WordPress.com adds paid upgrades

Free blog hosting site WordPress.com introduced its first paid feature this morning, allowing customers access to their CSS for $15 a year per blog. Free members can still access 40 built-in templates for free and customize their image header and sidebar widgets. Payments are processed through PayPal. The site is currently testing custom domain mapping, a likely next upgrade. The combination of custom CSS and domain mapping a la carte upgrades puts Automattic’s WordPress.com in direct competition with Six Apart and its TypePad product currently charging $90 a year for a similar feature set….

BloxPress personalized blog sidebars

BloxPress is a theme and template engine for WordPress that allows viewers of your blog to configure their own widget modules in your sidebars. If Bill likes to view the last 10 comments and Jane likes to see your latest Flickr uploads, they can have both at once with their own configuration. Individual user preferences are stored in a cookie and anyone can create their own “blocks” for the system. Check out the demo to see the system in action. It’s too bad the blocks do not seem to interoperate with any other widget definition format. I’m glad Spaces…

PodSession: Startup Do’s and Don’ts with Matt Mullenweg of Automattic

Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform. We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it’s best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson’s new book,…

Dave Winer relaunches Share Your OPML

Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress. The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading…

Toni Schneider joins Automattic

Toni Schneider has left his position at Yahoo! to become CEO of Automattic, the corporate side of WordPress. Toni was previously leading Yahoo!’s API team and his move to Automattic comes less than a month about six months after his golden handcuffs came off from the Oddpost acquisition of June 2004. Om Malik broke the story of Tony’s departure this evening on his blog….

WordPress 2.0

WordPress 2.0 is now available for download from the newly redesigned WordPress.org. The new release includes many behind-the-scenes changes as well as some front-end AJAX goodness. A Subversion update is the best way to upgrade your existing installation. My favorite new features: Improved user permissions that allow you to select a role instead of a number. Better importers. WordPress importers can login to other blogging services and suck out your data, comments and all! Abstracted data layer allows future support of various databases and makes plugin development a bit easier. Rich post authoring through a WSYIWYG interface and drag and…

WordPress developers get corporate

This morning the lead developers of WordPress unveiled a new corporate entity based on the popular open-source blogging platform. The new company, Automattic, employs WordPress lead developers Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg, contributing developer Donncha O’Caoimh, and Andy Skelton. The new company will provide WordPress consulting services and develop and maintain services such as hosted blogging site WordPress.com and antispam tool Akismet. Automattic is a Delaware corporation founded on March 28, 2005 and previously mentioned on this blog as “WordPress Inc.” in late March. The company’s official launch is meant to coincide with the release of WordPress 2.0 later…