud, a striking theme for portfolios and other image-heavy sites.

Congrats to all the bloggers nominated as 2014's BlogHer Voices and Photos of the Year -- especially to the 22 of you blogging on WordPress.com.

In our Early Theme Adopters series, we focus on bloggers creating great sites with the most recent additions to our Theme Showcase. Today, let’s visit some of the sites that are already using McKinley, a modern, visually striking theme.

The Customizer is full of great features to discover, from simulating how your content appears on smartphones and tablets to previewing different background images. Let's take a look at three free features that you'll enjoy tinkering with.

Reporting back from a unique WebCoast conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, Happiness Engineer Karim Osman shares the view from the North.

In the two months since its release, Twenty Fourteen has already made quite a splash, becoming the theme of choice for almost 200,000 sites. If you’re a new blogger (hello, Zero to Hero participants!), it likely looks familiar. It’s our default theme for 2014, so it was the one that greeted you when you first landed on your homepage.

Twenty Fourteen has a flashy magazine layout that enables you to showcase content in numerous visually striking ways. With plenty of free customization options right of the box, including new color palettes, this is a theme that can give any site a major design boost.

If you’re looking for ideas on how to customize Twenty Fourteen to make your content shine, look no further than the two sites featured here today: they have each taken the theme in a strikingly different direction.

The Daily Slice

What do you know — a magazine theme used by an actual magazine! The Daily Slice, a collaborative online music zine, makes the most out of Twenty Fourteen‘s versatile layout, creating a cool look that’s at once vibrant and streamlined.

With a black-and-white custom header image that works perfectly with the theme’s default color scheme, the site channels an underground vibe from the get-go. The site’s main menu blends seamlessly into the header for easy navigation.

The site then capitalizes on Twenty Fourteen‘s featured content area, highlighting three recent posts, all with generously-sized featured images (the theme lets you select up to six posts to showcase).

Since this is a group effort, the magazine’s authors are all given a moment in the spotlight. Sidebar links direct visitors to each writer’s author page, and a sleek Author Grid Widget contains red-white-and-black illustrations of the writing staff.

Twenty Fourteen also comes with a contributors page template, a unique way to give credit to everyone involved in a group blog, and The Daily Slice features a particularly creative one.

One of the most notable visual elements of this theme is the ability to use splashy featured images on the homepage as well as on single-post pages. Whether your visitors arrive at your site through a search engine, a shared link, or the WordPress.com Reader, they’re in for a visual treat.

edjelley.com

A blog dedicated to the retro beauty of fountain pens, edjelley.com presents a bright, clean take on Twenty Fourteen. The blogger’s intentions are unmistakable no matter where you look on the page: this is a place to enjoy the colors and shapes of lovingly-crafted objects.

An elegant custom header image — complete with a sleek logo — announces the site’s theme. Then, Ed, the pen aficionado behind the site, uses Twenty Fourteen‘s featured content slider to give his photos maximum visibility.

Other small touches make the site both visually coherent and smooth to navigate. An Instagram Widget in the right sidebar adds a dash of color and presents more stationary-related eye candy.

Across the page, on the right sidebar, enticing Text Widgets invite readers to follow Ed on other social networks and encourage them to submit content to the site — a smart way to foster interaction.

Even the primary menu serves several purposes. In the midst of the site’s colorful images, its neutral shade acts as a soothing visual element. It lets users find the content they look for, but also includes links to Ed’s Pens for Sale page as well as to his blogroll page — a great space saver, freeing up valuable real estate in the sidebar.

The beautiful design of edjelley.com stays intact no matter what device you’re using. As a fully responsive theme, Twenty Fourteen guarantees your visitors see your site the way you intended it — whether it’s from a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone.

edjelley.com viewed on an iPad

New color palettes

In case you’ve considered Twenty Fourteen but prefer a brighter color scheme than the sleek black that comes as its default background color, we have good news.

We’re happy to announce that the theme now arrives with four free featured color palettes. Just go to the Colors panel in your Customizer (in your dashboard, head to Appearance → Customize) and pick the one that suits your mood.

