Tag: WordPress

Guess How Many WordPress.com Blogs Were Created In 2014

We may be nearly a week into January, but there are still some interesting year-in-review posts coming out from major Internet companies. On Monday, Amazon gave us a look back at third-party seller performance in 2014, for example.

Now, Automattic is sharing some numbers for WordPress.com blogs, and they’re quite “Im(Press)ive” as the company puts it. There were a total of 18,300,771 new blogs created throughout the year. That’s up 12.5% compared to 2013. In case you’re wondering, that works out to nearly 50,000 new blogs per day.

Wow.

Now just imagine how many posts there must have been on WordPress.com blogs in 2014. Actually you don’t have to, because they gave that number too. 555,782,547. That’s over 1.5 million per day with 47 million published from mobile devices.

WordPress also gives us a 24.5 trillion bytes of data per hour stat.

“Those bytes aren’t just little packets of code winging around the internet’s series of tubes (at least, they’re not just that),” writes Automattic’s Michelle W. “They carry stories. Memories. Voices. Relationships. Experiences. They’re your essays, your photos, your poems, your drawings. Every time a piece of what you’ve created pops up on someone’s screen, you expand someone’s universe, just a little, and they expand yours — which is the real power of WordPress.com, and of the internet.”

She also drops some additional stats: “Behind everything Automattic does are 301 Automatticians: 66 Happiness Engineers responded to your requests for assistance 365,212 times; Every one of our 134 developers worked on the improvements and enhancements we’ve been rolling out over the past few weeks; 9 systems engineers kept everyone’s sites running fast and secure; 8 editors shepherded over 22,000 of you through Blogging U. courses; 24 themers made 96 stunning new layouts and dozens of customization improvements available.”

As reported earlier, Automattic has launched a new in-person event series for WordPress.com bloggers, where they can learn from WordPress experts.

Image via WordPress (Facebook)

January 6, 2015
WordPress.com Bloggers Get ‘Press Publish’ Event Series

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com, announced the launch of a new event series called Press Publish. This will give bloggers the chance to learn and network with so-called WordPress.com experts.

“These events will focus on inspiration and tools from WordPress.com, though people blogging on any platform will be welcome,” says Jen Mylo in a blog post. “Speakers will be a combination of awesome WordPress.com bloggers and staff members including folks from the Happiness Team, Blogging U, and the Theme Team — in short, the WordPress.com experts.”

The series will kick off with conferences this spring in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix. The Portland event will be on March 28, and the Phoenix one will be on April 18.

“We’re putting together the program now, and will start announcing speakers, schedule, and pricing later this month,” says Mylo. “In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about bloggers/speakers or topics that we should have on our radar.”

Bloggers can subscribe to the Press Publish site for further updates.

Image via Press Publish

January 6, 2015
Automattic Announces BruteProtect Acquisition

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress, announced that it has acuiqred BruteProtect, which makes a plugin and service for protecting sites from malicious logins, and saves server resources to help sites run faster.

The plugin, according to the company, also keeps sites on the latest versions of WordPress core, plugins, and themes, lending to better security.

While the plugin and service are already available, Automattic says it it will build their functionality into Jetpack, and retire them. The company says in a blog post:

Though Automattic is known for its consumer-facing services like WordPress.com and Jetpack, the infrastructure behind them is the bottom part of the iceberg. Taking services to web-scale is another one of Automattic’s specialties, whether it’s the 8 billion Gravatars we serve every day, the Simperium sync service, or the countless spam that Akismet has blocked (and time it has saved).

This is internet plumbing: when it works it’s completely invisible, and we love that. We’re now pushing 450 terabytes of data a day from 9 datacenters around the globe.

BruteProtect says its solution has been installed on nearly 110,000 sites and has defended against over 140 million brute force attacks.

Image via BruteProtect

August 26, 2014
Pinterest Launches ‘Pin It’ For Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress & Wix

Pinterest announced that launch of the “Pin It” button for Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.org, and Wix.

