I took the opportunity to install the latest changes to the WordPress software we all know and love. Right now, the Administration Panel footer says I’m using 2.4-Bleeding - - it is the latest build as of 2.12.08. There are some things I just love about - - other things? Not so much. I do understand the design work on it is not completed yet. With a release date of sometime the middle to the end of March.. I would say WP has a ways to go.

The Dashboard. Have a look:

While I am not in love with the design… the colors or the layout - - what I am in love with is the ability to edit certain sections of the dashboard.. mainly the RSS Feeds that are fed into the Dashboard:

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.

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?

Automattic, the fine folks who bring you Akismet (and WordPress.Com) have recently acquired/partnered with Gravatar. Gravatar is a service that serves up globally recognized avatars giving you the ability to have the save avatar everywhere you go! (remember all those forums where you have to choose from different avatars? With Gravatar, it’s portable - you can take it with you.)

Matt had this to say about the purchase: “Watching how Gravatar changed and evolved over the years I saw a service with great adoption and potential, but facing some classic problems of scale that successful sites are often lucky to run into. Scaling happens to be something my company, Automattic, is very good at, and as we started chatting with Tom Werner of Gravatar it became obvious there’s a lot of potential for combined forces, and I also saw a lot of parallels to Akismet, a product that does one thing, does it well, and has an open API so any platform can use it.So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic..”

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.