Are you curious to see more customizations of Twenty Fourteen? Here are a few more creative takes:

• Honey & Thyme, a food blog with a clean, modern look.
• Coyopoa :: lightning in the blood, a writer’s stark, black-and-white homepage.
• A Pretty Penny, a soft-hued design and DIY blog.

For more customization tips and previous installments of our Customizing series, click here.

This year’s Black Friday special on WordPress.com is our biggest yet. Today you can add any upgrade to your blog for a free 14-day trial.

The special sale covers all of Friday, November 29, for all US time zones. Sale started midnight today, and ends on 12:00AM PST on Saturday, November 30.

A free trial with no strings attached is a great way to get to know our different upgrade plans:

• WordPress.com Premium ($99 yearly), includes all our blog upgrades: more design customizations, video uploads, more space — and no ads.
• WordPress.com Business ($299 yearly), includes everything that WordPress.com Premium offers, as well as unlimited access to all our premium themes, unlimited storage space, and real-time live chat support — right from the dashboard.
• WordPress.com Enterprise ($500 monthly), includes everything offered by the other plans, as well as access to more than 100 plugins to customize your branding, better track your audience, integrate with social media services, and more.

Go to Store in your dashboard to see all our plans and other upgrades, and try them out for free.

For technical reasons, domain upgrades are not included in this offer. If the upgrade plan you’re trying out includes a custom domain credit, like WordPress.com Premium or WordPress.com Business, the credit will be disabled for the duration of the trial. The credit will become available if you choose to purchase the plan when the trial is over.

With this offer, we hope that more of you will be able to try out our great upgrades this year.

Happy holidays!

Today we have a shiny new theme for your blogging pleasure! Introducing Typo by Okay Themes:

With clean typography, an inky color palette, and lots of subtle textures, Typo has all the charm and style of an old-fashioned typewriter.

The responsive, one-column design makes it perfect for writing, while support for several post formats makes it easy to share your life with vintage flair.

Read more about Typo on the Theme Showcase, see it in action on the demo site, or activate it on your own blog by going to Appearance → Themes.

WordPress.com users show their creativity not only in the content they publish, but also in how they design their sites. We always enjoy seeing how bloggers transform popular themes like Oxygen, Pilcrow, or Imbalance2 to create sleek, tailor-made sites. Today, let’s take a closer look at the Theme Customizer, a key …

The Automattic Worldwide WP 5k is back again in 2013! Set your timers for September 29th! At Automattic we work from all over the world, and we use internal blogs for socializing and exchanging non-work ideas in addition to making WordPress.com and our other products more awesome. One of the things we’re really …

Do you regularly host events as part of your work and/or play? Do you run a venue or plan events regularly? Are you an Eventbrite user? If so, we have some exciting news for you — we’ve teamed up with Eventbrite to bring you two new WordPress.com themes that make it …

On Tuesday’s Freshly Pressed roundup, we highlighted posts published last month that resonated with us — and the rest of the WordPress.com community. Below, we’ve shared more picks that generated lively discussions, made us think, and even made us smile.

Dear Lady in the SUV

That’s how you made us feel: Like we were that kid, and finally someone wanted to be on our team. It was the first time someone looked close enough to ignore that we were gay, and instead, saw the love we shared between us. Better yet, I don’t think you “ignored” that we were gay. If you smiled, I think it actually made you happy.

The author at Coffee Bean Glean talks about holding hands with her partner in public, and the hurtful glares they’ve received as a gay couple. Here, in this open letter, she thanks a lady in an SUV who smiled at her and her girlfriend one day, as they walked across a parking lot. Candid and endearing, the letter made us smile. It’s refreshing to read a positive personal story that resonates with some of our readers.

“Hurricane Porn”?: The Aesthetics of Authenticity and Nature’s Wrath

That is, we increasingly live in an internet environment that is akin to walking down Main Street USA in Disneyland; Disneyland announces itself as a lie in which we willingly participate from the very outset, and most of us expect if not actually desire clever if not beautiful distortions and misrepresentations in such popular culture.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, we saw many fake photographs shared across the internet. In this post at Archaeology and Material Culture, Paul discusses authenticity in journalism in the age of Instagram and memes, and the internet’s power to shape our collective imagination and idea of reality. Sophisticated and thought-provoking, Paul’s take makes you think about ideas you may not have considered before.

