My Coffs Harbour

This is a small, surfing town. Groups of teenage girls and boys wander from the beach to the convenience store, hanging around, girls sometimes in only bikinis, boys without shirts. I often catch myself marvelling at the boys’ bodies. The effortless muscle, lean and supple. I rarely went to the beach when I lived here [...]

The Happiness Engineers had a great time in London last week. We worked on some cool projects and came up with a lot of great ideas. We’ll bring more updates to you over the coming weeks and months.
One of the items we worked on is a widget we call RSS Links, which allows you to [...]

Last week you guys published 1.4 million new blog posts, but you only ran the spell checker about 204 thousand times. Ahem. The two possible explanations for this are that we’re all perfect writers or that we just forget to run the spell checker. I’m in the latter camp.
I don’t blame you — spell checkers [...]

As part of my quest to get back on the football field next season I have returned to the classes in the surfclub or what is known locally as ‘Block-Chi’. (The classes are run by a bloke nicknamed ‘Blockhead’, don’t ask me why they’re called ‘Chi’ because they are far more violent than any [...]

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a way for people to subscribe to updates to your blog using a client like Google Reader or Bloglines. You may not know what RSS is but chances are people are using it to read your blog. We track over 50,000,000 posts read via RSS every week. [...]

I’m back in San Francisco after a trip to London for the Happiness Engineer meetup. It’s serious business, but the group has managed to have a little fun along the way.

Our developers have been hard at work, too. In August, we launched the SoundCloud shortcode and WP.me, a URL shortener for WordPress blogs. And at [...]

I’ve been tooling about, trying to write something about football and my (perhaps very misguided) decision to get myself fit so I can get back on the field next season. As part of this I’ve been thinking about why I like football, and sport in general, so much and why not many people I know [...]

In the coming week, the Support crew (seen among the lovely faces here) will be meeting in London to brainstorm new ways of providing you with the resources you need. While us Happiness Engineers are putting our heads together to churn out some big ideas, we’ll be closing our email support system.
Support will be unavailable [...]

Sandbox 1.6.1 is now available to all WordPress.com blogs.
Alongside Sandbox 1.6.1 you’ll also find the older Sandbox versions. We’ve left them intact. If you’ve been using them, don’t worry, they haven’t changed. However, we do urge you to check out 1.6.1.
Sandbox is a skeleton theme for WordPress. Though you can use it by itself, it’s [...]

Check out this address:
http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten
If you visit it, you’ll end up right back here. The nice thing about it is that it’s a short link, about  70% smaller than the permalink for this post. URL shorteners are nothing new, Tiny URL has been around for 100 years, but WP.me is different in a few ways.

WP.me is [...]