“We talk about the Pin It button a lot around here, and that’s because it’s a pretty big deal,” says Pinterest’s Bill Rastello. “It’s what Pinners use to save things they find around the web, an easy-to-add tool that gets your business on Pinterest.”

“These new integrations will make adding the Pin It button to your site a snap,” he adds.

To add it on Tumblr, you’ll need to add a JavaScript line. Go to “Customize,” then “Edit HTML” Find the code here.

For Blogger, the button is now one of the default sharing buttons. It will automatically pick up the first image in the post.

For WordPress.org, there’s a plugin to install.

For Wix, the button is now native to the page editor. It will create a Pin based off the image and description you specify, and will link back to the page of the site you’re on when you click it.

Pinterest says it will be adding more integrations in the future.

Image via Pinterest

April 10, 2014
WordPress Founder Talks To LinkedIn About The Future Of Publishing

This video’s about a month old, but interesting none the less, and LinkedIn just shared it in a blog post today. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg discusses the future of publishing with Reid Hoffman.

It’s part of the LinkedIn Speaker series.

It’s probably safe to say that Mullenweg knows a bit about what he’s talking about when it comes to publishing. WordPress boasts over 77 million sites with over 409 million people viewing more than 13.1 billion pages each month.

More incredible WordPress stats here.

Image via YouTube

March 27, 2014
WordPress.com Now Offers 12 More TLDs

WordPress.com is now offering users twelve new top-level domains. You can now register domains with the following TLDs for new or existing sites:

.com.br
.net.br
.info
.biz
.mobi
.mx
.es
.nl
.be
.fm
.tv
.in

WordPress.com now offers a total of seventeen TLD options for those buying domain names. The others are .com, .net, .org, .me, and .co.

You can register for any of these regardless of where you live (though you might want to look into how search engines view them with regards to location, as it could have an effect on your search visibility).

Here’s a video Google put out on the subject last year:

If you already run a site on WordPress.com, and wish to grab a domain with one of the new options, just go to Store, and then “My Domains”.

In other domain news, ICANN announced this morning that he number of new gTLDs that have been delegated has surpassed 175. They expect the number to be over 1,300 within the next few years.

Image via WordPress

March 24, 2014
You Can Now Use Millions Of High-Quality Pics From Getty On You Site For Free

Getty Images, long known for suing people for using its photos on blogs, has surprised the Internet by making millions of them free to use. The photography giant announced that tens of millions of its photos are now embeddable, which means you can feel free to embed them on your blog. Just make sure you’re using the photos the way you’re allowed to.

Do you intend to take advantage of Getty’s new embedded photo offering? Let us know in the comments.

Here’s what it says about embeds in the terms of service:

You may only use embedded Getty Images Content for editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are newsworthy or of public interest). Embedded Getty Images Content may not be used: (a) for any commercial purpose (for example, in advertising, promotions or merchandising) or to suggest endorsement or sponsorship; (b) in violation of any stated restriction; (c) in a defamatory, pornographic or otherwise unlawful manner; or (d) outside of the context of the Embedded Viewer.

That last one is important. You can use these photos, but you better make sure they’re within Getty’s embed code.

To find something you can use, go to gettyimages.com, hover over an image in the search results or on the image detail page, and click the embed icon. The viewer includes the photographer and the image collection, as well as link to the image page on Getty’s site. There, those who wish to use it commercially can obtain the relevant licensing information.

Here’s what the embeds look like:

How about that?

“With people increasingly turning to imagery to communicate and tell their stories online, the embed capability opens up Getty Images’ award-winning imagery for seamless sharing,” the company said in an announcement. “Through the embed tool, individuals can draw on Getty Images’ latest news, sports, celebrity, music and fashion coverage; immense digital photo archive; and rich conceptual images to illustrate their unique passions, ideas and interests. This innovation opens one of the largest, deepest and most comprehensive image collections in the world for easy sharing, thereby making the world an even more visual place.”

