Chartina - My Blog

For many of you, your WordPress.com site isn’t just about communication, it’s about collaboration, too.

We’re taking collaboration and sharing one step further today at WordPress.com by enabling you to embed  presentations, documents, forms, spreadsheets, and calendars created with Google Docs and Google Calendar.

We’ve had a lot of users request this functionality from our awesome Happiness Engineers, and we are listening.

To get started sharing Google Docs and Google Calendars, just copy/paste the code provided by Google into a post, page, or text widget, and you’re done!

We’ve created two new Support documents to guide you through this step by step:

• How to publish your documents from Google Docs
• How to publish calendars from Google Calendars

Note: if you’re sharing a private (not public) document, the viewer will have to be logged into Google and have permission to access the document.

Get sharing!

Today we are excited to introduce a new, beautifully designed, free theme called Vertigo. It makes great use of WordPress post formats. It has a charming, hitchcockian typeface for site and post titles. And it’s dark.

The Vertigo Theme

With Vertigo you can set your own accent color for links, which is used in several places throughout the theme, if you don’t feel like red is a good fit for your blog. You can also have a second color of your choice for the site title by using the settings in Appearance → Header.

The theme is inspired by the design work of the late Saul Bass, Art Goodman, and Dave Nagata. Based on the original design by Matthew Buchanan. We hope you like this new theme and start creating incredible blogs with it. As usual, go exploring on the theme showcase.

Today’s latest theme is as clean and fresh as you’d expect a theme named Linen to be. It’s also an impressively adaptable theme with an array of options that make personalizing it simple and easy. If you’re publishing articles in a magazine, pages for a business site, or your own personal blog, you’ll find Linen’s elegant style perfect for you. And it’s yours for the lifetime of your blog for only $68.

The Linen Theme

Just like the other premium themes from The Theme Foundry Linen is packed with features. Linen beautifully highlights posts with featured images by sliding them across the home page. You can add thumbnails to each post and upload your own logo or custom background. You can even customize the typography with a selection of seven accent fonts and eight different body fonts!

Read more about Linen’s features on the Theme Showcase and preview it right now, live on your blog, from Appearance → Themes.

We know the hardest part of blogging is actually writing posts. And most blogging software,  and even word processors, do little to help writers write. Today at WordPress.com we’re  proud to announce a new kind of feature, aimed at helping the writing process, called Writing Helper. It’s a new box that appears underneath the edit box on the Add a Post Screen (the entire box can be dragged to the right side if you want it next to the edit box, instead of underneath).

First up is Copy A Post. You can now reuse the hard work of previous posts as the basis for the next one. Simply hit the Copy A Post button, pick a post, and we copy the title, content, tags and categories for you, saving you steps. If you often have similarly tagged or formatted posts, this will save much time. We will always show your most recent posts in the list, but you can search by title too.

Next is Request Feedback. You can now share a private draft of a post with a friend before it is published. They can help you find typos, suggest improvements and give advice to make the post amazing before your publish it to the world.

When you click on Request Feedback, you can enter email addresses of friends who are willing to help. They’ll receive a special private link to see your draft, where they can leave feedback on your post (see image above). Their feedback will appear in your post’s Request Feedback area when it arrives, so you can make changes to your draft accordingly.

For more about how Writing Helper works, read the support pages for Copy a Post and Request Feedback.

And if you have ideas for other Writing Helper features you’d like to see, leave us a comment.

We’re always amazed with the way you continually push the scope and depth of your blogs on WordPress.com. It only makes sense that you’d also want themes that can take that work and organize it in easily readable, neat layouts. Like our newest theme addition, Fresh News! For the one time price of $45, Fresh News offers a solid design that can accommodate many different websites. From its feature post slider to the 18 color schemes, this magazine style theme is an elegant and feature rich way to display your content.

The looks of Fresh News

Developed by WooThemes, Fresh News also makes use of two fully customizable navigational menus as well as several widget areas and layout options. If you love customization in your themes, you can’t go wrong with Fresh News. Of course, there is much more for you to explore and discover on the Theme Showcase.