Embedding Images from Instagram

This is one more way we are making it easier for your site to be the digital hub of all your content.

WordPress.com News

We know many of you document and share your experiences with Instagram, so we’re excited to announce that you can now embed images from Instagram on your blog.

As with other embeds, it’s quite easy. First, copy the image’s URL from your web browser’s address bar while viewing the image:

Then, while you are editing a post or page, simply paste the URL on its own line:

http://instagram.com/p/QI9cbtAdvW/

So for example, this text and URL:

will display this on your blog:

The URL automatically embeds the largest size of the image that fits into the content area. Alternatively, you can control the size of an image using shortcode. For example:

embeds this image instead:

An image is automatically linked to the URL of its original Instagram page, so when readers click the image on your blog, they are taken to its full-size version.

It’s another quick and easy way to…

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Video: Matt Mullenweg | State of the Word 2012

A great presentation on what the WordPress community has accomplished this year, and what is in the works for future releases.

Enterprise WordPress hosting, support, and consulting - WordPress VIP

If you missed WordCamp SF this past weekend, or didn’t  catch the live stream, the fine folks who work on WordPress.tv have the keynote by WordPress co-founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg ready to go:

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Couldn’t make it to WordCamp SF ? Watch the Livestream Now

WordCamp San Francisco is half way through the first day, and it’s been great seeing many of you here.

For those who couldn’t make it, we have a video livestream running, and we’ve just added a way for VIPs to see it without purchasing a livestream pass.

Just visit 2011.sf.wordcamp.org and click on “Sign in” and enter the following info (case sensitive):

  • First name: VIP
  • Last name: Partner
  • Email address: vip@automattic.com

This is just for VIPs, so please don’t blog or tweet this 😉

A special thanks to our colleague Barry for setting this up. Barry will also be speaking and doing a Q&A later today on topics including Scaling, Servers, and WordPress.com Infrastructure.

Last Week’s Dashboard and Publishing Disruption

We wanted to share a full timeline of the publishing/dashboard disruption that we had last week on Tuesday, and a few steps that we’ve already taken to avoid similar situations from happening in the future.

Details below from our systems team:

On Tuesday afternoon, at 4:33PM EDT, a bug fix was deployed to WordPress.com that triggered a function recursion (infinite loop). The code execution path that caused the recursion was somewhat obscure and did not show up in testing. One minute later, at 4:34PM EDT, our monitoring systems alerted us to system-wide performance problems across all 3 WordPress.com production data centers and other services which rely on WordPress.com core infrastructure and APIs. Approximately 15 minutes later, we had identified the problem and committed a fix. Unfortunately, the looping was so extreme that it caused some servers to crash. This made it difficult to deploy the fix to all production hosts. We immediately started the process of removing the failed hosts from production while ensuring the active hosts were running the correct code revision. This process was completed by about 5:30PM EDT. Front-end site serving was affected for approximately 5-7 minutes during the hour-long recovery process for some users depending on what datacenter they were sent to at the time they visited your site.

Unfortunately, once this was complete, we noticed that the admin web clusters which serve site dashboards (/wp-admin/) continued to crash even after being restored. We immediately began troubleshooting the repeated crashes, which were initially thought to be related to lack of capacity, or an incomplete code deploy to these hosts.

At 6:50 EDT, we made the decision to put all WordPress.com sites into read-only mode, which would reduce the risk that users publishing content would encounter an error that resulted in their changes not being saved. This also should have reduced the load on the admin clusters making them easier to troubleshoot and restore.

At 8:15PM EDT we discovered that the fix deployed 3.5 hours earlier didn’t fix all cases of the looping and the remaining problems were causing instability in the admin clusters. We decided to deploy a complete revert of the initial problematic code. By 8:50PM EDT we had recovered enough of our admin cluster to re-enable writes and everything returned back to normal. We continued to work behind the scenes for the next few hours to recover all servers affected by this issue and monitor everything to make sure there were no lingering problems.

The complexity and wide impact of this issue contributed to extraordinary amount of time it took to fully recover. We have identified some issues internally which we are working to fix and hopefully prevent a similar event from happening in the future. Worst case, the changes should drastically reduce the time it takes to recover from a similar issue.