CEO Jonathan Klein said, “Images are the communication medium of today and imagery has become the world’s most spoken language. Whether via a blog, website or social media, everyone is a publisher and increasingly visually literate. Innovation and disruption are the foundation of Getty Images, and we are excited to open up our vast and growing image collection for easy, legal sharing in a new way that benefits our content contributors and partners, and advances our core mission to enable a more visually-rich world.”

Just to be crystal clear here, note that he said “blog, website or social media.”

It is a definitely a new day.

Of course you won’t be able to embed any photo of Getty’s, but as the pics above illustrate, the embed code is available on a wide range of photos, including celebrities.

The new offering certainly has plenty of benefits for Getty. It will get plenty of links and branding out of this. It’s also great for the photographers, as it will get their names out there, and ensure that credit is given where it’s due.

Getty says the embeds will provide people with a “simple and legal way to utilize content that respects creators’ rights, including the opportunity to generate licensing revenue.”

“You have to adapt to survive,” said Kevin Mazur, celebrity photographer and director, and co-founder of WireImage Inc. “Evolving to embrace technology that encourages responsible image sharing is the way forward for the industry.”

The embeds are supported anywhere HTML can be used. WordPress, which has 75 million users, is already telling users about the feature.

“This new Getty Images embed capability will open users up to a huge new creative repository in a simple, legal way,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, senior vice president of commercial services at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. “We look forward to seeing all the amazing ways that our users can take advantage of this new access.”

WordPress says you can actually just grab the image URL from Getty, and copy that directly into you post.

But it doesn’t matter what blogging platform you use. If it uses HTML, you can use the Getty embeds.

Go ahead and go over to gettyimages.com, and search for something. There’s a good chance you’ll get some results, and good ones at that. This has the potential to significantly increase the quality of you blog posts.

Was this a good move by Getty? Do you expect to use the embeds? Let us know.

Images via Getty Images (Thanks, embed code!)

March 6, 2014
GoDaddy To Offer Managed WordPress Hosting Product

Today GoDaddy announced the official launch of their managed WordPress hosting product. As a GoDaddy customer using managed WordPress hosting, business owners can focus on things other than their technical worries with their WordPress websites. GoDaddy will take care of all the technical concerns such as security, backups, setting up the server, maintenance, and performance optimization of your site. It will be one of the simplest ways to build a fast and secure WordPress website. GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting will be affordable and easy for their customers as you can see below.

Many business owners and professionals who have several clients will not have the time nor want to take on the risk of managing maintenance, security and more with this product. GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting will have several levels of security and malware scanning which will be supported by a constant security team monitoring. “GoDaddy is committed to supporting the WordPress community with one of the fastest, most secure and reliable hosting platforms,” said GoDaddy Director of Hosting Product Management Bill Watt. “The team created a product that is easy-to-use and is robust and scalable as an enterprise-level service. GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting costs a fraction of other competitors’ prices and is backed by award-winning, around-the-clock customer service which makes this a great choice for anyone looking to get their website up and running.”

Most of GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting product plans include a free domain with a yearly plan, thousands of themes to choose from, a one click data migration tool, temporary domain names if migrating from another host, and much more.

Image via GoDaddy

January 16, 2014
Google Launches WordPress Plugin For AdSense, Webmaster Tools Management

Google announced the launch of its new Google Publisher Plugin for WordPress (in beta). This lets people place AdSense ads on their sites, and verify their sites in Webmaster Tools right from WordPress.

The plugin links your site to your AdSense account, and lets you place ads without having to manually modify code. If you already have an AdSense account, the plugin will detect it and show your publisher info (make sure it’s correct). If you already have AdSense ads on your site and just want to manage them through the plugin, you can do so, but you’ll have to remove the existing ads first, then place new ones.

For Webmaster Tools verification, it’s just a matter of a single click. Verification simply happens when you set up the plugin. Then, to open Webmaster Tools, open the plugin, and click the “manage site” button under “Webmaster Tools.”

