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

1. A more-focused Customizer.

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

2. Your Custom Design tools, inside the Customizer.

Change your fonts

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

Add some pizzazz

3. Custom Design Snapshots.

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

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

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

Today we are happy to announce a new tier, WordPress.com Enterprise, that brings the best of WordPress.com: all of our paid upgrades, including premium themes and Custom Design, and the best of all the built-in WordPress.com VIP features such as 70+ approved plugins which include integrations with top partners such as Flipboard, Chartbeat, and Facebook, and custom JavaScript for $500 a month per site.

Making a landing page, news magazine, company website, or product page? You’ll want to check out WordPress.com Enterprise.

More information about the new tier is available on the VIP News WordPress.com Enterprise announcement post. Click on over to the Enterprise announcement to get information about a free trial!

Even if you’re not interested in creating a WordPress.com Enterprise site, we’re sure you’ll want to check out what people are creating with Enterprise. Get a sneak peek at two sites created with WordPress.com Enterprise and live now, Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Chef and ESPN’s Digital and Print Products!

Learn more about WordPress.com Enterprise.

As more and more of you take advantage of our fabulous Upgrades, we’ve been conscious of the increasing need to offer a great way to manage your purchases. What if you could track all of your upgrades, manage them, renew them and *gasp* even cancel them, all in one place?

Well, starting today you’ll see a new page in the Store section of your dashboard: My Upgrades.

On that page you’ll find the list of the upgrades purchased for the site you are managing, followed by a lists of the upgrades you have on your other sites, if any.

Domain registration, mapping, Custom Design, Space upgrade, VideoPress or Premium theme, you will find them all here, along with links allowing you to renew, enable auto renew, update credit card data, or cancel ( and get a refund within the appropriate timeframe ).

As you can see, the status of each upgrade and its expiration date are clearly displayed there, with some handy color-coding:

• One-time purchases (Premium theme in the screenshot above) or upgrades currently set to auto-renew (Domain) are displayed in green
• Upgrades which need to be renewed manually are displayed in orange ( 10GB Space, Custom Design )
• When these upgrades which need to be renewed manually get close to their expiration date, they are displayed in red ( VideoPress )

You’ll also find some handy dandy links to more information about each upgrade, just in case you forget why you bought it! When appropriate, we give you links to the settings page, too.

We’ve got plenty of exciting updates planned, including the ability to visualize, save, and print your own billing reports and purchase receipts – so keep an eye on the page for more!

Never forget a renewal anymore, visit the My Upgrades section of the dashboard.

We have no excuses for the extended outage. We do have an upgraded forum ready for your loquaciousness, and with all previous posts intact.

The forum is running a default bluish-kinda theme for a bit, while we construct a polished IFri look’n'feel for the new software version.

Your old username and password should work. Welcome back.

Discuss.

http://illustrationfriday.com/forum/

Hi — I just upgraded my WordPress install and along with it, removed some old crusty plugins that I don’t think I was using anymore. If you come across something that is broken or working worse than it was this morning, please drop me a line or a comment and let me know. Thank you.

I have a fantastic announcement coming as soon as my new website is published (almost there)! There's going to be so many new samples it will drive you hog wild!... just you see...

For now, my mind is obsessing over nutrition. I am involved in a publication for the Royal Alberta Museum called the "Wit n Word" whose current theme is food. I've taken the top 9 worst foods from Nutrition by Natalie in her video "Top 10 Worst Foods" and turned it into a quirky illustration. I still have to do her List of Top 10 Foods... Read the rest of this post

Today I was fumbling through some old containers, looking for something to store spinach seeds in.  I came upon a prescription bottle of mine—these make perfect seed containers because they’re airtight and the lids don’t come off easily.  For some reason I looked at the label; there was a sticker on the bottle that read:

Call doctor if you experience mood changes, sadness, depression or fear.

The message of that little tab is amusing because the prescription was for an anti-depressant.  If you have ever been depressed, you know how busy you would be if you called the doctor every time you experienced “mood changes, sadness, depression or fear”—not to mention dread, anxiety, panic or any of a dozen associated responses which occur courtesy of your brain’s variable functioning.  There aren’t enough cell phone minutes in the world to take care of all the phone calls that would come from depressives if they heeded that little sticker.

Somebody once asked me what it was like to be depressed.  I couldn’t tell them.  The fact is, I don’t really know.  You see, I’ve been depressed all my life.  Over the past ten years I’ve been taking some medication which gives me about 50% relief, measured either in time or in effect.  It would be better to ask what it feels like not to be depressed—otherwise the question is rather like asking what it feels like to be alive.

Not being depressed feels very much different than being depressed.  It is important to know that depression is not the opposite of happiness, in the same way that pain is not the flip side of ordinary sensory input.  Happiness is not what you get from anti-depressive medication.  If it’s working, and when it is working, you get a break from depression with the medicine: you don’t get joy.  In other words, you reach or get close to ordinary level-one existence—but for a depressive this can be very much like a vacation, which in a sense, it is.

