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.

The 2013 Bloggie winners were announced on March 24, and we were excited to see eleven WordPress.com bloggers among the finalists and winners.

Now in its 13th year, the Bloggie awards accept blog nominations for everything from Best Craft Weblog to Best-Kept Secret Weblog, winnowing down the nominees through rounds of voting until five finalists remain in each of its 30 categories.

The 2013 Bloggies

We found lots of great new must-reads among the finalists — including the four WordPress.com bloggers who nabbed top honors in their categories. Maybe one of these WordPress.com gems will be your new go-to in the Reader:

Watts Up With That ran away with both Weblog of the Year and Best Science or Technology Weblog. Anthony Watts, a former television meteorologist, takes a skeptical view of government approaches to climate change on his controversial, highly-trafficked, and much-lauded blog.

If climate change and weather patterns are what float your boat, there was no shortage of WordPress.com blogs recognized for their work:

Australian Climate Madness won in the Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog category for penning incisive posts on the climate change debate and providing a forum for alternatives to government and media analyses of global warming.

Australian Climate Madness

Tallbloke’s Talkshop was a Best Science or Technology finalist. Another climate change skeptic, his take-no-prisoners writing style attracts thousands of readers, who jump in to create robust comment threads.

Climate Audit, also nominated in Best Science or Technology, focuses on unpacking the science behind climate studies with technical posts for the number-crunchers among us.

If you like your daily tour of the blogosphere to be a bit on the lighter side, there are plenty of nominated WordPress.com blogs on everything from books to parenting to cute baby hedgehogs:

3 Chic Geeks was recognized as Best New Weblog for a cheeky take on all things nerd. March Madness bracket pitting Torchwood against The Avengers? Check. Tips for throwing the world’s best Doctor Who season premiere party? Check.

3 Chic Geeks

The Movie Review Warehouse made it to the finals in Best Entertainment Weblog, where it held its own against heavy-hitters Jezebel and Perez Hilton. Looking for a film rec? A true movie warehouse, writer Bondo covers films from the 1940s through today.

Book blog Words for Worms was graced with a nomination for Best Writing of a Weblog for its literate but snarky take on everything from contemporary classics to young adult favorites. Check out her “Top Ten Tuesdays” posts for a concentrated dose of bookish opinion.

Fan favorite Captain Awkward, one of WordPress.com’s most popular advice columnists, got a nod in the Best Topical Weblog category, where she was a finalist.

The Urban Daddy was a daddyblogging juggernaut, picking up nominations for Best Canadian Weblog and Best Parenting or Family Weblog.

DIYer and marshmallow aficionado Pocketful of Joules can no longer claim to fly under the radar after making it to the finals of the Best-Kept Secret Weblog category.

Pocketful of Joules

Rounding out the illustrious eleven is perennial favorite of everyone who needs a cute kitten pick-me-up on a dreary Wednesday afternoon, Cute Overload.

Of the other nominees, 80 are self-hosted sites running the free WordPress software available at WordPress.org – which means that a whopping 68% of this year’s Bloggie finalists and winners are powered by WordPress!

Nominations generally open on January 1st of each new year, so if you didn’t see any of your favorites among this year’s finalists, make sure to nominate them in 2014. Congrats to this year’s nominees and winners!

Happy Theme Thursday! I’d like to introduce you to our newest free theme, Adelle. I hope you’ll make her feel welcome.

Adelle Front Page

Designed by BluChic, Adelle would love to adorn your blog. It doesn’t matter what you write about — technology, arts, crafts, food, fashion  — Adelle can handle it, with elegance and sophistication.

Adelle comes with some great features — a right sidebar for widgets, a full-width page, and support for post formats. She also knows that you like to stay connected with your friends, so she’ll display optional links to your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube at the top of the sidebar.

Adelle is responsive — she knows that your readers may visit your site on their smartphone or tablet, so she’s flexible enough to look good no matter where she’s viewed.

Sound like a theme you’d like to get to know? Read more on the theme showcase, or go ahead and see her in action.

Have fun!

You know what I love? The sound of the first pitch on Opening Day.

As a huge baseball fan, I’m thrilled about the start of the season, and as a WordPresser, I love the Major League Baseball themes — Fan, Modern, and Retro — that you can activate on your own blog to get you in the spirit of the game.

Fan is loud and vibrant — the online equivalent of waving your rally rag in the air.

Modern is classic, offering a more minimal look so your content is front and center, ready for any curveballs thrown its way.

Retro is a throwback to old Major League Baseball logos, for nostalgic fans and bloggers who want to give their sites a proper old-school look.

You can customize each of these MLB themes with your favorite team’s logo and colors, so whether you’re a Red Sox, Yankees, or Giants fan — we’ve got the right theme to get your fans cheering.

To get started, head over to the Theme Showcase to activate one of these themes.

In your dashboard, go to Appearance → Theme Options to select your team.