Product manager Michael Smith said in a blog post, “If you own your own domain and power it with WordPress, this new plugin will give you access to a few Google services — and all within WordPress. Please keep in mind that because this is a beta release, we’re still fine-tuning the plugin to make sure it works well on the many WordPress sites out there.”

The Plugin can be found in the WordPress plugin directory.

Image via WordPress.org

January 15, 2014
Mullenweg Takes Over Automattic CEO Role

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is getting a new CEO. Kind of.

Founder Matt Mullenweg is stepping into the CEO role held by Toni Schneider for the past eight years, while Schneider is taking over for Mullenweg. From the sound of it, it’s not going to be a huge change in the company’s operations.

“He’s going to focus on some of Automattic’s new products, and I’m going to take on the role of CEO,” Mullenweg says in a blog post. “Internally this isn’t a big change as our roles have always been quite fluid, and I’ve had some recent practice filling in for him for a few months last year when he was on sabbatical. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Toni over the years and I’m looking forward to putting that into practice.”

“Besides, it’s obvious that no one in their twenties should run a company,” he adds. “They think they know everything, a fact I can now say with complete confidence now that I’m 30 and two days old.”

Schneider also blogged about the change.

“A few months ago, I started to feel a sense of completion about our early goals, coupled with a growing itch to work on some new product ideas,” he wrote. “So I turned to Matt and suggested that now felt like a good time for us to “swap jobs” and have him become Automattic’s next CEO. Matt and I have been working side-by-side, building and running Automattic over the years, and he is without a doubt one of the most talented people in tech today, so I have full confidence that Automattic will continue to thrive after we make this change. And yes, Matt did just turn 30, which makes it a fun moment in time to say that he’s finally old enough to be a CEO! As for me, I will stay at Automattic (and at True), excited to switch my focus to working on new ideas and building new products.”

It’s unclear what new projects the company has in the pipeline. According to Schneider, WordPress.com is the 8th largest site on the Internet.

Image via Matt Mullenweg (Facebook)

January 13, 2014
WordPress.com Now Lets Users Register .CO Domains

Automattic announced today that it has added .CO as a new top-level domain option for WordPress.com users. This joins other options like .ME, .COM, .NET, and .ORG. It will cost you $25 a year for a .CO domain.

To register for a .CO domain, go to Store and Domains in the dashboard, and type in the .CO domain you wish to register in the “Add a Domain” field.

After that, it will ask you for more details, such as contact info, and if you want to add Private Registration to the purchase (an additional $8), then you will register the domain, and make your payment. Once you go through all of that, you’ll activate it by going to Store and Domains in the dashboard, and selecting the button next to the domain, and clicking “Update Primary Domain.”

According to Automattic, over 1.5 million .CO domain names have been registered in over 200 countries since 2010.

July 23, 2013
WordPress Just Got A Spike In Imports From Tumblr

WordPress might have quite a bit to gain by Yahoo’s purchasing of Tumblr for $1.1 billion. As noted, a bunch of Tumblr users are already freaking out about Yahoo buying the massively popular blogging platform (and the promise of new ads coming into the feed likely isn’t doing anything to slow the freak-out down).

Even before the acquisition was officially announced this morning, on onslaught of users importing Tumblr blogs to WordPress already began. That is, at least, according to WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

He writes, “Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.”

Despite what would appear to be a mass exodus of users leaving Tumblr for WordPress, Mullenweg appears to think that’s not the case. After he initially wrote the post, he updated it to say, “Some people are reading too much into the import numbers — I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr.”

He then pointed readers to the comments on this post, where he said, “I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.”

Even still, other blogging platforms are likely to get a little bump out of this.

According to a recent report from Pingdom, WordPress’ share of the world’s top blogs has already been on the rise.

May 20, 2013

WordPress’ Share Of The World’s Top Blogs Increases

The majority of the world’s top 100 blogs are using WordPress, according to a new report from Pingdom, and the content management system’s share of these blogs is on the rise.

