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PollDaddy joined the Automattic team last year, and we have been working on adding some of our great features directly into the WordPress platform ever since.
Ratings
The PollDaddy rating feature that was enabled on WordPress.com last week has really started to see some use. Over 100k blog posts, pages and comments on WordPress.com are now being [...]

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.
Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.
Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.
Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email from any email client, whether in a browser, on your desktop, or from your cell phone, and as much formatting will be retained as possible.
Attachments are not left out, and your images will be included and automatically converted into thumbnails.  If you include multiple images they’ll be converted into an attractive gallery.  Now you can take photos anywhere and have them appear on your blog in moments.

If you’ve purchased the Space Upgrade then MP3 attachments will be displayed using our audio player. If you’ve purchased the VideoPress upgrade then you can also include videos.
There really is no easier way to get media onto your blog.

If this hasn’t whetted your appetite, here’s a quick run-down of Post by Email features:

Transcoding of any video files supported by the WordPress video player (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, and m4v).
Automatic removal of standard signature blocks, with support for manual removal of other signatures.
Add your email addresses directly into your address book using downloadable vCards. (You don’t even need to remember the address!)
Automatic notification of a published email post.
Conversion of YouTube URLs into embedded videos.

For advanced users wanting th

You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.
I don’t just mean the cool content from WordPress.tv, but the video player and video/audio quality itself.
We’ve rewritten how videos work here on WordPress.com from the ground-up and taken inspiration from the great products at Vimeo and Smugmug, and are pleased to formally offer our video upgrade to everyone. Here’s a sample of what it can do especially for those sweltering in the heat right now:



With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.
Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.
The video feature was part of the space upgrade previously and for those that helped us test it we have now extended a one-year free video upgrade. We just want to make sure existing video users can continue to use it without any hassle. For new users, the video upgrade costs about 5 bucks a month.
As an added bonus, each video has stats attached to it so you can see how often they’re being viewed, and more stats are coming.
If you’d like to geek out, here’s some technical information about the encoding of videos and such, and the entire VideoPress WordPress video player and transcoder is under the GPL and open to the world.
In the future we’ll be working on giving your viewers more options for streaming and downloading videos, better and more in-depth stats, more player customization, and a way for WordPress.org users to use and embed the new player easier.

You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.
I don’t just mean the cool content from WordPress.tv, but the video player and video/audio quality itself.
We’ve rewritten how videos work here on WordPress.com from the ground-up and taken inspiration from the great products at Vimeo and Smugmug, and are pleased to formally offer our video upgrade to everyone. Here’s a sample of what it can do especially for those sweltering in the heat right now:



With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.
Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.
The video feature was part of the space upgrade previously and for those that helped us test it we have now extended a one-year free video upgrade. We just want to make sure existing video users can continue to use it without any hassle. For new users, the video upgrade costs about 5 bucks a month.
As an added bonus, each video has stats attached to it so you can see how often they’re being viewed, and more stats are coming.
If you’d like to geek out, here’s some technical information about the encoding of videos and such, and the entire VideoPress WordPress video player and transcoder is under the GPL and open to the world.
In the future we’ll be working on giving your viewers more options for streaming and downloading videos, better and more in-depth stats, more player customization, and a way for WordPress.org users to use and embed the new player easier.

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!
I swear it was Matt’s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Matt’s.
And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blog’s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4).
The best part is that any time you change your blog’s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. I’ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.

Some of you may have noticed we’ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment.
Although shortcodes are great and we’ll continue to support and encourage them for comments the simplest possible interface seemed to be just a URL.
The URL is all you’ll need to include a YouTube video or PollDaddy poll. To try it out copy and paste the permalink for a video or a poll on PollDaddy Answers and put it on its own line in a comment, like enter enter http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1598108/ enter enter. You’ll now have a poll embedded in the comment just like this:
View Poll
(By the way, I have a Kindle 2 and it’s the bestest thing since sliced beer.)
Of course if someone leaves a video or poll you don’t like it’s just like them leaving something else you don’t like, you can always delete it or edit it to remove the offending link.
As you and your audience start to play with this it should spice up comments a bit, and based on your feedback we may expand this to encompass other shortcodes and embeds in the future.
Keep commentin’.