We read other thoughtful post-Sandy commentaries as well. In “In the Eye of the Storm: What Hurricane Sandy Taught Me about Social Media and Technology,” Tracy describes how the experience taught her more about the role of technology in her daily life, disconnection in the digital age, and the importance of neighbors — our immediate, physical social network.

Goodbye, Twinkie the Kid

And what of the children? The innumerable generations of American children who will never know the foam-like, room-temperature mouthful of a Twinkie, who will never get the chance to debate the finer points of Twinkie-eating — end-to-end like a hot dog or upside down and bottom-first, like some cruel Twinkie surgery, savoring every layer of the total cremectomy.

Many WordPressers weighed in on the Hostess Twinkie news, and we were particularly entertained by the sharp humor in John’s homage to this all-American spongecake. Still, amid the lightheartedness, he makes us think: What does it mean when a society mourns a packaged snack — when crowds rush to grab the last ones off the shelves, or flock to eBay to snag what they can? At the end, he writes: ”O, Twinkie the Kid! Winsome cowboy of my dreams, western harbinger of root canals, you will be sorely missed. A singular America dies with you.” We think you’ll agree: it’s a nice mix of humor and opinion.

Sometimes a Punch In the Face Is All It Takes

No one pushed me to defend myself by pressing charges or anything, which I really needed in this situation. Plus, wasn’t my dad supposed to walk out in overalls, wild eyes, and carrying a shotgun? That’s what happens on Lifetime. But, mine just stood idly by, which made me feel like I’d been punched a dozen more times.

You know those occasional pieces we stumble upon that are so raw and honest and bold? Meghan’s post is one of them. Here, she paints a picture of her father — whom she had wished was more open and loving when she was younger — and then recalls a relationship in her early 20s with an older man that turns violent. After a number of years, she learns the truth about the situation — and realizes her father is indeed the man she had always hoped for.

Art Blogging vs. Conversational Blogging

Art Blogs are like museums. When visiting one, the guest usually strolls about casually, looks around, stops, stares, maybe sits for a minute, contemplates, wanders off, and eventually leaves with a sense of appreciation for whatever was on display.  It’s rare to happen upon a conversation during a visit.

Adam at My Right to Bitch created a lot of chatter with this post, which presents two distinct types of blogs — the art blog and the conversational blog — as well as how to cultivate a fan base. We appreciate the space he creates for a community conversation and like how the piece kicked off a healthy discussion — be sure to read the 500 comments from readers and fellow bloggers who’ve weighed in.

Just can’t get enough? Read the latest Freshly Pressed picks; check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips and inspiration 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.

Have some featured content that desperately needs saving? Have no fear, our new theme Hero is here!

Hero’s featured content-rich Front Page template

Designed by antthemes, Hero is a dark and minimal theme that features the content you care about most with a Front Page template that’s packed with the promotional power of our Featured Post Slider, a custom tagline, and three featured post callouts. Hero also comes packed with sidebar and footer widget areas galore, and a full width page template for those times that you just want to eliminate some of the distractions.

Read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Brace yourselves, new themes are coming. Today I’m pleased to announce the latest three additions to the ever-growing collection of themes here at WordPress.com.

First up is Watson, by The Theme Foundry.

Watson: Home Page

Inspired by the clean lines and bold strokes of a classic newspaper, Watson boasts a neatly organized front page layout and a pleasurable reading experience that was designed with writers in mind. It offers a beautiful featured slider for important posts, looks great on devices both big and small, and comes with a lovely custom widget that takes advantage of featured post thumbnails.

Watson is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Our second treat for you today is Simfo, a theme that has a minimal, yet strong, aesthetic that’s embellished with subtle hints of grunge.

Simfo: Home Page

Designed by Themify, Simfo directs all focus to what matters most: your content; and it was built from the ground up to support screen sizes from small to large, ensuring that your site will look great for visitors on the go.

Simfo is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Last, but certainly not least, is Publish, created by our very own Konstantin Kovshenin.