One of those issues involves stats – you may have noticed that any stats collected between 6:50PM EDT and 8:20PM EDT were lost. On Wednesday, we deployed a change to our stats parsing code which will allow us to queue stats in the event we have to switch to read-only mode in the future. We are also working on integrating some unit tests into our continuous deployment system. This will allow us to run unit tests on changes in real-time before they are deployed to production. We sincerely apologize for the service interruption and are doing everything in our power to prevent similar events in the future.

iPad Optimized Experience

Today we launched an iPad optimized plugin/theme across WordPress.com. Developed by the fine folks of OnSwipe with collaboration and tweaking for this particular WP.com implementation by the WordPress.com team, this touch aware theme is a native HTML5 experience — no download or native app required. It takes advantage of what’s possible now — touch interactions, swiping, accelerometer, ability to add it to your homescreen, and much more.

A few topics we wanted to cover that are specific to WP.com VIPs:

What Is OnSwipe?

OnSwipe is a plugin for WordPress that makes your content display beautifully on the iPad. It works with your existing theme and content. When a reader comes in from an iPad Safari browser, they get the experience created by the theme. It does this by recognizing the user agent and activating the plugin.

How do I get started? And is this turned on for my site?

For most of you, no action is required to get started — it’s ready to go. We do not modify your content and we do not require any extra work on your end when creating posts. It just happens “automattically”.

If your site has mobile themes disabled completely or has a custom mobile theme running for smart, dumb, or iPad — we will not activate the PadPressed theme by default.

If your site is running our standard mobile themes, PadPressed will be on by default.

You can also turn it on or off from your WordPress.com dashboard, Appearances -> Onswipe

How do I do basic customizations like adding my logo, and changing fonts?

Setting Up Logos?- You can set separate logos for both the categories page and the cover. The optimal size is 200×200 resolution.

Setting Title Fonts- We allow users to choose from a large range of fonts that are native to the iPad for use on their blog. The font is only applied to titles and headings, while keeping the simple readability for the actual text of articles.

What is the basic architecture of the plugin?

Everything is kept under the PadPressed main folder. That folder is then divided into: assets, themes, and framework. Most of the php functions related to WordPress are located under the framework folder. The key files to the theme and design are located under the themes folder and the subfolder warp.

How do I create child themes?

Very soon we’ll have documentation on how to modify and tweak this theme.

What if I want more customization?

We understand as VIP clients you may want more customization and functionality. By modifying the code (soon), you should be able to accomplish anything that you’d like to do. If you have more questions, drop us a note via the VIP ticket system, and we can also connect you directly with the team from Onswipe for more info.

And for more information, please check out the announcement post on WordPress.com.

Dashboard and Publishing Disruption

As you all know, today on Tuesday March 22nd, we had an extended period of time in the afternoon where all WordPress.com sites, including VIP ones, were serving up content to their visitors, but were in read-only mode – not allowing any admin/editors access to the dashboard or the ability to publish new content.

We are still gathering details, and keeping a close eye on all of of our systems, but since the full recovery over 7 hours ago, everything has been working as it should.

On the communication front, we were sending out regular email updates via our vip-notify mailing list. Please let us know if any of your colleagues need to be added to that list – we’d be happy to do so. We were also posting to our main WordPress.com Twitter account as well – which is probably a good account to follow for these types of situations, and for overall news about WordPress.com.

More details to come with information on exactly what happened. In the interim, we have a time-line of the events posted on our Automattic Status site.

Update: your colleagues can also add themselves directly to the Emergency VIP Notification list.

Domain Mapping Issues this Morning *Resolved*

The earlier domain mapping issues have now been fixed.

For anyone who tried to access the site during that time that these problems were ongoing, they will need to clear their browser cache: http://en.support.wordpress.com/browser-issues/

We are gathering all the details and will have a post-mortem wrap-up once we have a clearer picture on what exactly happened. We know the timing was unusually bad for some of you with breaking news — and we are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Domain Mapping Issues this Morning

At approximately 7:53am PT we began to have issues, where some blogs that had primary domain mapping setup are being incorrectly redirected to a test blog on WP.com. This is being fixed as we speak, and we’ll have an ETA shortly.

We are very sorry for this inconvenience and have our whole team working on fixing this issue ASAP.

Downtime Due to a Power Outage

Tonight at approximately 8:30pm PT, our monitoring alerted us to an issue in our Dallas data center. We immediately investigated and learned of a power outage that impacted critical parts of our WordPress.com infrastructure. WordPress.com became slow and then unresponsive minutes later. We were able to restore all sites to read-only mode by approximately 9:12pm PT. After checking and testing that all systems were healthy, we enabled write access at 9:28pm PT.

We apologize for this inconvenience, and are reviewing all the details surrounding this power outage to see if there were any other steps or systems we could have had in place to minimize the downtime. Once we have more info, we’ll share those details with you.