Happiness is another thing altogether.  I was happy plenty of times when I was depressed, in those pre-medication days.  Happy breaks through at times; you experience it like a good meal, and then it is gone.  Meanwhile, you remain depressed.  Happy is a nice thing, like a glass of good wine, but it has nothing on Normal. Normal, meaning Not-too-Damned-Depressed, is like—well, it’s like nothing you’re familiar with as a Depressive, but something that, as they say, you could easily become used to.

The best definition of Depression I can think of is that it entails mental pain akin to the experience of tragedy without the associated stimulus.  In other words, if you clear your mind entirely of any thought, have nothing untoward going on in your life, yet still feel the pang of intense sadness, guilt or remorse, then, by George, you’re depressed.  Congratulations—you’re in the club.

I used to live in a neighborhood marked by steep hills.  Every morning I could see a fellow on crutches drag his useless legs to the bus stop, then head off to work somewhere.  Every evening I could watch him get off the bus, drag his steel-braced legs across four lanes of traffic and make his way up a long hill to his home.  It seemed very difficult for him to get around.  Being human, I felt sorry for him. 

Being chronically depressed is like that.  The world is a series of uphill grinds on bad legs.  The difference is, one is encouraged by experience and custom to pretend the legs aren’t bad—to neither limp nor use crutches, as it were.  For that matter, nobody can see you’re depressed, at least not until you make a mistake and let them know by word or deed.  Then, as anybody who’s been there can tell you, you’ve essentially confessed to having a social disease. 

Lose an arm and the world will mutter ‘Poor bastard’ as you walk by.  Lose the ability to experience pleasure and people will cut you off their party list.  Depression remains one of the few diseases it remains acceptable to discriminate against.  And why not?  Nobody believes they’ll get cancer from somebody else, but they think that the depressed guy will make them unhappy—happy, in their mind, being the thing they believe depression kills.

Strangely enough, depressed people avoid their fellow sufferers, too.  They believe that depressed company will either rob them of the experience of whatever happiness they can feel through the pain, or that it will remind them too much of their own dilemma.  All of which is understandable—when you’ve only got so much good feeling, you don’t want to spend it in the company of people who might drag you down.  Depression is a club without meetings.

Even so, depressives know perfectly well who their fellow lodge brothers are.  Your seasoned depressive can spot a comrade across a crowded subway station.  A depressed person can usually tell if a movie actor playing a part is a depressive.  You might be able to as well—I mean, you didn’t figure Buster Keaton was depressed?  Believe me, if space aliens ever land on earth, I’ll know right away which of them wants to share my Prozac.  Assuming that they don’t have something better.

Even if I couldn’t smell them, if there weren’t something in the shift of an eye or the shrug of a shoulder to tip me off, I could simply close my eyes and listen for the sound of depression:  that sound, oddly enough, is laughter.  Depressed people have an interesting relationship with laughter.  They seem to laugh quite a bit more than their condition would call for; that, and they have a huge talent for making other people laugh.

I would not be the first to remark that comedic talent and depression seem to go hand-in-hand.  Depressed people have a deep and complex relationship with humor.  For a depressive, humor is the residue of the relationship with pain, the latent trace of a long-term conversation.  For the average person, pain is a brief interlude; for the depressive it is represents a career.  The thing we call humor—that collection of paradoxical surprises, those clever manipulations of expectation—arise as frequent insights, electric emanations from the sour acid of depression. 

Happy people don’t understand their own non-Depression, and they don’t spend time researching the subject.  Depressed people can’t get away from Depression; it is literally a devil in the head, and one with a loud, clear voice.  The humorist talent of the Depressive consists mainly of scraps of dialog from the constant dickering with that devil—the better riffs and punch lines. 

As a kid I was known as the boy who could make anybody laugh.  It was easy:  all I had to do was think of what was going on inside my head.  There, just under the scalp, I had a huge trove of one-liners and glib remarks, all of them bouncing atop layers of story elements, just waiting for a chance to see the light of day.

With a little prompting, and often enough without, I could take a look at a playground situation, offer up an alternative version of events with a snappy ending, and let go with that. 

The material was warehoused because I needed to maintain a store of words, and some good ones, to answer the devil with—and to explain the situation to myself as well.  Old Lucifer would laugh and say, ‘Why shouldn’t you feel lousy all the time?’ and there’d be a voice from my own soul echoing the same sentiment—I had to make up something quick.  I’d say, ‘Why the hell not—didn’t Eisenhower get elected twice?’  A lot of it was just to have a diversion, to have some answer.  All those words, the glibness and stories, were stabs at the cruel fate that made a kindergartner wish he had never been born, most of the day, nearly every day.  By the time I was out of school, I could make anybody feel good but myself.  For the longest time I settled for busy.  Busy is another diversion of the depressed.  Taken altogether, the store of words boiling up from the acid bath, plus the habit of using them and the need to be busy—those are useful tools for any writer.

Michael McGrorty