Hit the road with some MLB blogs

Follow some of your favorite players, managers, and commentators! Here are some blogs to check out:

• Hot Stove: The latest news in the baseball world from MLB.com reporters.
• Brandon and Brandon: The blog of Giants first baseman Brandon Belt and Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford, both in their third major league seasons with the current World Series champions.
• From the Corner of Edgar and Dave: A beyond-the-headlines look at the Seattle Mariners.
• Phillies Insider: Notes, quotes, and anecdotes from Larry Shenk at the Phillies.
• Ozzie Speaks: The blog of former shortshop and manager Ozzie Guillen.
• Dodgers Photog Blog: The blog of Jon Soo Hoo, the official photographer of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
• Baseball Nerd: The blog of commentator Keith Olbermann.

Want more? Browse the top 100 MLB.com blogs.

Let’s play ball!

Where I live, it seems winter is refusing to loosen its grip, holding back a long-awaited spring. With two feet of snow still on the ground and frigid, breezy days, it’s nice to sit inside (by the fire) and lose myself in the delights of the Reader. Forget Calgon. Reader….take me away! Here’s just a few Freshly Pressed posts that gave us pause this week.

Roger Ebert, RIP

Yesterday, the world lost more than a prolific film critic when Roger Ebert died of cancer at age 70. In Roger Ebert, RIP, science fiction author John Scalzi hails Ebert as one of his most important writing teachers, a fair, incisive film critic, and above all, a man who refused to allow a devastating disease to take away his humanity:

In these later years and after everything that he’d been through with cancer and with losing the ability to physically speak, I read and was contemplative about the essays and pieces he put up on his Web site. Much of that had nothing to do with film criticism, but was a matter of him writing… well, whatever. Which meant it was something I could identify with to a significant degree, since that is what I do here. It would be foolish to say that Ebert losing his physical voice freed him to find his voice elsewhere. What I think may be more accurate was that losing his physical voice reminded Ebert that he still had things he wanted to say before he ran out of time to say them.

Lean Together

Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, Lean In, challenges ambitious women to seek leadership positions to help shake off the ever-competitive socio-political status quo and reshape the world of work for the better. At The Purpose of Work, Mike Gammage suggests Lean In‘s fatal flaw is that Sandberg should be addressing society’s “all-pervasive competition” to always be “on” and working in Lean Together:

Almost wherever we look, the workplace is becoming relentlessly competitive. It’s an assumed ‘passion’ that jeopardises family life. And as work becomes more hyper-competitive, women’s opportunities shrink. Pregnancy and maternity leave especially become huge issues. Sandberg acknowledges her own fears that – even at her level and with her talents – her job and prospects at Google would be diminished if she took ‘too much’ time off [that is more than a week or two] after her first child was born.

What if we try instead to slow down and step off this devilish hamster wheel that we’ve created?

First off, I think, we would want to reflect on the culture of contest that is embedded into our societies and so into our working lives. We have to recognise the myth of the inevitability of all–pervasive competition.

Cursi

At Vocabat, author Katie gives us a reflective Spanish lesson on the word cursi, which in English means “cheesy.” Katie transcends simple translation, meditating on the cultural nuances between Latino and American culture, finally embracing cursi as an unfettered expression of love:

In sum: What is love if not cursi? Love is supremely sentimental and gushy and ridiculous. And love means leaving your self-consciousness at the door, as well as your ego. I feel like you’re not really in love if you’re not regularly making a fool of yourself! But why hide our cheesiness within the safe confines of relationships? I admire people who can unblushingly own their feelings, hopes, and even disappointments without pussyfooting or pretending to not care all that much anyway. Although cursi people could use some work in the originality department, at least they care in the first place. There’s a lamentable epidemic of nonchalance and numbness and self-absorption these days, and cheesiness is a much better alternative to these terrible modes of subpar living.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips 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.

We know your blog is important to you, and today we’re proud to announce Two Step Authentication: an optional new feature to help you keep your WordPress.com account secure. For those of you who use Two Step Authentication with your Google account, you’ll know how useful this feature is for keeping your account secure.

Two Step Authentication works like this: when you log in to your WordPress.com account, we’ll prompt you to enter a secret number. To get that secret number, you’ll need to download the Google Authenticator App on your smartphone. It generates a new number every 30 seconds, making it virtually impossible to guess. All you need to do is open the app on your phone, and type in the number it’s showing. If you don’t have a smartphone, you can instead opt to have the number SMSed to you.