According to the firm, 52% of these blogs are using WordPress, up from 48% a year ago.

To come up with the top blogs, Pingdom looked to Technorati, which is famous for its annual State of the Blogosphere report, which has transformed into the “Digital Influence Report“. It’s worth noting that Pingdom was only able to identify the platform in use by 94 out of 100 sites.

As you can see, the next largest piece of the pie comes from custom systems, followed by Drupal, N/A, Gawker, BlogSmith, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, Ceros, Joomla, and Tumblr.

Considering Tumblr’s rising popularity in recent months, it’s interesting to see it carry such a small percentage here (1 site).

TypePad has increased from two sites to four sites, while Movable Type decreased from seven to four. Drupal dropped by one site. Google’s Blogger gained one site, reaching three.

Here’s the list of blogs, and which platform each uses:

Top 100 blogs and their blog platforms – complete list
Technorati ranking	Site	Platform
1	www.huffingtonpost.com	Movable Type
2	www.tmz.com	Ceros
3	mashable.com	Custom
4	www.techcrunch.com	WordPress
5	www.gothamist.com	Movable Type
6	www.mediaite.com	WordPress
7	www.theverge.com	Custom
8	www.gawker.com	Gawker
9	arstechnica.com	WordPress
10	www.buzzfeed.com	Custom
11	jezebel.com	Gawker
12	www.gizmodo.com	Gawker
13	bits.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
14	www.infowars.com	WordPress
15	laughingsquid.com	WordPress
16	theonion.com	Custom
17	www.theblaze.com	WordPress
18	hotair.com	WordPress
19	www.joystiq.com	Blogsmith
20	www.zerohedge.com	Drupal
21	www.scotusblog.com	WordPress
22	www.engadget.com	Blogsmith
23	googleblog.blogspot.com	Blogger
24	krugman.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
25	www.eurogamer.net	N/A
26	www.deadline.com	WordPress
27	politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com	WordPress
28	www.boingboing.net	WordPress
29	thenextweb.com	WordPress
30	www.deadspin.com	Gawker
31	9to5mac.com	WordPress
32	funnyordie.com	N/A
33	www.towleroad.com	TypePad
34	www.wired.com/wiredscience	WordPress
35	www.neatorama.com	Custom
36	www.neowin.net	Custom
37	www.businessinsider.com	Custom
38	www.macrumors.com	WordPress
39	www.slashgear.com	WordPress
40	thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
41	americanthinker.com	Movable Type
42	www.redstate.com	WordPress
43	bleacherreport.com	Custom
44	mlbtraderumors.com	TypePad
45	www.sbnation.com	Custom
46	artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
47	thisisnthappiness.com	Tumblr
48	marginalrevolution.com	WordPress
49	ycorpblog.com	N/A
50	blog.us.playstation.com	WordPress
51	blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/	WordPress
52	www.extremetech.com	WordPress
53	www.dailykos.com	N/A
54	townhall.com	Custom
55	www.wired.com/threatlevel	WordPress
56	eurekalert.org	Custom
57	www.tor.com	Joomla
58	americablog.com	WordPress
59	sethgodin.typepad.com	TypePad
60	www.whitehouse.gov/blog	Drupal
61	www.autoblog.com	Blogsmith
62	thebiglead.com	WordPress
63	joemygod.blogspot.com	Blogger
64	www.refinery29.com	N/A
65	flavorwire.com	WordPress
66	www.lifehacker.com	Gawker
67	blog.twitter.com	Drupal
68	rightwingwatch.org	Drupal
69	www.tuaw.com	BlogSmith
70	thisiscolossal.com	WordPress
71	www.dlisted.com	Drupal
72	www.comicbookmovie.com	Custom
73	inquisitr.com	WordPress
74	economix.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
75	www.geekologie.com	N/A
76	www.geekosystem.com	WordPress
77	thelede.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
78	opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com	WordPress
79	directorblue.blogspot.com	Blogger
80	www.bleedingcool.com	WordPress
81	www.bostonherald.com/sports	Drupal
82	www.kottke.org	Movable Type
83	economistsviews.typepad.com	TypePad
84	blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/	WordPress
85	consequenceofsound.net	WordPress
86	www.cinemablend.com	Custom
87	www.wired.com/dangerroom	WordPress
88	wattsupwiththat.com	WordPress
89	www.geek.com	WordPress
90	consumerist.com	WordPress
91	www.popsugar.com	Drupal
92	www.celebitchy.com	WordPress
93	trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com	WordPress
94	www.siliconera.com	WordPress
95	www.nakedcapitalism.com	WordPress
96	www.mediabistro.com/galleycat	WordPress
97	www.ubergizmo.com	WordPress
98	hip2save.com	WordPress
99	animalnewyork.com	WordPress
100	phandroid.com	WordPress

