WPAssist » WordPress.com
Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog this week that all free WordPress.Com accounts now come with 3 Gigabytes of disk space available. This is HUGE - considering that space generally costs money on the web and 3GB is rather generous. The space increase for WordPress.Com users is not only useful, but greatly appreciated!
The space is increased from the original 50MB - that’s quite a leap!
More details can be found at the WordPress.Com News Blog:
Much of the work we do at Automattic is behind the scenes, infrastructure you’ll (hopefully) never notice or see, but we’re always thinking about how the improvements we make to the foundation of the site will allow us to build more interesting things on top of it.
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Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.
This question came in via my email today, from a reader of my WordPress For Dummies book, regarding adding themes to a WordPress.Com blog :
How do I set up my wordpress.com blog to use your xMark theme? The setup instructions on the website say to send the xMark folder to the server, but that sounds like a wordpress.org setup. …. Recently I’ve tried again using the wordpress.com setup, and found that was more my speed. Now that my blog is up, http://dominickrusso.wordpress.com/ I’m trying to find a fluid theme, and that’s why I wanted to try xMark.
Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic, announced at WordCamp Argentina that Automattic will soon launch a service for premium WordPress themes. The idea? To provide a repository of ‘premium’ WordPress themes for sale. Designers make 50% of the revenue from themes that sell - - Automattic pockets the other 50%.
It will be interesting to see if this kills the free WordPress theme offerings. From a designers standpoint - why continue offering up free themes when you can submit them to this WordPress Themes Marketplace and make a buck, or two.
And what will the going price be for these premium themes? Is it a standard price - for instance will it be a blanket price for all themes? If not, will Automattic valuate each theme? Based on what criteria? Or will the designer be allowed to set the price? Maybe it will be an auction-type setup where users can bid on the themes that are only sold once?
WordPress.Com offers a VIP Hosting service if your blog is getting more traffic than you can handle. What kind of traffic are we talking… well, WordPress.Com gives an example of a blog that gets more than 500,000 pageviews a month. VIP Hosting isn’t cheap, and it is not offered to everyone. Have a look at the services you get:
- You create WordPress.com accounts, import your content, and point your DNS at us.
- WordPress.com will load balance your site across our hundreds of servers. (**This alone, for a high traffic blog, is worth the price of admission)
- You can have your own domain name.
- People logged in to WordPress.com will also be logged in on your domain, which makes it easier for them to comment and link you. (Also gives you free integration with our My Comments, Tag Surfer, and avatar features.)
- Included enterprise-level Akismet spam protection.
The simple answer to the often asked question of whether or not you can advertise or monetize your WordPress.com blog is: NO.
Unless you are a VIP hosted member of WordPress.com. You can read about the WordPress VIP Hosting Services here. Unless you are a VIP member, there is no way for you to advertise on your WordPress.com blog. Thing twice before you consider VIP hosting, however. It carries a hefty $600 set up fee and $300 per month to carry the VIP status. That may sound like a lot - but, objectively speaking, it’s worth it if you have a blog that does the kind of traffic they’re talking about. I did a post on the VIP hosted services previously - have a look.
It’s true! However, unlike the service you’re using to blog on WordPress.com - customizing the theme is not free. At the time of this post, the current cost is $15.00 per year to obtain access to the Custom CSS feature on your WordPress.Com account.
WARNING: The WordPress.Com Custom CSS feature is not for the faint-at-heart. It does require knowledge of CSS in order to accomplish the task (or hire someone to accomplish it for you).
In your WordPress.Com administration panel, click the Upgrades tab in the top menu to access the place you need to be in order to purchase the option. Once done, you are granted access to the CSS editor and are able to edit the CSS to style your template the way you’d like.