Publish: Home Page

Publish is a clean, minimal, responsive theme ideal for individual bloggers. One of its neat features is that it uses your Gravatar image as the blog’s header to make your site recognizable and unique. It’s also available for immediate download from WordPress.org.

Read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Uploading and editing media just got a whole lot better on WordPress.com. Check out our new Media Manager, designed to make it easier to upload images, audio, and video files to your site and edit their attributes on the fly. Let’s walk through how to add images to a new post on WordPress.com.

Within a new post, click on the Add Media button:

The Media Manager allows you to collect images to add to your post-in-progress. You can select a file you may have already uploaded to your Media Library, designate a URL from which to embed an image, drag and drop files into the browser window, or select files to upload from your computer:

Editing image attributes

Once you’ve uploaded the images, you can edit each image’s attributes from within the Media Manager, simply by selecting it. You can edit an image’s title, enter a caption and alt text, and/or edit display settings:

When you’ve got the details just right, click on the blue, Insert into post button on the bottom, right-hand side of the Media Manager to add your images to your post:

Creating a gallery is a snap

To create a gallery, select the images you wish to include:

Then, click on the Create a new gallery button in the bottom, right hand corner of the Media Manager:

On the following screen, you can edit descriptions. You can click and drag photos to re-order them as you see fit:

Here’s the new gallery in a published post:

Pretty nifty!

For our self-hosted friends running WordPress.org, Media Manager improvements will be available in WordPress 3.5, which rolls out on December 5th, 2012.

New Tools for Restaurateurs

Between starting the demi-glace and getting the case of chickens out of the walk-in for stock, the last thing we think you should be worrying about as a restaurateur is whether the guests showing up to your soft-open can actually find your phone number and location on your web site. Can phones do Flash yet? How long has that osso bucco been braising? We think the latter is probably a much better thing to take up your time, so we put together a few key tools to help get your mind off your website and where it belongs – on the food.

Introducing Confit

When looking at common restaurant site problems, one of the first issues that sprang to mind was how often broken animations, inaccessible information and bloated PDFs are foisted upon us when using our smartphones, when all we really need is a phone number and tappable address.

When designing Confit, a brand-new WordPress.com theme, we started with the mobile experience and expanded thoughtfully outward to larger content views like tablets and conventional web browsers which allowed us to focus on a seamless experience for all of your site’s visitors, no matter what device they’re on. No fuss, no muss.

Get in Touch

The next couple areas where we felt restaurant sites could use some help were mobile-accessible contact details and easy OpenTable reservations, both of which we’ve tackled by creating custom widgets.

The Contact Info widget includes an address field that automagically embeds a Google map, phone numbers that include tap-to-call for mobile users and your hours, right alongside your content in a conveniently simple sidebar.

If you are an OpenTable customer, just copy and paste your embed code from the Restaurant Center to embed a simple reservations widget right in your sidebar.

Focus on the Food

One thing we knew we couldn’t sacrifice in the name of accessibility was gorgeous photography, so we chose to feature it front and center with support for background images that scale up to even the highest of resolutions for hi-dpi displays to showcase those top-quality photos of your gastronomic creations. Each page can even have its own background photo if you’d like.

We think we’ve chosen some lovely typography to represent the humanity in the act of cooking food for others, but should you wish to change your fonts and colors, by all means check out our custom design upgrade.

Another first for WordPress.com users is the ability to manage your menu (not the website’s navigation, we mean your actual food menu) right within your Dashboard. Add as many food menus as you’d like and arrange your items into sections quickly and easily. You can even edit each menu item and add a featured image to display.

Already have your menu set up by a designer in a PDF? No problem, we’re ready for that, too. Simply upload your PDF and tell us which page you’d like to show the menu on, and you’re good to go.

Find out more about how to get your restaurant started with WordPress.com on the restaurants page, or check out the Confit demo site.

As November wanes, we’re nearing the end of the 13th National Blog Posting Month, better known as NaBloPoMo. Every single day, participants are firing up their blogs and writing on every topic under the sun in a marathon of self-expression. Are you one of them? If you are looking for more background or inspiration, this is the post for you.

