Author: queentracey1

Speaking of light … just click on the picture to see more of the luminous work of Donald Langosy, and to learn how music … and the lack of it … influence his art.

Or click here.  Enjoy!

Today I’m happy to announce two great new additions to our collection of premium themes.

First, we have Standard, a sleek, exacting theme designed by 8BIT for professional blogging with an emphasis on contextual display of your content.

Your content, in each of its various forms, deserves to be presented with unique distinction. Thanks to Standard’s support of post formats, it can. Image, video, quote, status, and link posts all receive a beautiful visual treatment.

If your visitors are browsing on a mobile device or tablet, Standard has got you covered. Its responsive layout adapts gracefully to smaller screens. View it in action on the demo site, or head on over to the Theme Showcase to read more about Standard and its features.

Next, we have Chalk, an innovative theme designed with a strong focus on online educators by The Theme Foundry.

Posts containing to-do lists, chats…

You can read more about this very special place here.

Learn more about this lovely place here.

After moving from New York City to Chicago and getting married, Rachel Bertsche realized that her new life was missing one crucially important thing: a local best friend. So she decided to go on one friend date every week for a year, and she documented her quest on a WordPress.com blog at MWFseekingBFF.com.

But before Rachel even started the blog, the 27-year-old writer put together a book proposal based on her search for a local BFF, and successfully pitched it to agents, and then editors. She says, “After I sold the proposal, I decided to start a blog so that I could have a place to document my journey and some of the research I was finding. I also wanted to start building a community and to engage with readers.”

It’s now been over two years since Rachel first launched MWFseekingBFF.com. So did she accomplish her blogging goals?…

Once in a while, it’s important to stop, catch your breath, and look at your accomplishments before you move on to the next thing — to put a stake in the ground that says, “I made it this far!”

Today, we’re rolling out a couple of notifications to help you celebrate your blog activity milestones. From now on, whenever you hit a milestone for how many followers your blog has (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and beyond), you’ll get a badge:

We also created badges to celebrate when you receive lots of likes from visitors:

In addition to celebrating your achievements, we wanted to notify you when you’ve had a particularly good day for receiving likes or new followers. From now on, we’ll let you know of your best days for such activity:

Keep in mind that we’ve only started counting your best days this March.

We all blog for different…

It was the owls that first caught me, dark eyes so wise and brilliant with life.

Then I noticed the other little birds, dark bodies reminiscent of the sparrows of my Virginia youth.  The artist, Angie Pickman, is based in the midwest of Kansas. I don’t make it out that way very often and so when I see glimpses of her work in my email box via her blog I am thankful for the internet for allowing me to see such creative beauty made out of black paper.

Without ever seeing her blog posts about music, one can sense the lyricism in Angie’s cut paper work.  I’ve told her — and I am being sincere — that she has redefined my sense of black paper and negative space.  Given that she does post on occasion about music and that her paper cuts titles sometimes refer to birdsong, I asked her…