Now that you’ve been snapping away, you’ll want to build your photographic following. WordPress.com has an excellent photo blogging community, which you can tap into by following these tips and tricks.

Tags, topics, and phloggers, oh my!

Tags work to connect your blog to the larger WordPress.com community, so you can see others who are writing, or photographing, the same subjects as you. By tagging your post as “Photography” or “Black and White,” your posts will be included in the respective Topic page so that other viewers can find your site. If you haven’t added tags to your posts before, you can learn how to do so here.

However, tags can be used for more than just bringing traffic to your site, but as a networking tool as well. As your photo blog grows, taking some time to look at other photo blogging sites can both help you to find inspiration, tips and tricks, and new ideas, as well as put you in contact with your fellow photo blogging compatriots.

You can start following new topics in your WordPress.com reader by going to the WordPress.com Reader and inserting “Photography” or any related tag into the “Add a Topic” text box.

The Photography topic page from the WordPress.com Reader

Building Connections

One of the best ways to boost readership and build a following is to do the same in return. This means that when you see a photo blogger that you like, comment on their post! Comments and pingbacks help to create connections between bloggers and their readers.

Blogging is about community and sharing, and this sets the tone. Just recently, I wrote a blog post inspired by a post on 1000AwesomeThings.com. I linked back, and hopefully turned a bunch of new readers onto the site. Because there was a decent amount of traffic sent to his blog, or maybe because he received a pingback, Neil Pasricha then came and commented on my blog! This is the author of two #1 International Bestselling books! I was so thrilled. I emailed Neil to thank him, and that began a back and forth, where I was able to ask him his blogging tips.

From Bestselling Author Shares 3 Tips for Building Your Blog Audience

In browsing other photo blogs, you may see that many photographers add information about their camera and set up to each post. Generally, photo bloggers will include the camera they used to shoot the image, the aperture and f-stop information, and the lens. This is a great way to explain both the tools you’re using as a photographer and another method of contributing to the photo blogging community by sharing your experiences.

The Duotone theme automatically pulls your digital photo information and displays it in the left sidebar.

Protecting Your Work

Through consistent posting, commenting on other blogs, and tagging your posts, you can continue to build your photo blogging readership. As you get your work out there, it’s also important to make sure that it’s protected. For photo bloggers on WordPress.com, we recommend that you watermark your photos. This means adding a copy right, such as “© Erica’s Photography,” directly to your image with a photo editing program. Watermarking your photos helps to prevent others from taking your images and pretending they’re their own.

If you’re interested in licensing your work as well, the Creative Commons license is an excellent way to both protect your work, while still contributing to the photographic community as a whole. Creative Commons licenses establish you as the owner of your product, but still allow for others to use your work. For example, among the various Creative Commons licenses, you can state that anyone is allowed to use your work as long as it’s attributed to you and they’re not using it for commercial purposes. Better yet, they can follow all of the above rules, and may also build on your work, similar to sampling when it comes to music beats.

Now that your photo blog is well on it’s way, don’t forget to stay tuned for more tips and tricks with our final post on Photo Blogging 101.

Trying out new themes is fun, isn’t it? I think so! The thing about changing my blog’s theme that has traditionally bugged me, though, is the 10-15 minutes right after you click “Activate” when you have to rush through uploading a new custom header, maybe resetting the background, fiddling with a new sidebar configuration, and other transition adjustments so that people won’t see your site in a half-switched state. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to that — I don’t like to leave things half-painted either — but luckily for me we’ve just finished a new feature to improve this very thing. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to our new theme customization tool* and say good-bye to half-painted websites.

The customizer provides a live preview as you play with Appearance settings, and can be used to customize a live preview of a new theme before you activate it, or to make changes to your existing theme. It allows you to edit the site title and tagline, custom headers and backgrounds, navigation placement, front page selection, and other options that vary by theme. It works with both free themes and premium themes. Shall we take a test drive?

Imagine you want to change themes. As you are browsing on the Themes screen, notice the new “Live Preview” link and click it.

You’re taken to the customizer. As you make changes, the preview in the right-hand part of the screen updates live so you can get things just right.

When things look the way you want them, click the Save & Activate button in the lower left (or Save & Purchase if it is a premium theme) and boom, your new theme and custom settings are live!

You can also use the live preview feature to customize your existing theme. On the themes screen in your dashboard, you’ll now see a “Customize” button that launches the previewer.

And don’t worry, you still have access to the regular screens for adjusting these and other features. Just use the navigation for the Appearance section like you always have.

So, please try it out, and let us know what you think in the comments! I hope you like  it as much as we do. If you hit any snags, let us know in the forums so that we can help.

But wait, there’s more!

Yes, more! Here are a couple of smaller additions also aimed at making it easier to customize your site and make it look just the way you want it.