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Across WordPress.com this month, NaBloPoMo bloggers have been writing about . . .

Image: mindfulmonth

The importance of hanging on

As with every creative challenge, the key to a successful NaBloPoMo is stamina, determination, and a cool head. If you are looking for an apt analogy, try rock-climbing, courtesy of ”A Good Day” from A Month of Mindful Blogging:

Power, technique and fitness all play their part but reigning supreme over them all is the climber’s head. Fact: your technique goes to pot if your head is not calm and focused. Fact: your power disappears in an instant when lactic acid surges through your forearms because you’ve been clinging on too hard because you’re scared. Fact: fitness doesn’t matter a jot if you don’t believe you can get up a climb.

The power of an apology

For some, this has been a month of finding the courage to say the difficult, painful things that need saying — including the words “I’m sorry.” Prompted by this post, “Unspoken Apologies” from Hayley of Going The Distance lists the regrets she’s never been able to articulate in person, before noting:

An actual, genuine apology should never be delivered over a blog post.

Sometimes blogging is only the first step toward expressing how you feel.

Image: Mr. T in DC

Saying “no more”

If you’re committing yourself to a writing challenge, and if you can choose what you write about, why not make those lifestyle changes you’ve always longed for and document the process as you go? Take the post “Giving Up Diet Soda or: How I Am Learning To Stop The Fizz And Love Water,” in which sorta ginger decides to . . . well, you guessed it:

Over the years, I have tried to quit this habit.  The cost alone of these drinks is phenomenal.  I would alternate brands to match what was on the best sale that week.  I would switch to store brands to try to wean off the taste and save a few bucks.  But none of this really worked.  It is my caffeine source, helping me wake up since I have never liked coffee or tea, and my replacement for sweets when I have a sugar craving.

An unexpected longing for Twinkies

Unsurprisingly, the sad news that Hostess Brands has gone into liquidation has hit Twinkie-lovers hard this month. What has surprised some bloggers is how attractive it’s made this spongy snack. In ”Death Of A Sponge,” the author of The Smug Cloud writes:

I can’t remember the last time I ate a Twinkie or a Hostess cupcake, but you would not believe how much I have been craving one, knowing that they are virtually unattainable.

. . . while Andrea‘s post “In My Lunchbox” notes:

With all the talk of Twinkies this week, I now have a ridiculous craving for one… and I don’t think I’ve actually had a Twinkie in at least fifteen years.

Image: suanie

A passion for unique food

It’s a month in which a lot of love has been expressed for a lot of food. Take Char Kuey Teow, staple dish of Malaysia. Inspired by this prompt, Sakthi of Time flies when you’re having fun explains why this meal is a different experience for everyone:

In most places one can ask for ingredients like prawns, egg, or cockles to be added or omitted, and also specify whether more or less chilli is preferred. And the brilliant thing is, the kuey teow vendor will remember every version that each customer has ordered, while still cooking a previous order in their giant wok. That in itself is a wonder to be experienced.

Learning to trust their instincts

It’s one thing to know that your instincts are often the source of your future happiness — and another thing to find the confidence to trust them. In “Instincts,”  melbatoastjones outlines the danger of ignoring your deepest feelings:

…if you constantly dim your brightness to accommodate others, if you repeatedly allow your ideas to be watered down or replaced with someone else’s, then you never even get to see the impact that your voice has. You never get to see if your idea really was a good one. You’re so busy trying to please others that it becomes washed out, a pale ghost of the idea it should have or could have been. Even if your idea ultimately sucks, it’s better to learn that for real rather than regret the never having seen it come to life in the first place.

Image: Guwashi999

Appreciating their lives

Some NaBloPoMo writers chose to reflect on their progress through life, examining their goals, hopes, and fears, while considering how differently things might have turned out. In “NaBloPoMo: Rewrite Time,” Lady Joyful remembers her years as an English university student, and recounts a panic attack that led to a protracted stay in Finland. If she had caught her plane home as originally planned, she may never have found the source of her current happiness:

If that had happened, I would probably have muddled through my first year of university and come out the other side somewhat more settled. I would, this summer just gone, have finished my degree and graduated with the friends I made there. I may not have moved to Finland. Going by statistics, our relationship would have floundered as many long distance relationships do. I would not be engaged. I would not have my three lovely cats or the flat with my much-loved fiancé.