To enable Two Step Authentication, head on over to the new Security tab in your WordPress.com account settings, and go through the setup wizard. The wizard will help you make sure that everything is configured correctly:

Once you enable Two Step Authentication on your account, there are a couple of extra steps we recommend you take:

Print backup codes

Print out some backup codes to keep in a safe place — your wallet, a filing cabinet or your document safe in case your phone is lost or stolen. You can print backup codes right from your WordPress.com Security tab:

Generate application-specific passwords

Some apps that connect to your WordPress.com account (such as the WordPress mobile apps) don’t yet fully support Two Step Authentication. For these apps, you can generate unique passwords to use with each one (for example, you can have a different password on your phone and your tablet). If your device ever goes missing, you can disable its password with a single click, locking it out of your account.

If you need any extra help setting up Two Step Authentication, detailed instructions are available in the Support documentation.

Have feedback or suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

Every few weeks, we’re sitting down with an Automattician to help you get to know the people who work behind the scenes to build new features, keep Automattic running, and make WordPress.com the best it can be. This week, we’re very pleased to introduce you to Ms. Sara Rosso, the ultimate WordPress fan, and World Nutella Day instigator extraordinaire.

What kinds of awesome things do you do at Automattic?

Sara Rosso

As VIP Global Services Manager, I work with the WordPress.com VIP team to make the WordPress.com VIP platform as awesome as it can be for VIP clients and their users. A lot of the features and improvements we make also get rolled out to the rest of WordPress.com, so we’re working for every WordPress.com user, too! The VIP team spends a lot of time behind the scenes and are happy to let WordPress.com VIP clients like CNN, TIME.com, NFL, NBC, BBC, and more, take the spotlight with their WordPress.com VIP sites instead.

Describe a recent project for us:

I spend a lot of time on our product communication and resources, user and developer training, and discovering and sharing how large and interesting organizations are using WordPress throughout the world. We recently published case studies with NASA, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME.com for their Person of the Year site, all using WordPress! I think it’s great how WordPress allows so many organizations to get a website up quick and easily, and there are some really beautiful and innovative WordPress sites I enjoy discovering, too. I’m also spending more time on designing and developing training programs which is great because I like helping people understand and master WordPress, and it’s something I’ve done on my own for friends and family since I started using the software in 2006.

Give us a bit of your expert advice — what tip can you provide the WordPress.com community?

There are so many features built into WordPress.com, it’s like you’ve got hundreds of plugins at your fingertips. Snoop around on your Dashboard to discover them!

I think besides writing, the most important thing you can do is to make sure you’re sharing your content so people can discover, read, react to, and share it themselves. WordPress.com plays really nice with social media and I love the Settings > Sharing page on your blog’s Dashboard. Turn on Sharing Buttons under every post for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and more with one click, and have your WordPress.com posts automatically push to Twitter and Facebook by turning on Publicize also on this settings page.

What do you most enjoy about your job?

I love the freedom this job has given me to construct my day, day by day. It allows me to decide when I’ll be most productive and organize other important things around my work as well. Since I don’t have to be in an office, I can get productive anywhere, which means I can decide between working from my couch or my desk, to working in San Francisco or London! Living abroad for the past 10 years means that I’m actually able to see friends and family more often than I ever have; all I need is an internet connection and my computer to work.

I have pretty awesome colleagues, too. I talked a lot about Automattic in this article, but I wanted to share this with you about why it’s great to work in a distributed company with interesting and challenging colleagues:

It’s hard to choose just one day as my favorite day working for Automattic, but I would say most of the best days I have had at Automattic have been during our in-person company meet-ups. You might think that this means we should work together more often, but on the contrary I think because we’re a distributed company we enjoy our time together in-person that much more. We spend every waking hour together (some days are quite long due to excitement and catching up) and a lot of it being excited to talk shop, too. The best part is working on a week-long project with people who are not your normal team members and presenting your project at the end of the week to the entire company (for example, my team’s project was the restaurants vertical, which recently launched on WordPress.com).

What do you love to do in your spare time?

Blogging and writing in general! I have four sites of my own (all running on WordPress, naturally), where I share my experiences in travel, food, healthy living, technology/running a business, and my photoblog. I spend a lot of time sharing tips with friends and readers on how to run their businesses and websites online; thank goodness WordPress is the answer for a lot of them. I also have written two ebooks (on Italian coffee and Nutella) and I plan to do more.

If I’m not writing, I’m reading voraciously — books and blogs alike. I consume enormous amounts of content and I’m always looking for the next blog, site, or book which will educate, entertain, or inspire me (sometimes a combination of all three!) And I’m constantly snapping photos either with my DSLR (I sell some of my photos) or with my iPhone — you can follow on my WordPress.com mobile photoblog and join me with the Weekly Photo Challenge on The Daily Post!

When you start to work with us at Automattic, Sara will be among the first friendly folks you meet — she’ll be the one gently nudging you to post your introductory video, so that you can tell us a little about yourself. What are you waiting for? Check out all the opportunities currently open at Automattic and apply to work with us.

Sara would like to say a little hello to you via video — can’t see the video? Click through to see the post on the website.

