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.

Blue, orange and white - that is the color scheme of the new WordPress administration panel. Why are they changing the theme? No clue - from what I’ve seen, so far, it reminds me of an earlier Blogspot admin panel, for some reason. Maybe it’s the use of the orange that makes me think that. I quite like the current design of the administration panel in WordPress, though…I’m a little dissapointed that they aren’t staying with it and building from it, for congruency’s sake. That’s just me, though - there will be plenty who applaud this change and I’m sure I’ll embrace it as well - I’m just a damn creature of habit! Heh.

At this time, the two big changes in the top menu in the Administration Panel is:

• Presentation is now labeled “Design”
• Options is now labeled “Settings”

The 1.3 version of WordPress MU is finally released - much to the pleasure of MU users everywhere. On his blog, Donncha O Caoimh announced that this new version of WordPress MU includes:

• Better admin controls for the signup page. It can be disabled in various ways.
• Upload space functions have been fixed.
• The signup form is now hidden from search engines which will help avoid certain types of spamming.
• Profile page now allows you to select your primary blog.
• Database tables are now UTF-8 from the start.
• If you’re using virtual hosts, the main blog doesn’t live at /blog/ any more.
• The WordPress importer now assigns posts to other users on a blog.

I downloaded and installed version 1.3-RC for WordPress MU this week. Download it here, if you want - - or wait for the final release to be coming soon!

Changes:

The main blog of the site doesn’t have to live at /blog/ if you’re using virtual hosts. #409

WordPress importer can now assign posts to other users. #435

The importer shouldn’t error on the foreach() loop when there’s only one author now #405

Privacy mode of new blog is stored properly. #423

Various cleanup patches by ktlee and momo360modena.
momo360modena gave the wpmu-* admin pages a nice facelift!

XMLRPC posting and the signup page are now disabled by default. They can be activated in the wpmu-options.php page. It is possible to change the xmlrpc setting for a particular blog by editing it via the wpmu-blogs.php page.

Individual blog’s upload quota can be edited on the edit blog page too.

Please update now.

What am I speaking of?? The version update feature that is packaged in the new 2.3.+ version of WordPress. I heard about it in the buzz about the new version in the weeks prior to it being released. Now that WordPress 2.3.1 is out - I’m seeing it in my WordPress Dashboard and it looks like this:

This nifty feature tells you when your WordPress software is out of date and a new version has been released. This is really nice, especially for those who don’t keep updated on such information on a regular basis.

2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than their WordPress Address
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

Unfortunately, some security issues were found in 2.3. Specifically, an XSS problem that can be exploited if your php setup has register_globals enabled. For this reason, upgrading to 2.3.1 is advised.

See a full set of changes between 2.3 and 2.3.1 here on the Trac

Download the new version and upgrade your current copy.

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..”