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.

…..

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.

What about those folks who had already purchased the 1GB upgrade???

..we’re also increasing the limits of the paid upgrades, so if you bought a 1GB upgrade before it now adds 5GB for no additional charge.

Before you think that this is your solution for streaming your own video or audio files on your WordPress.Com – in order to do that, you’ll still need to pay for the space upgrade.

How does the free WordPress.Com blogging soluton now compare with their competition at Typepad.com and Blogger.com – in terms of space availability??

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

As always – bandwidth at WordPress.com is unlimited, and remains free.

This makes WordPress.Com *almost* perfect. The one thing that Typepad and Blogger have over WordPress.Com is that on those two other services, you can freely advertise on your blog. As of right now, WordPress.Com disallows advertising unless you are a member of their VIP Club.

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© Lisa Sabin-Wilson, 2008 - Author of WordPress for Dummies

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

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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.

The simple answer to this is you cannot add any theme you want to your WordPress.Com blog. You are limited to the themes that WordPress.Com provides for you – you are not able to add any new themes to your WordPress.Com blog. For a fee, the best you can do is upgrade your WordPress.Com account so that you are able to edit the CSS for the template you’re currently using – - if you know how to edit/write CSS, that is.

However, if you find a WordPress theme on the web that you’d like to use, and it’s not included in the WordPress.Com themes page — then you’re out of luck. There is no way around it – you cannot upload themes to your WordPress.Com account.

Your best bet is to obtain your own domain name, hosting account and begin using the WordPress.Org software on your own hosting account – - you can change themes to your hearts content at that point!

Have a theme that you think the folks at WordPress.Com should add to their theme selection? Then read this!

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1. Management of themes on your WordPress.Com account is covered in WordPress For Dummies in Chapter 5.

© Lisa Sabin-Wilson, 2008 - Author of WordPress for Dummies

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

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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?

I will guess that the designers who continue to provide good quality free themes to the WordPress community have more of an opportunity to get their names out and about, than designers who stick with the paid, premium themes. And there will always be a market for custom themes

Good designers are out there. A quick search on Google will help you find them and the themes they offer – - either free or premium. As a designer myself, I cringe at the idea of giving anyone 50% of the profit from my work. However, on the flip side – this will be a nice opportunity for theme users to find some good, quality themes for their sites.

As I’m writing this, I checked the original post and Toni Schneider (of Automattic) posted a clarifying comment to the thread:

Some bits of information seem to have gotten lost in the translation here. Most crucially, the theme marketplace will be launched for WordPress.com (not WordPress.org) users. We are enabling theme designers to offer paid themes to over 1.7MM WordPress.com users who currently can’t upload custom themes. The marketplace is separate from the existing thriving world of open source WordPress.org themes. Also, theme designers will set the price for their themes, not Automattic.

That clarifies things a bit more. WordPress.com users need to have a solution for customized themes. Other hosted blog solutions like Typepad and Blogger give their users the ability to customize their themes, as well as having a handful of premade, standard themes available to them. Although, Typepad and Blogger give their users that ability at no cost – as far as I know, WordPress.com is the only free, hosted solution that requires payment for such abilities.

Now, if only WordPress.com will allow their users to monetize their blogs a little.

UDATE – Matt Mullenweg made a post on his blog to clarify the Themes Marketplace issue:

Right now WordPress.com is a little bit like a clothing store with only XXL men’s pink ponchos available — not a lot of selection. We’d like to offer more products, hence the idea of a theme marketplace.

Imagine you’re a theme designer and if you do a custom one-off theme for a site like this you may get $500. (Keeping the numbers simple for the sake of argument.) Making a good theme is really hard, and you may only be able to do one a week. Now imagine you made a theme and uploaded it to our theme marketplace, then set a price of $50. You’re now an option on the dashboard of 1,736,206 blogs, if we split the price evenly and 20 of those 1,736,206 blogs purchase the theme, you just made as much as you would doing a one-off design. You can plug in different numbers and assumptions there and it’s pretty easy to see how this could be big for designers.

No offense to XXL men wearing pink ponchos, of course

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© Lisa Sabin-Wilson, 2007 - Author of WordPress for Dummies

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Themes, WordPress.com.

• 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.
• Inclusion in our top lists, which can drive a great deal of traffic.
• You will have the ability to edit your templates via Subversion (SVN).
• You can run most plugins (that don’t modify DB tables).
• There are no restrictions on ads, javascript, etc.

What do you need to do for all of the above services?

• A “Powered by WordPress.com” link on your site.
• A few standard hooks in your template for our centralized stats.
• Your tags go into and point to our Tags community.
• $600 to setup your site and $300 a month hosting fee.

WordPress.Com makes this clarification: ..“Because of the nature of this program it is not open to the general public, it is intended for existing high-profile publishers, or startups that we have a good deal of confidence in. You may be a good candidate for VIP hosting if, for example, you get more than 500,000 pageviews a month on your blog. Pricing may be flexible depending on your circumstances….”

People often ask how WordPress.com makes the money required to run the kind of service they do. VIP Hosting services is just one way.

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© Lisa Sabin-Wilson, 2007 - Author of WordPress for Dummies

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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.

In the meantime, to answer the question – no, you cannot advertise on your WordPress.com blog unless you are a VIP hosted member. That means no Amazon or Google ads – no participatin in the Text Link Ads program, or AdBright or Auction Ads. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see WordPress.com allow their users to monetize a little bit.

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© Lisa Sabin-Wilson, 2007 - Author of WordPress for Dummies

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

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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.

With the Custom CSS option, you do not have access to any of the template files (i.e.: header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, etc). Rather, you have access to a stylesheet editor that creates an additional, Custom CSS file – and since your Custom CSS is loaded after the theme’s CSS, the styles in YOUR CSS override the styles in the original Theme CSS. Clear as mud? Good!

Not sure where to begin? Well, like I mentioned before – it does take some CSS know-how to accomplish the customization of the CSS of your WordPress.Com theme. Here’s how I would get started….

I use Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme on my own WordPress.Com account. If I wanted to start styling a new Style Sheet for it, I would begin with the basics.. by looking at the source code of my own blog….starting after the < /head> tag….

Any style element (also called selectors) you see can have a style applied to it in your Custom CSS. Some style elements include: body, id, class, span, ul, ol, li, p. For instance, in the image above, the very first style element you see is the body tag. This can have a style applied to it in the CSS like this:

body { margin:0; font-family:arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; background-color:black; color: silver }

That style gives the margin definitions, the font you’d like to use, the font size, the background color of the page and the color of the text on the page.

The very next style element you see in that source code is: <div id="container">...</div>

Again, that element can be styled in your CSS in any way you’d like:

#container { width: 800px; background-color:white; border: 2px solid silver; padding: 5px; }

This style defines the width, background color, border size and color and padding of the container id.

All style elements that have an id (p id, div id, etc) must start with the hash symbol in the stylesheet. All style elements that have a class (p class=, div class=, etc) start with a period. For instance, this would be an id element in your CSS:

#container

While this would be a class element in your CSS:

.container

This is just some very basic information about styling with CSS. Here are some great CSS resources if you’re interested in learning more about it in order to customize your own CSS on your WordPress.Com account:

• CSS Tutorial at HTML.net
• Beginner’s Guide to CSS
• W3C.Org – Starting With HTML + CSS
• Dave Raggertt – Intro to CSS (W3C.org)
• CodeStyle’s CSS Guide

Have fun!

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© Lisa Sabin-Wilson, 2007 - Author of WordPress for Dummies

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Themes, WordPress.com.