May 7, 2013

Automattic Launches WordPress.com Enterprise

Automattic announced the launch of WordPress.com Enterprise today. It costs $500 per site per month.

According to the company, you can scale your traffic as your content goes viral, and it can handle it. WordPress’ network does handle 100s of millions of pageviews each day.

The offering comes with all of the built-in WordPress.com VIP features, including over 70 plugins, including integrations with Flipboard, Chartbeat, Facebook, etc.

“To top it off, you also get our new Javascript customization service that allows you the flexibility to customize your site without needing to touch the underlying PHP code. You can tweak and personalize to your heart’s content,” says Automattic’s Raanan Bar-Cohen.

Automattic has worked with Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Chef, ESPN’s Digital and Print Products, Soleil Moon Frye’s Moonfrye.com, and The Crosby Press from JackThreads for the beta.

December 13, 2012
WordPress Is Getting Rid Of The Blogroll

The Blogroll is something that’s near and dear to my heart. It was something that every blog I ran growing up had, and I used it extensively. It was my way to direct readers to other great content, and I hoped that others would find me good enough to include my blog in their blogroll. It was a wonderful system of give-and-take, but it’s not going to be around for much longer.

WPBeginner found a ticket on the WordPress Web site that points to blogrolls being removed in the next major update (3.5). The ticket refers to two possible solutions for the removal of the blogroll and the pros and cons of each action:

Hide the menu. For new installs, stop inserting default links and hide the menu, only. (Also the default widget.) For old installs, remove default links if those are the only ones they have. Hide the menu if they have no links. In this situation, we could make it so the menu does remain accessible, which means they could go in, insert a link, and suddenly the feature would come back to life.

Pros: Focuses on our main goal here, which is UI bloat.

Cons: Ignores code bloat and required future maintenance of essentially dead code.

Move everything to a plugin. For new installs, everything is gone. No more table, no more API. For old installs, on upgrade, install a compatibility plugin that contains the API, if they have any links. Remove the table on upgrade if they don’t have any links beyond the default one.

Pros: Handles both UI and code bloat in one big swing.

Cons: Backwards compatibility nightmare. Functions are removed rather than deprecated. Even just truncating these functions and conditionally defining them could result in fatal errors from plugins expecting different return values. Sites not relying on the automatic upgrade could break.

Either way, it seems that WordPress is pretty serious about ditching it. The good news is that people who were already using blogrolls won’t have their links deleted. New users, however, will not have access to the functionality.

Of course, we do have to ask if blogrolls are even worth it? WPBeginner feels that WordPress Menus are a perfectly suitable replacement. They perform all the functions of the blogroll and then some. That being said, Andrew Nacin has created a plug-in for WordPress that will keep the blogroll intact. You can grab it here.

September 21, 2012
Facebook: Here’s An SEO Boost For Your Site
Facebook announced some new WordPress integration today. This includes a new plugin called Facebook for WordPress. It comes with “social publishing features” and the following widgets (as listed on Facebook’s developer blog) which have been around for some time:
Emphasis added.

