WordPress.com goes to 3 Gigabytes

WordPress.com has just increased its storage space allowance to a massive 3 Gigabytes — that should be more than enough for anyone with text and images, and also enough for audio and movies, or other kinds of large files.

…everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. …

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.

[Via WordPress.com Blog: Free Space to Three Gigabytes.]

Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free

As those of you who read my site regularly should know, I’ve been pretty POed about the blog spam and splogging situation. I subscribed to the Plagiarism Today feed because of its excellent articles about copyright and the fight against feed scraping by sploggers.

Today’s article about WordPress.com was an especially good read. From Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free on PlagiarismToday:

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com . Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

The article author, Johnathan Bailey, interviewed WordPress founder Matthew Mullenweg to learn why WordPress.com is so spam-free. The article is enlightening and highly recommended.

The WP.com Write page

A new feature with WordPress.com blogs is additional information and options on the Write post page. This includes tips about the types of files you are able to upload and information about how much disc space you’ve used. If you need more space to store your files, click the Buy more link.

If you upload large files, such as movies and audio files, you may find you quickly need to add more disc space.

Another really great feature is Autosave. WP.com saves your posts as you go along, so you don’t have to keep clicking the Save and Continue Editing button.

WordPress.com evolution

WordPress.com is the hosted WordPress service. You don’t have to mess around installing and updating files on your own server; instead you log in to your account and everything is done for you.

One of the exciting features of WordPress.com is that it’s not static: it evolves almost daily, with more and less subtle changes and developments occurring all the time.

One downside of this is that some of the instructions and screenshots in our book are a little out of sync. But then, that’s what this website is for…

In the last few posts we’ve concentrated on server installs. This post, and several to follow, aim to do a quick review of what’s changed over at WordPress.com since the book was published.

Dashboard changes

As soon as you log on at WordPress.com (WP.com) you’ll see that the Dashboard looks a little different. The Dashboard Administration panel itself has a few, mainly cosmetic, changes. The quick links to write a post, view comments and so on are on a single line near the top, with links to your own recent posts immediately below. At the very top (below the toolbar) you may find a Quick Tip. The Sidebar area now contains WP.com news and links to other WP.com blogs.

You’ll also see new links in the Toolbars across the top of the page. The Bookmarks item has been replaced by Comments and Blogroll links, while the Import link has changed to Upgrades.

There are many more items on the second row of links too: what was merely Dashboard, Blog Stats and Feed Stats has added Friend Surfer, My Comments and Tag Surfer.

In the next few posts I aim to work through these different areas of the Dashboard and alert you to changes you should know about.