Before starting a new week on WordPress.com, be sure to check out the features that made a splash on Hot Off the Press last week:
- We introduced two beautiful new themes, Designfolio and Pictorico, and chatted with a few bloggers on how they chose their themes.
- If you were looking for help on how to make your site more visible, we had some handy SEO tips for you.
- Readers loved hearing about recently published WordPress.com authors, and to learn about Automatticians participating in a monthly blogging challenge.
- We were honored to talk to Archbishop Desmond Tutu about his Global Forgiveness Challenge.
Pro tip of the week: Do you have a lot to say about another post, but don’t wish to crowd someone else’s comment section? Consider creating a pingback, a comment that lets the original author know you’ve linked to their post on your own blog. To learn more about this feature, check out this great overview at The Daily Post.
Coming up this week
Stay tuned for more exciting announcements and features this week, including:
- Our new events calendar, allowing you to find WordPress.com-related events near you,
- A focus on journalists who blog,
- And more…
WordPress.com News 
Loved reading about the recently published WordPress.com authors. I think it’s great to have such a wonderful community of folks supporting know and little-known authors!
Crowded Coments section will never be a problem for me. Would love to hear from a blogger who has too many or too lengthy comments and ask one short question…. How?
Great recap!
Stephanie
I love getting your Monday morning updates, a refreshing way to start the week.
Wanted to say something about pingbacks being used instead of comments. Speaking for myself, I much prefer comments and feel that pingbacks can go down a slippery slope. I have had pingbacks sent from blogs with inappropriate content… For people whose blogs are viewed by professional contacts or even clients, it is important IMO to vet pingbacks before approving them. Approving a pingback, linking back to another blog is a defacto endorsement of the content at that other blog. My blog, for example, is a nature blog. Someone sent a pingback to a post describing a (well-intentioned) tale of drug addiction (with somewhat sordid details). While I totally empathize with that writer, do I want to send people interested in bird photos back to that sort of story? No. I would much prefer a simple comment posted on my blog and not a pingback… But maybe I’m in the minority in thinking that approving a pingback is an actual endorsement of the linked-to content?
Anyway, keep the great Monday morning updates coming!
The weekly recap is a great idea !
Can we make it ‘sticky’ on the top of the Reader page for a few days ?
Best,
InR
Thanks for the suggestion! While we’d like to keep the Reader as the place where everyone receives the latest posts from the blogs they follow, that’s definitely some food for thought.
Thanks for consideration!