While the comments plugin has been around a while, I find it noteworthy that Facebook is touting the “SEO support” as a selling point.

If you go to Facebook’s page for the Comments plugin, the company says:

How can I get an SEO boost from the comments left on my site?

The Facebook comments box is rendered in an iframe on your page, and most search engines will not crawl content within an iframe. However, you can access all the comments left on your site via the graph API as described above. Simply grab the comments from the API and render them in the body of your page behind the comments box. We recommend you cache the results, as pulling the comments from the graph API on each page load could slow down the rendering time of the page.

As we’ve seen in the past, Facebook comments on your site can show up in Google search results. That said, the search value of comments, in general, is debatable. A while back, we spoke with Shoemoney’s Jeremy Schoemaker, who spoke with a Google engineer friend about blog comments.

This was pre-Penguin update, when much of the industry focus was still on the Panda update. It was (may still be) worth considering how comments might impact a page’s quality in terms of how Panda looks at content.

According to Schoemaker, the Google engineer indicated that if anything, it’s “diluting the quality score of my page” by possibly diluting overall keyword density. Another factor could be the few common comments that go through that are clearly spam send signals that the page is not being well maintained.

“So he said he did not see a positive to leaving indexable comments on my site,” Schoemaker told us.

Of course, no Google employee knows everything about Google. That’s not to say this person didn’t know what they were talking about, but one Googler recently indicated that Google didn’t have anything called Penguin. It’s just wise to keep a grain of salt on you with these types of things.
June 12, 2012
Facebook Gets WordPress Integration

I think it’s safe to say that everybody has had a blog at one point or another. While we may have moved on to the microblogging world of tumblr, there is still value in the traditional blog offered by WordPress, Blogger or others. What better way to share that value than through Facebook?

Facebook announced today that they are making a Facebook for WordPress plugin publicly available. So why is it being announced by Facebook and not WordPress? Facebook engineers created the plugin to bring the Facebook experience to WordPress. In an awesome move, the plugin also works with the mobile version of WordPress.

The Facebook for WordPress plugin is really similar to what you would find on an app that utilizes Open Graph. Like Open Graph, the plugin allows you to cross-post content between WordPress and your Facebook Timeline including any other Facebook pages that you may own. You can also enter specific names for pages or friends before publishing on WordPress and it will deliver your post to the appropriate profiles.

Facebook also released a number of widgets on WordPress including Activity Feed, Recommendations, Customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons, and Comments Box. All of these aim to make your WordPress site more social and visible to those who also use Facebook. An example would be using the Activity Feed plugin which shows people what their friends are liking and sharing on the site.

While the new Facebook for WordPress plugin is definitely available and usable by the general blog owning populace, the true potential of this plugin can be seen for businesses. It’s mentioned that WordPress powers 16.6 percent of the Web and that’s not just personal blogs. Pretty much every blog styled Web site out there uses WordPress and this plugin should help them reach a larger audience.

It’s pretty easy to install the Facebook for WordPress plugin, but here’s a handy tutorial if you’re new to this. If you already know how to install plugins, you can download it right now and get to sharing your WordPress content with the world, or the world as defined by your Facebook page.

June 12, 2012
WordPress.com Gets New Notifications Tab, Toolbar Button

WordPress announced a new tab on the WordPress.com home page and a new toolbar button for notifications.

“The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no number,” explains Andy Skelton of WordPress. “We axed it out of compassion. It all boils down to how people feel about inboxes. In giving you a notifications stream, the last thing we wanted to do was cause more stress! So we dropped the unread count and now the orange color simply means there are new notes since you last looked. An icon shows the type of your latest notification. The icon now also refreshes while you’re on a page, no need to reload a page to see new notifications.”

“You might also notice that unread notes are still white until you open them, which turns them gray. We didn’t entirely remove the concept of read/unread; we just stopped counting them. Feel free to turn them all gray if that’s your thing, or let some notes stay unread. Either way, we won’t pester you with a number.”

