Archive for Wordpress.com News
Publicize: Facebook
Posted by: | CommentsYou can now send your WordPress.com posts to Facebook.
Joining our Yahoo and Twitter features is our latest in WordPress.com’s Publicize family: Facebook.
The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Facebook account.
These connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Facebook accounts separately.
More details can be found on the Publicize support page.
Publicize: Facebook
Posted by: | CommentsYou can now send your WordPress.com posts to Facebook.
Joining our Yahoo and Twitter features is our latest in WordPress.com’s Publicize family: Facebook.
The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Facebook account.
These connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Facebook accounts separately.
More details can be found on the Publicize support page.
WP.com Downtime Summary
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Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.
What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.
What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.
I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.
I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.
Proofread More Languages
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We’re often asked when we plan to make our intelligent proofreading technology available for more languages.
We’ve been hard at work and today we’re announcing After the Deadline proofreading for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
These languages feature After the Deadline’s smart contextual spell checking. We’re also using a great open source project called Language Tool to check French and German grammar.
If you’re on WordPress.com and your blog language is set to French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish–you’re ready to use our multi-lingual proofreader.
Click 
in the visual editor or 
in the HTML Editor.
We realize many of you blog in multiple languages and we have not forgotten you. Visit your WordPress.com profile page and select Use automatically detected language to proofread posts and pages.
With this option enabled, our proofreader will guess the language of your blog post and apply the correct proofreading technology for that language.
The WordPress.com Proofreading technology is available as the After the Deadline plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs.
Enjoy.
Sitemap pings for instant search updates
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Publishing your blog on WordPress.com lets you focus on your content while we sweat the technical stuff, including helping your content reach a larger audience.
Last week WordPress.com turned on sitemap pings for our millions of hosted blogs. Now, immediately after you publish or delete a page or post*, your WordPress.com blog sends a ping to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Ask. These immediate notifications help the major search engines receive your new content as quickly as possible (often within seconds) so your blog can show up in search results faster.
Help search engines discover your content
Sitemap pings are just one of the ways WordPress.com helps your content reach a large audience moments after you hit “Publish.” Every blog includes support for webmaster validation through Google, Bing and Yahoo! webmaster portals. Post updates are sent through Ping-o-Matic!, a ping relay tool owned by the WordPress Foundation, to major feed reader and blog search engines. Our Publicize feature updates your Yahoo! and Twitter accounts with a short summary and a link back to your blog content. These are just some of the ways WordPress.com helps you find your audience.
More information
- Creating and submitting sitemaps to Google
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- How Yahoo! supports sitemaps
- Ask.com webmaster FAQ
* Note: We only expose content to search engines for public blogs on WordPress.com.