Feeling inspired to take part?

With a few days still left on the clock, it’s not too late to join in. Take a look at Michelle’s overview of resources to help you get started, including our daily writing prompts and weekly writing and photo challenges over at The Daily Post. If you want to know a little more of the thinking behind NaBloPoMo, have a look at WiseGeek’s overview, or rummage through the resources on offer at BlogHer’s official home of NaBloPoMo.

The 365-day challenge

If you’re nearly a month into your daily blogging routine and wishing that NaBloPoMo lasted longer, why not take things further?

We’re thinking of the impressive commitment of the yearly bloggers, setting themselves challenges that span twelve months. We’re thinking of Ann of A year of reading the world, who has made it her mission to read a novel from as many of the world’s 196 independent countries as she can by 2012′s end. We’re thinking of Chuck Cottrell’s Sketches from Memory, in which the author has been posting a sketch a day for nearly a full year.

As the year draws to a close, we’ll highlight some more motivated bloggers who’ve participated in challenges through 2012. Stay tuned over at The Daily Post!

This Thanksgiving, we’re celebrating with a Black Friday Sale just like we did last year. On Friday, November 23rd, you’ll receive a free one year subscription to our Custom Design Upgrade, a $30 value, when you purchase any Premium Theme.

Sale starts Thursday night—November 22, 2012 at 11:00 PM PST.

Since last year, we’ve more than doubled the number of premium themes! Each premium theme is meticulously reviewed and updated before it is added, and each one comes with support directly from the theme developers themselves. You can find the perfect theme for your blog this Friday!

To see all of our themes, check out the WordPress.com theme directory.

Custom Design has options anyone can use: fun and professional Custom Fonts, color palettes and patterns you can add with just a few clicks, and a recently-overhauled CSS editor for those of you who really like to dig into the CSS code. You can really make your theme stand out using Custom Design!

Sale ends November 24, 2012 at 2:00 AM PST (that’s Friday night).

Our goal for these themes and customizations is to help you make the web a more beautiful place. We’re grateful to have such a wide range of talented individuals, companies, groups, and families writing, posting photos and videos, contributing ideas, reading, and connecting with the world through blogging.

A very special thank you to every single person that makes WordPress.com what it is today. May your year’s end be filled with spice, love, and inspiration.

My name is Jared Gulian, and I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up living in paradise.

That’s the first line on the About page of Jared Gulian’s blog, Moon over Martinborough. In Jared’s case, “paradise” is a tiny olive farm in rural New Zealand, the location and inspiration for his upcoming book based on his blog at WordPress.com.

We asked Jared about his whirlwind of an experience landing a book deal with Random House New Zealand this summer, and how he’s built his audience using his blog.

How did your book contract come about?

It started with my blog, which is about life on our tiny olive farm. My partner and I are both American city boys, and somehow we ended up living in rural New Zealand with an olive grove. I wanted to write about it, so I created a blog on WordPress.com in 2009.

The blog became popular and won some awards, and a regional magazine, Wairarapa Lifestyle Magazine, started publishing my posts. Eventually, it attracted national media, including Radio New Zealand and the Dominion Post. Visitors on my blog started asking where they could buy our olive oil. Although we’d never planned to have our own brand, due to the overwhelming demand we decided to launch a line of our own artisan extra virgin olive oil. We named the olive oil after my blog, Moon over Martinborough.

After blogging for about a year, I slowed my schedule so I could start turning the blog’s content into a book. It took longer than I thought, and it was harder than I thought. I spent the next year-and-a-half blogging and working on a book manuscript simultaneously. I took a break from the book to write new blog material, and then returned to the book. When I was done with the manuscript, I let it sit for a while.