If you’re an author or an independent publisher, check out our new Send to Readmill widget, which makes it easy to get your prose into your readers’ iPads and iPhones. Readmill is an ebook reader that not only offers a clean, elegant reading experience, it allows you to highlight and share passages with others and discover new books to read.

Here’s how to set up the Send to Readmill widget on your WordPress.com blog:

Go to Appearance >> Widgets and locate the Send to Readmill widget:

Click and drag the widget to the location you’d like it to appear on your site. Your sidebar is a great choice, which will allow visitors to see it more easily.

Configure your Send to Readmill widget by adding a custom title, the direct link to the location of your PDF or epub, and a URL to a page that describes your book in greater detail:

Once you’ve got your widget configured, click on the blue Save button for your changes to take effect. Here’s a sample of the button your site visitors will see:

For more information, check out Matthew’s screencast on the WordPress.com Send to Readmill widget.

At WordPress.com, we’ve launched a collection of improvements to smooth your editorial workflow, and save you time writing posts and organizing your content. Here’s what’s new:

• Improved Menus let you organize content more easily.
• Post Locking prevents accidental changes in a multi-author environment.
• Revision tracking lets you see who changed what, and revert as necessary.
• Improved Autosave protects the content you’ve worked so hard to create.

Manage Menus and Menu Locations with ease

Always wanted to have a menu in say, your site’s footer, in addition to your header? Now you can. Currently 15 WordPress.com themes support multiple custom menus including Comet, Nuntius, Academica, Imbalance2, Blaskan, Yoko, Oxygen, Able, Vostok, Mixfolio, Beach, Enterprise, Shaan, Sight, and Simpla.

To get started, go to Appearance >> Menus in your dashboard. There, select from among pages, links, and categories to create your new custom menu. In this example, we’re adding new primary navigation to our header and a new tertiary menu to our footer. Our new footer menu will include a link to our Twitter profile, our WordPress.com photoblog, and our Facebook page.

We’ve set up a custom menu that uses our About and My Travels pages in our primary navigation:

To create our new tertiary menu in the footer, we’ve added links to our Twitter profile, our WordPress.com photoblog, and our Facebook page:

Under Manage Locations, we’ve selected locations for each menu. Our primary navigation will display at the top of the site, and our footer menu of custom links will be set to Tertiary, and will appear in the footer:

Here’s our new primary nav as it appears on our site with the Oxygen Theme, and a bit o’ blogroll, to boot:

Here’s the nifty new tertiary menu in the footer of the site:

Post Locking protects your content

Working in a multi-author environment? Post Locking lets you see at a glance who’s editing a post. You can choose to preview the post, return to the dashboard, or take over the post to edit it.

Let’s look at how Post Locking works. If I go to All Posts in my dashboard — I see that Cheri Lucas is editing my post:

Now, when I hover over the post title and click on Edit, I have three options to choose from: Go back, Preview, and Take over. In this case, I’m on deadline and I need to edit my post. I click on the blue Take over button:

Here’s what Cheri sees on when I click the blue Take over button:

Post Locking offers crystal clear editing status on a post — streamlining and smoothing editorial workflow and helping make it easier for your team to publish new content.

Revision Tracking: see changes easily, revert with one click

With the enhanced Revision Tracking feature, you can see at a glance who has previously edited or contributed to a post:

Clicking on the link next to any avatar shows the changes that person made to the post:

To revert to any given version of a post, select the revision you’d like to keep and then click on the blue, Restore This Revision button.

Autosave: protecting your darlings

Consider this: you’ve been working on that 1000-word post recounting that trip of a lifetime to Spain. You’re headlong into writing. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, your internet’s gone down and all your work — all that lovingly recounted detail on The Alhambra’s stunning grounds and architecture — is gone. Newly revamped Autosave takes advantage of your web browser’s storage to ensure that you never lose your work again, despite a wonky internet connection.

Happy Theme Thursday! It’s spring in some parts of the world, which for many means tidying and redecorating their homes. Today we have a new free theme to help you do the same for your blog!

Truly Minimal

Truly Minimal, designed by FlareThemes, lives up to its name for its clean typography and elegant simplicity. The theme includes three sidebar placement options, support for multiple post formats, and a responsive design for small screens and mobile devices. It’s an excellent choice for showcasing your writing, promoting your business, or for anyone who wants a crisp, modern look for their site.

Read more about Truly Minimal on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site by going to Appearance -> Themes!

The dates are set, the call for speakers is open, and the website is up: WordCamp San Francisco returns this July 26-27 (with Contribute Day — formerly known as “Hack Day” — on the 28th)!

WordCamp San Francisco was the first-ever WordCamp and is the official, annual WordPress conference. It’s a great place to come meet and learn from WordPress innovators from around the world and features the yearly “State of the Word” talk from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, which takes a look back at the last year and considers the next phase of WordPress awesomeness. Hone your WordPress skills, get inspired, and make new friends. If you can’t make it to The City by the Bay, follow along with the live stream and host a WordCamp in your living room.

