WordPress.com News
en.blog.wordpress.com · Company blog · on HN since 2008
The official news blog of WordPress.com, announcing product features, security changes like HTTPS, payment options, and publishing tools.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for specifics: reblogging and feed features, early Bitcoin acceptance for countries PayPal doesn't serve, and Automattic's stand against censorship.
76HN people shared it
22linked it in comments
59stories submitted
988story points
2 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1HTTPS Everywhere: Encryption for All WordPress.com Sites4 people · 5 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 2WordPress.com accepts Bitcoin3 people · 288 points · first shared 2012 · 117 comments on HN
- 3WordPress Launches Google Adsense Alternative, WordAds3 people · 106 points · first shared 2011 · 28 comments on HN
- 4Newspack by WordPress.com – A New Publishing Solution for News Organizations3 people · 27 points · first shared 2019 · 4 comments on HN
- 5Striking Back Against Censorship3 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 6WP.com downtime summary2 people · 28 points · first shared 2010 · 7 comments on HN
- 7Write (More) Effortlessly With Markdown2 people · 13 points · first shared 2013 · 13 comments on HN
- 8Wordpress will turn on HTTPS for all subdomains of Wordpress•com.2 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9A New Way to Earn Money on Wordpress.com2 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10RSS in the Clouds2 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 11Wordpress Introduces WP-centric Feed Reader2 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Welcome Windows Live Spaces Bloggers (Microsoft + Wordpress)2 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 13Join our censorship protest2 people · first shared 2012
- 14Open Sans, how do we love thee?1 people · 132 points · first shared 2013 · 75 comments on HN
- 15New Default WordPress Theme: Twenty Twelve1 people · 109 points · first shared 2012 · 29 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
JorgeGT · 2016-12-15
> Does WordPress have reblogging? A feed that will show you all the posts from people you follow?
To answer your questions: yes and yes: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/ (Not that I use it, but this functionality was implemented back in 2012).
gibrown · 2016-01-22
It's not dominant, it's apparently perceived that way within tech circles because they focus on tech.
There's not a good apples to apples comparison of public data, but for instance...
Medium 20k authors per week: http://recode.net/2015/09/28/ev-williams-medium-raises-57-million-for-…
WordPress.com average 12.7m posts per week: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/the-2015-wordpress-com-year-i…
regecks · 2014-11-28
Right.
e.g. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/?author=1
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/?author=2
Pointless information disclosure
lukifer · 2013-12-02
WordPress got on board with accepting BitCoin early, primarily as a way to accept payments from countries not supported by PayPal: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/
Promotional purposes notwithstanding, the best legitimate use cases for accepting BTC so far seem to be online services (web hosting, domains), where the transaction delay and risk of double-spend isn't a big deal; and charities, who risk little and potentially gain much by publishing an address for a donation wallet.
DanBC · 2013-11-21
The Next Web article doesn't add anything over the actual notice, which they link to.
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/striking-back-against-censorsh…
EDIT: But it's great that Automattic are fighting this, and I wish them best luck.
mquinlan · 2012-04-28
Things may have changed in the last few years as blogspam is still pretty lucrative and has continued to advance, but I remember reading a study a few years ago (found here: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/04/09/why-wordpresscom-is-virtuall… that made the conclusion that by barring Wordpress.com bloggers from using AdSense and other advertising services, they significantly cut down on the amount of spam Blogger and other services had to deal with. Wordpress.com does have WordAds (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/).
Otherwise, if you don't qualify for WordAds, self-hosting may be your best option.
a4agarwal · 2010-06-30
Ok here you go:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/posterous-importer/
There's information and a direct link to a plugin that lets you export your site out of Posterous to Wordpress.
We think we're a better service than they are, but we aren't afraid of data portability. Users can switch as much as they want and choose the best service
apphacker · 2010-04-24
Here's Matt's post about it: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/surprise-me/?blogsub=confirmed…
claudiulodro · 2019-01-15
Interesting timing, the day after Newspack was announced.[1] I know which one I'm going to support, but it's going to be tough to take on a $300mm commitment with a $3mm commitment.
1. https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/newspack-by-wordpress-com/
detaro · 2016-06-09
> Do you have any idea how TLS actually works? If this worked out of the box for custom domains, then GitHub would need to be able to impersonate those domains.
If you redirect your domain to my webserver, I can get a certificate for it. E.g. from Let's Encrypt.
Wordpress.com uses that and offers SSL certificates to "million-plus"[0] blogs with custom domains. It's certainly doable at scale, although I totally understand it not having priority for GitHub (esp if it doesn't fit their current technical setup).
[0] https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/https-everywhere-encryption-f…
pfg · 2016-04-08
Original announcement:
https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/https-everywhere-encryption-f…
ljd · 2015-01-16
Am I missing the point, or shouldn't:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/reset-the-net/
redirect to https by now?
nernst · 2014-01-13
Wordpress.com now has Markdown [1]. Which has kept me there, so I'm guessing the timing cannot be coincidental, either.
[1] http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/markdown/
nwenzel · 2013-11-21
Bringing some needed balance to the situation (from the original post by Paul Sieminski http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/striking-back-against-censorsh… is a good way to put it.
westi · 2012-08-29
> Just realised it has a kickass gallery viewer
Actually the kickass gallery viewer works on all WordPress.com blogs regardless of the theme.
We call it "Carousel" [1] and it is also available for self-hosted WordPress installs in Jetpack [2]
[1] http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/around-the-carousel-again/
[2] http://jetpack.me/2012/07/13/jetpack-1-5-with-carousel/
darylkoop · 2012-01-18
Any WordPress.com site can protest by going to Settings → Protest SOPA/PIPA.
More info here: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/join-our-censorship-protest/
grecy · 2011-12-01
I asked the question on the linked blog [1]
The official reply was
"
For now, we are starting with WordPress.com users but look forward to working with folks like yourself who are self-hosted.
"
Sweet!
1 - http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/#comment-143819 (that # href doesn't seem to work too well, do a seach for 'grecy' and you'll jump to my comment and the reply)
remi · 2010-09-27
Official post from WordPress.com: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/welcome-windows-live-spaces-bl…
yungchin · 2010-03-10
He's probably not even aware of it; it's the default on WordPress. To get rid of the ads, you'd first have to be aware that there are any at all (and you won't normally be served ads when you're logged-in as an author), and then pay for the no-ads upgrade. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/go-ad-free/
potatolicious · 2010-02-25
I agree, this reminds me of just how good WordPress' apology was recently when they had downtime:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/wp-com-downtime-summary/
Now there's some non-weasely, honest-to-goodness apologisin'.
photomatt · 2009-09-08
Wow no reason to be so angry -- it's just some pings going back and forth. There's no need to make it personal. Besides, I've had way worse ideas.
We've always planned to have a variety of update notifications available -- the first we did was Jabber/XMPP, now RSS Cloud, after this we'll do some others. I mentioned this in my post on the subject, which you can check out here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/
We've supported other things before, like Atom Publishing, that to this day get almost no use (literally less than but we support them anyway because it can't hurt and might help. In general I would consider myself API- and format-agnostic.
snewe · 2008-09-11
Looks like a more sophisticated version of:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/
Oh, and Backpack's status updates:
http://backpackit.com
I guess it's the packaging?