My friends and partner pushed me to put together a book proposal to send to publishers. (I wrote about the process in this post.) A good deal of that proposal was about the blog: web stats, awards I’d won, and media attention I’d received. (I also included stats about people who “liked” the blog’s Facebook page to show who my audience was. As it turns out, my audience is 70 percent female and 30 percent male, mostly between the ages of 35 and 55.)

I sent the proposal to four publishers, and a week later I heard back from two of them. Eventually, I signed a contract with Random House New Zealand. It’s like a dream come true.

How did your WordPress.com blog contribute to this?

It wouldn’t have happened without the blog. The blog helped me to build an audience and establish a platform that showed potential print publishers I had a viable, engaging project. It’s like my material had already been “user-tested” and proven popular.

How has being part of the WordPress.com community influenced your work and writing process?

I have found a lot of parallels between moving out to the country and joining the blogging community. In both worlds, I’ve found the people to be remarkably helpful and friendly. Other bloggers have been very supportive when I needed advice. They’re like country neighbors. The WordPress.com forums are a great source of information, and the “like” function makes it easy to connect with all sorts of fantastic bloggers in our community. The first “like” on a post has, in many cases, led to an ongoing conversation with really nice people.

How has having a blog changed the way you interact with your audience?

When I started the blog, I knew I eventually wanted to turn the material into a book. I saw my blog as a way to self-publish sections of the book as I wrote them. I’d been writing for years, but before blogging I was writing mostly fiction. In fact, I have two novels in the bottom drawer (where they belong), and a stack of rejection letters from publishers.

With my “olive grove book,” I wanted to do something different. Publishing my content online as I wrote it allowed me to engage with my readers directly and learn from what they liked. When certain posts received a lot of comments (such as Old Man Henry and the Chook House Race Wars and The U.N. Committee on Home Decorating), I took a closer look at what it was that people responded to. Then I did more of that. This changed the course of my writing as I progressed.

The biggest result was that I began focusing more on humor than I’d originally intended, because humor was what people were responding to most strongly. This is completely different to my early fiction writing, which I did in isolation and which was a bit heavy-handed and self-consciously “literary.” Blogging has helped me to learn that I don’t need to take myself so seriously — in writing as well as in life.

Why did you choose WordPress.com over the other options available to you? Are there certain features that have been particularly useful?

WordPress.com makes it easy to manage my site. There are really good videos, support, and forums that make it easy to learn, and I like how there are so many useful bits of functionality. There are also heaps of great free themes that are easy to sort and sift through. Ultimately, I like that WordPress.com lets me focus on content — not back-end technical development. Good content has always been my focus.

I’ve found the built-in stats very useful. Also, I like that I can easily dictate photo layout in my blog and control where I want things to appear. It’s important for me to have a beautiful blog with a nice layout, and WordPress.com makes that easy without HTML.

What advice would you give budding authors on building their web presence?

Produce good content. If you’re doing stuff people like, and if you keep doing it long enough, people will notice. Being a good blogger is a lot like being a good country neighbor. You need to be sincere, helpful, and kind. You can’t introduce yourself to your cyberspace “neighbors” with secret agendas about what they can do for you. Just join the conversation. Be warm and open.

Talk to people about what you can do together that will help both of you. And remember that if you ask for help, be prepared to give help in return. That’s how it works in the country, and that’s how it works in the blogosphere.

When will the book be published?

Moon over Martinborough will be released in June 2013. A print version will be available in New Zealand (and internationally through NZ websites such as www.fishpond.co.nz and www.mightyape.co.nz), and an e-book will be available internationally.

I’m hopeful the print book will be picked up by publishers overseas. This process so far has shown me that anything can happen, so who knows?

Be sure to head over to Jared’s blog, Moon over Martinborough, to say hello and see what he’s up to, or visit his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter. We’ll check in with him when the book is published so he can share more about his experience.

Today, I’m happy to announce that our collection of themes grows by one:

Academica: Home Page

Academica is a great choice for educational and school websites. Designed by WPZOOM, it sports a classy, modern design and comes with a one-, two-, or three-column layout, nine widget areas, three page templates, and a featured content slider. With all of these customization options, Academica makes it easy to create a unique look for your school or organization.

Find out more about how to get started with Academica on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your blog by going to Appearance -> Themes.