(If you’ve never been to WordCamp San Francsico before, you can check out videos of last year’s speakers — as well as presentations from WordCamps from around the world — at WordCamp.tv.)

We want to make sure you get the most you can out of WordCamp San Francisco, and that means lining up great speakers — not just the speakers we love, but the ones you find the most inspiring. To make sure that happens, we want you to nominate your favorite WordPress speakers from the past few years (whether they spoke at a WordCamp, meetup, or other conference). You’ve got until May 1st to tell us who your best and brightest are.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be announcing ticket details, pre- and post-WordCamp events, speakers, sponsors, and more, so keep an eye on the WordCamp San Francsico 2013 blog or follow @WordCampSF on Twitter for the latest. See you in July!

We’re constantly working on updates to our mobile apps to make your WordPress.com experience on the go the best it can be. Today, we’ve jubilantly released version 2.3 of WordPress for Android to Google Play. After updating, you’ll see right away that this release includes very exciting updates to the user interface. Let’s dive in to what’s new!

Action Bar

You’ll notice a fresh, new look. We’ve taken into account Android’s “Holo” style guidelines and implemented the Action Bar interface throughout the app. If you’ve used any other apps designed for Android 4.0 or higher, you’ll feel right at home with the new design. Your Action Bar provides easy access to common actions such as creating a new post, refreshing, and sharing to other apps.

We also couldn’t resist making the Action Bar in WordPress blue.

Menu Drawer

The older-style dashboard interface has been replaced with a Menu Drawer for quick and easy navigation to other areas of the app from wherever you are. You’ll find all of the same actions the dashboard had, but with the addition of some nifty new ones.

To access the menu, simply tap the arrow next to the WordPress logo – in the top-left corner of the app — or swipe from the left side of the screen. If you’re on a large tablet device, the menu will always be visible, which takes advantage of the extra screen space. If you have multiple blogs in the app, you’ll see a drop-down list at the top of your Menu Drawer that you can access to quickly switch to another blog to work with, right in the app.

When you leave the app, it will remember the last selection you made in the Menu Drawer so when you return, you can pick up where you left off.

Other new features

In addition to the revamped app interface, you’ll find these new features as well:

• View Site option. A View Site option has been added to the Menu Drawer so you can view your blogs from within the app.
• Admin area access. You can access the wp-admin areas of your WordPress.com blogs by loading the Dashboard option in the Menu Drawer.
• Faster loading. The WordPress.com Reader now takes advantage of caching for faster loading.
• Updated look and feel. Settings have been converted to use the Android standard for preferences, giving them the Holo look and feel on supported devices. Many views have been updated to the Holo look and feel as well, including the post editor and all list views.
• Improved post editor experience. The post editor now has an expandable content area, which makes it much easier to navigate around the post content when you’re editing.
• Improved image uploading. If a post has an image but fails to upload the image, the post will be saved as a draft first — instead of published — so the image upload can be corrected.

Download App

On a device? Tap here to download WordPress for Android directly. If you’re not on Android you’ll instead get redirected to the app for your device.

What’s Next & Calling Contributors

This update was a big one and we want to make sure to keep the momentum going. We’re currently looking at adding notifications to the app so you can keep up with what’s happening on your WordPress sites while mobile and on the go. What would you like to see added to the app?

Don’t forget that WordPress for Android is an open source project. Want to get involved? Check out make.wordpress.org/mobile to get started.

Follow @WPAndroid on Twitter and the WordPress for Android blog for the latest updates on WordPress for Android.

It’s Threeme Day! I’m proud to present three new awesome themes!

Meet Bon Vivant.

Bon Vivant

Bon Vivant is a quirky restaurant-oriented theme designed by Denise Chandler. With a unique custom header information area, food menus support, Open Table registration widget, and a prominent space for your business’ phone number, Bon Vivant is the perfect choice for your café or food-themed blog.

Read more about Bon Vivant on the Theme Showcase, or activate it for your restaurant under Appearance → Themes!

Next up: SemPress.

SemPress

Designed by Matthias Pfefferle. SemPress is an extremely lightweight, responsive theme designed to show off your posts, quotes, and images.

Read more about SemPress on the Theme Showcase or activate it today under Appearance → Themes.

Last but not least is another ‘press’ theme, BonPress.

BonPress Front Page

BonPress is a traditional, simple, and responsive theme ideal for individual bloggers. Designed by WPZOOM. It features Custom Menus, five Post Formats, and the ability to add a Custom Background, to make your blog posts even more beautiful.