Here’s what the toolbar button looks like:

From the Notifications tab, you can scroll back through older notifications, and WordPress says it will be adding more features, as well as new notifications, for which the company says it has lots of ideas.

The changes don’t work with IE versions older than version 9.

May 25, 2012
Keeping Track of WordPress Conversations Made Easier
There are tons of WordPress blogs out there, many of which you may comment on. While such interaction is always welcome, keeping track of the various discussions you’re engaged in can be difficult. Thanks to a recent WordPress update, this process has been refined, making it easier on those who visit, and comment on, multiple WordPress blogs.

The first aspect of the update is to automatically subscribe those who comment on a particular post. The official WordPress blog has the details:
By default, posting a comment will now subscribe you to receive follow-up comments via email for that specific post, keeping you updated on the conversation. This is indicated by the checked box in the comment form.

If you have a WordPress.com account, you now have a global setting to change this so that by default you will not be subscribed…

If you don’t want email notifications for a thread, just uncheck the box when you post your comment. If you’ve disabled the feature, you can also subscribe to a specific thread by checking the box in the comment form.

There is also a link at the bottom of every notification email that will allow you to change your subscription options.
Essentially, if you comment, you’re subscribed. This includes email notifications when other readers respond to a post containing one of your comments. As the screenshot indicates, you can change what posts you follow every time you post a comment:

Are default subscriptions the way to go as a WordPress user or should this be something users should have to opt into? Granted, WordPress members can adjust their accounts globally, but if you neglect to do so, every time someone comments in a post you’ve commented on, you’ll receive an email notification.
May 16, 2012
WordPress Friend Finder Uses Facebook To Find Blogging Friends

WordPress has used social networking integration for quite some time now. I use it on my own personal blog to point people in the direction of my Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. WordPress, however, figures that this information could be put to a better use – finding friends who also use WordPress.

WordPress announced the new Friend Finder tool today. It allows users to find out which friends are using WordPress so they can follow their blogs for updates about their cats, jobs and even the family vacation that ended up ruined because they realized their father was actually Chevy Chase.

To use the new function, just authorize WordPress to have access to your Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts and WordPress will go sniffing. If you’re worried that WordPress will use your social contact information to spam you with sponsored posts and the like, worry not as the company vows not to save any of the information.

Once your friend list is up, just click Follow by the names of those people you wish to become more acquainted with through the magic of blogs. If you’re new to WordPress, these people will show up in the WordPress reader under Blogs I Follow.

If another friend is looking to add you, only your primary blog will be viewable by them in the Friend Finder. This is important for those of us who have multiple blogs. I care more about my video games blog so I will want my friends to see that instead of my music blog appropriately titled, “More Hipster Than You.”

I checked out the new application for myself and can confirm that it presented me with people that I had yet to add to my innocent WordPress stalking list. Funny enough, it turns out that I have more friends on Twitter using WordPress than either Facebook or Google. Regardless, the tool has helped me add 10 more friends to my follow list on WordPress. I can’t wait to forget their blog exists to only rediscover it a year later which leads to me spending five hours reading a year’s worth of blog entries.

Try it out for yourself to see if you have any better luck. Maybe you have more cool friends who use WordPress to tell other people about their lives and things they like.

May 1, 2012
WordPress Powers Nearly One-Fourth of All New Websites

Since WordPress 3.3 was released at the end of last year, there have been nearly 12 million downloads and 26.9% of the blogging services sites are using it. So yes, you could confidently say that the blogging service is quite popular.

With a host of plug-ins that allow for customization and a smooth integration with social media sites like Twitter and Flickr, it’s no wonder so many people have taken to WordPress. To really detail how much WordPress has grown recently, the folks at Yoast.com put together an infographic using data from Experian Hitwise that displays the staggering amount of traffic and popularity that the service enjoys every single day. After all, there’s a reason that WordPress is used by nearly half of the top 100 blogs in the world.

[Via Visual.ly.]

April 17, 2012