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

Though nothing stays still for long with WordPress, the design of your blog’s dashboard hasn’t changed much lately. While we’ve added new features and made some adjustments along the way, the dashboard has been looking forward to a refresh for some time. With that in mind, seven weeks ago, a scrappy gang of web designers and developers teamed up to explore how to do just that. We asked ourselves the question: “What should a modern version of WordPress look like?” We decided that:

• It should have a simple, uncluttered design; free of excessive decoration and focused on your content.
• It should use webfonts for beautiful, legible typography that’s consistent in every browser.
• It should have a responsive design that’s tailored to PCs, tablets and smartphones.
• It should do all this while retaining the familiar, user-tested dashboard interface that millions of users already understand.

We’ve drawn new icons, increased contrast and font size, and generally modernized the design from top to bottom. We’re still working on it, but you can preview it starting today! To step into the future, head over to Users → Personal Settings in your blog’s dashboard and check “Enable experimental admin design (MP6),” then Save Changes.

We’d love to have you preview the new design and let us know what you think. You can use this feedback form to send us your ideas. Since it’s a work in progress, you may see some things that don’t look quite right or aren’t working just yet. You can instantly switch back and forth between the new and old dashboard design during this test period. We’ll switch on the new design for everyone later this year.

If you’d like to learn more about how the new design was created, or you’re a designer or developer who would like to contribute, please join us on the Make WordPress UI blog.

WordPressers, day in and day out, you entertain us, you make us think, you make us laugh, and you make us grateful to be exposed to so many voices all over the world. It’s a pleasure to read what you’re writing. Like everyone in the community, we value that feeling of connection that comes from reading something that speaks to you, that resonates, that makes you feel not so alone.

For this edition of Freshly Pressed Faves, we’re looking at three posts that do just that, all around the idea of “busy-ness.” Modern society seems to embrace the idea that unless you’re “swamped” or “super busy,” you just aren’t being productive enough. Free time? Fill it up, preferably with something that pays! This attitude permeates children’s lives, too, with scheduled after-school dance classes and soccer practices and violin lessons and foreign language tutors. The idle hours that once allowed kids to daydream seem to be no more. When’s enough enough, though?

Doing more only to do less — do we glorify busy?

Author Tim Kreider believes ‘Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.’ We feel we are nothing, not worthy, unimportant or left out if we have nothing to do.

But there is another aspect to it. Perfectionism – that shadow from our childhoods. We want to be excellent – because if we are, we will be worthy of love. So we take on anything and everything that is thrown us. Even when we are aware we are overwhelmed, we find it hard to say ‘NO’. Because we fear that if we do – people will think less of us. So we end up doing more than our fair share.

Sofagirl at Campari & Sofa writes eloquently about her own fight with the “busy” beast and the scary personal episode that drove her to question it all. Weaving in others’ research on the topic, she presents a compelling argument for taking a step back — and a deep breath — and for refusing to participate in the tyranny of “busy” any longer. Bet you’ll find it difficult to disagree.

The Quiet Contemplation of Inactivity

As kids we could come up with 16 ways to put our lives on the line using the jungle gym in ways no designer ever intended. They were days when we simply looked at clouds and imagined animals (or teachers or, for the juvenile delinquents, body parts) hiding in the puffy expanse of the heavens. … We were bored, but no one was ever bored enough to learn something.

Except it appears, according to recent research, that boredom is good for the brain. Evidently, boredom switches our brain’s little buttons and the synapses and neurons start firing on more cylinders, pushing us to creativity and intellectual growth.

John Wegner of Consistently Contradictory harkens back to a time when “boredom” and free time were acceptable and even encouraged, when we didn’t rely on technology and scheduling quite so much, and when we allowed our brains to wander. Are we losing the benefits of this today? Should we re-introduce some “slack” into schools? Read John’s convincing and thought-provoking post and you’ll probably be answering “yes.”

The Kid Stays in the Picture

When I was a kid, Dad made it clear that ‘mere play’ was being idle—something lazy people did. And boy, you couldn’t get lazier than me.

Michael Maupin from Completely in the Dark takes us back to his childhood and the lasting effects of not being encouraged to “play.” He explains, “As a shadow, it darkened the room, filling me with anxiety and self-doubt: ‘What am I doing now? Is it practical? Is it useful? Shouldn’t I be ashamed?’ … For years that sound, that shadow, was all around. It blocked up my writing, my artwork, my self-esteem — everything. I was psychologically held at gunpoint by an ethic that carries little currency in my world.”

Not one to be bullied, however, Michael has found ways to protect and embrace his natural tendencies towards “play and reverie.” Read his post, and you’ll be inspired to do the same.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips 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.

If you want to promote your hotel, inn, or bed & breakfast with a stylish and functional website that looks and works great on mobile devices, look no further than WordPress.com/hotels.

An online property for your property

You’ve worked hard to create a comfortable home-away-from-home for your guests, and now, we can set you up with an online home to help keep your “No Vacancy” light burning brightly.

WordPress.com makes it easy to get your website up and running, and keep it secure, making housekeeping a breeze — saving you time you can now spend with your guests.

Come Stay with us

Our new theme Stay, designed with hotels, inns, and bed & breakfasts in mind, allows you to show off the features and amenities your property provides with stunning imagery and plenty of baked-in functionality.

Add rooms with rates and guest testimonials with a few clicks of the mouse, and then display them with their own page templates.

Take advantage of the handy reservation widget to allow potential guests to inquire about your availability.

Customize Stay by uploading your logo and take advantage of its flexible widget areas and custom menus. Take your customization one step further with custom colors, elegant fonts, or your own custom CSS through the Custom Design upgrade.

Best of all, Stay is completely responsive and displays well across any device. If your guests are looking you up from the road, they won’t have a problem finding you.

You’re in good company.

Check out other properties users have built on WordPress.com.

The Lake Crest Inn

Long House Bed & Breakfast

Yellow Inn

Come on in and let WordPress.com help you showcase your property. You’ll have your site up and running in no time at all.

Today, we celebrate Earth Day. Perhaps you’re marking the occasion by attending a volunteer clean-up event in your neighborhood, talking with your children about recycling, or choosing to bike to work, all in the name of environmental stewardship. Here in the WordPress community, we’re lucky to have bloggers covering everything from sustainability, to homesteading, to organic gardening and farming, to a whole host of environmental concerns and issues all year long.

Let’s take a look at how several bloggers choose to go green:

20-something environmentalist

20-something environmentalist

“Lindsay McNamara has been interested in the environment all her life.” So reads the first line of the “About Lindsay” section of 20-something environmentalist, and even a quick glance at her blog reveals a young woman full of enthusiasm, passion, and intelligence about the work she’s doing. Her blog reflects her focus on the environment with smart customizations on our most popular theme, Twenty Ten. Not only has Lindsay chosen a custom header for her blog, but we love the leafy green custom background she’s picked. Additionally, Lindsay uses the tag cloud widget to help readers find what they’re looking for, as well as draw even more attention to her blog’s tight focus.

EcoGrrl

EcoGrrl

Aimee Fahey, the EcoGrrl from Portland, Oregon, covers topics as diverse as organic gardening, career changes, interviews with fascinating and inspiring people, and other subjects related to thoughtful environmental stewardship. Aimee’s content reflects her site’s tagline: “simplicity, discovery, sustainability, equity, creativity.” She’s chosen the premium theme A Simpler Time, which mirrors her personality and warmth. Aimee also makes good use of the custom menu at the top of her blog, with several different navigation options for her readers. This premium theme’s largely green-on-green color scheme, as well as the casual and inviting fonts, are well-suited for this EcoGrrl.

Food (Policy) for Thought

Food (Policy) for Thought

On the blog Food (Policy) for Thought,  we’re privy to “a grad student’s musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture, and more!” This blog is a fascinating academic repository of thoughtful posts on everything from solutions to childhood obesity to the importance of livestock production in developing countries. The blog’s author, Janina, chose the theme Yoko for her blog, and interestingly enough, did not alter the header photograph that comes standard with the blog. This is an instance, however, of the existing header being perfect for the blog in question. The up-close picture of the dew-softened leaves is beautiful and fitting. Janina streamlines the blog by making it two columns versus the standard three. This change results in a layout that is clean and easy to navigate, making sure that there are no distractions to inhibit the blog’s important topic and message.

More blogs to explore for Earth Day

Want more examples of WordPress.com bloggers going green? Check out the below:

ClimateSight is home to Kate, a self-described “young climate scientist,” who started her blog at 16 and continues her work today to bridge the gap between “scientific and public knowledge on climate change.” Happy Simply celebrates a lifestyle of focusing on the simple things, including a small sustainable dwelling, while Little Home in the Big City tracks the adventures of a couple homesteading in Milwaukee. Finally, Fiona Grows Food follows the Irish Fiona as she learns the ins and outs of gardening.

ClimateSight

Happy Simply

Little Home in the Big City

Fiona Grows Food

Want even more inspiration this Earth Day, or every day? Check out the following topics in the Reader: environment, sustainability, organic farming, and nature.

Think you need to be a graphic designer or buy a bunch of upgrades to make a sweet-looking, custom blog? Think again: Prada for Breakfast stands out from the other 214,699 blogs using the Forever theme with creative use of text and simple tweaks that are accessible to any blogger:

Forever was originally designed as a wedding theme, but the bold images, simple layout, and clean typography make it suitable for any kind of blog, including an art and style site like Prada for Breakfast. There’s nothing matrimonial about Halie’s site, and here’s why:

Custom header and background

Forever is one of the many themes that lets you upload a custom header, which is a great way to instantly grab a visitor’s attention and show off your blog’s personality. Some bloggers opt for graphically designed headers (like Mi Piace Kate, previously highlighted in Customizing Bueno), but a custom header can be as simple as a favorite photo or a bit of text. Prada for Breakfast uses some of both:

The photo she’s chosen — of coffee, a croissant, and the morning papers, slightly soft and faded — transports the reader to a Parisian café on a misty day, where you sip a latté while watching the well-heeled stroll by. If the photo doesn’t whisk you off to France, she’s superimposed her title and tagline above, both of which reinforce that you’re reading a style blog.

Halie’s custom header is paired with a custom background of pink and off-white stripes, simultaneously calming and whimsical. Adding a background is as easy as finding a image or pattern you like and hitting “upload.” The internet is your oyster here; take a screen shot of the pattern of a fabric you like or find a photo using Creative Commons, and presto! Background.

She — and you — can also choose any of the background patterns that come already loaded in WordPress.com, which you’ll find in the Customizer. (Check out our other suggested sources for background patterns and textures for more inspiration.)

Bold tagline

One of Forever’s distinct features is the way it features the blog’s tagline separately from the title, almost like a call-out:

Prada for Breakfast takes advantage of this feature, using it to highlight a favorite quote:

It doesn’t involve any design or custom fonts. Halie just edited her general settings to set this quote as the tagline, and the theme does the rest. The quote instantly sets a tone for the blog (and looks great, to boot).

Customized widgets

Prada for Breakfast makes excellent use of widgets to highlight recent posts, tweets, an extensive blogroll, and more, using small custom touches to help them blend with her blog and add their own personality:

• Widget titles are all customized to reflect her tone: “Hello” instead of “About;” “Reading List” instead of “Links;” “Follow Me!” for social media links.
• Social media links are done with image widgets, but here, the images are just text saved as pictures — something you can do in most word processing programs. There are no custom graphics, no cute-little-blue-bird-on-a-branch, just an elegant font that melds with the rest of the blog.

Nearly everything Halie at Prada for Breakfast does to create her stylish yet dreamy blog is done with simple text edits and basic tools available to everyone on WordPress.com — no technical or design know-how needed. And as an added bonus, this is a reminder not to skip over themes originally created for a specific purpose; you can easily transform a wedding or restaurant theme into your dream site.

(For more inspiration, check out the Branding Your Blog or Custom Backgrounds posts over on The Daily Post for help developing and implementing a cohesive look for your blog.)

If you’re a WordPress aficionado you’ll know why one of the most eagerly awaited announcements each year is the arrival of a new default theme. Wait no longer, friends. I’m thrilled to introduce the newest addition, Twenty Thirteen. This gorgeous theme is colorful, opinionated, and ready to give your blog a warm, welcoming vibe.

An important goal of the yearly default theme is to be different than before, pushing visual boundaries and finding new ways to display your handcrafted content. Twenty Thirteen does just that, taking us back to the blog by featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.

Delight and engage your visitors with this vibrant design, from the color scheme and matching header images to excellent typography and beautiful icons. All within a flexible, wide layout that looks great on large screens yet remains readable on any device, big or small.

Colorful to the max, Twenty Thirteen showcases your lovingly crafted content with bold and unapologetic colors. Large, alternating swaths of color are intended to encourage posting a variety of formats—writing all kinds of different content on your blog: images, videos, quotes, links, and more. The result is a lush and attractive layout.

Twenty Thirteen is chock full of other fun design details to make you smile. See it for yourself on the demo blog—things like the off-size post navigation circles and the funky 404 page. The typography is beautiful and readable with Source Sans Pro for body text, Bitter for headings, and a symbol-font called Genericons for seamlessly scaling icons.

And there’s more… learn about everything in Twenty Thirteen on the Theme Showcase.

Designed by Joen Asmussen and built by a cadre of enthusiasts in the WordPress community, Twenty Thirteen is now available in your WordPress.com dashboard at Appearance → Themes. Self-hosted WordPress.org users will have access to the bundled theme with the official 3.6 software release, coming soon.

I hope you get a thrill out of this new theme in all its colorful glory.

Greetings and Salutations!

Another Thursday has arrived and you know what that means … more themes! The theme machine here at WordPress.com has been cranking out few fresh, new designs that I am happy to present to you.

Flora & Fauna

Flora & Fauna is a colorful, illustrated premium theme designed by Aline Yamada. It’s perfect for your crafty DIY blog, tumblelog, or personal site. Among the theme’s features are support for several post formats, links to popular social networks, and three optional footer widget areas.

Read more about Flora & Fauna in the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

TheStyle

TheStyle is a beautiful, grid-based premium theme created by the fine folks at Elegant Themes. The design’s simple structure and photo-driven visualization of posts makes your website fun and easy to browse. TheStyle is a great theme for bloggers or news publications that want to showcase their most recent articles within a stylish design.

Read more about TheStyle in the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

Fanwood Light

Fanwood Light is an attention grabbing theme featuring multiple post formats, widget areas, and a responsive layout that looks great on devices both large and small.

Read more about Fanwood Light in the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.