• When choosing a custom header image, you can now choose from your Media Library. I looove this, because I have uploaded the same header image at least a dozen times to re-use it when I changed themes.
• For themes that support it, custom headers now have a recommended size rather than a fixed required size, so you can be flexible with the height and width of your header images. I love this too, because sometimes I really like a theme but the header image I want to use is taller or shorter than the theme design allows. Now, the power is in your hands to decide! The goal is for as many themes as possible on WordPress.com to support this feature, but you can see if we’ve added it to yours yet by checking the list of supported themes.

And one last thing…
If you know HTML, you can now add links and a little bit of formatting to your image captions. This is great for people who want to link a photo credit to the photographer’s blog or to a Creative Commons license, or want to make some text bold or italicized. At some point in the future we may add a WYSIWYG option, but for now you’ll just need to learn some basic HTML tags if you want to use this one. Just type the HTML right into the caption field in the image uploader, and your links will appear like magic. So this:

becomes this:

You can adopt adorable kittens at your local Humane Society.
Make a new friend and save a life today!
Photo by Jane Wells, saver of kittens

I’ve been wanting this feature for four years now, so I’m really excited.

Have fun with these new features!

*Fun Fact: While this feature was in development, it was originally conceived as a wizard, or guided walkthrough. We codenamed it Gandalf.

There’s something about this time of year that always makes me wistful for the good old days—the simpler times, if you will—when all that mattered were family, friends, and a whole lotta blogging about everything under the sun. I miss those days, don’t you?

Fear not, my fellow blogging friends. We’ve got you all covered today with a theme that will make you want to stop time and write about everything in your lives until you can’t write anymore.

A Simpler Time, designed by Denise Chandler, is a theme that’s beautiful, bold, and memorable—pretty much exactly like the types of stories you’ll be writing alongside it on your WordPress.com blog:

A Simpler Time: Single Post

It’s a traditional blog theme in the sense that it offers everything you’ve come to expect from a WordPress theme—widgets, custom menus, and custom headers, and more—and it also looks incredible. If you’d also like to mix it up with different colors and fonts, try the Custom Design upgrade. You can do all of that and more.

A Simpler Time is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

It’s now much easier for you and your commenters to keep track of the conversations you’re involved in across WordPress.com. Some recent tests have shown that by subscribing commenters to new comments by default, they are more likely to stay engaged and come back and comment more on your blog. With that knowledge, we’ve changed the default comment following behavior to help you get more conversations going on your blog.

We made the initial changes last week and after great feedback from you we just launched an update. Here’s how it works:

• By default, posting a comment will now subscribe you to receive follow-up comments via email for that specific post, keeping you updated on the conversation. This is indicated by the checked box in the comment form.
• If you have a WordPress.com account, you now have a global setting to change this so that by default you will not be subscribed. If you don’t have an account, then you can create one over here.
  
• If you don’t want email notifications for a thread, just uncheck the box when you post your comment. If you’ve disabled the feature, you can also subscribe to a specific thread by checking the box in the comment form.
  
• There is also a link at the bottom of every notification email that will allow you to change your subscription options.
  

If you’d like to find out all of the details about how this works, we’ve also updated our support documentation about following comments.

We’ve added a user showcase where you can view stunning customizations made by people just like you. From complete redesigns with CSS to adding pizzazz with Custom Fonts to clever use of options like background and header, this showcase will spark your imagination and inspire creativity.

Discover details about what each showcase blog is doing with WordPress.com themes and customizations by clicking a thumbnail to see a colophon-style list of credits on the left.

We’ve also updated footer links so blog owners can show off the types of customizations they’ve made and visitors can learn more by clicking the “Customized” link in WordPress.com footers. A “Customized” link will appear next to the theme name for blogs that are using Custom Design tools like fonts or CSS.

Things we like to see when looking for showcase-worthy customizations are blogs with good traffic, beautiful design, well-written articles or stunning images, recent content updates, and involvement helping out in our CSS Customization forum.

Be inspired, customize your blog and make it that perfect place for your creations.

Are you curious to see how your friends are using WordPress? Give the new and improved Friend Finder a try to connect with your Twitter, Facebook, and Google contacts who have WordPress sites!

After authorizing WordPress.com to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account to find your friends (don’t worry — none of this account information is saved!) you’ll see a list of people you know who have WordPress sites.

Click Follow and each time your friend publishes a new post it will show up in your Reader under Blogs I Follow.

If you have multiple blogs, make sure to set the Primary Blog in your Settings so the correct blog is shown to friends when they find you.

If you’re interested in finding more cool blogs to follow, browse our collection of Recommended Blogs and try adding some topics to follow in your reader using the box in the bottom left.

In our quest to help you find the perfect look for your blog, we’ve added two brand new themes to our collection!

First up is Everyday, a beautifully designed premium theme by James Goode.

Everyday has been precisely calibrated to be pleasurably readable on almost any screen. Attention and care has especially been given to provide a robust and versatile layout to suit your writing needs. From short quips to lengthier bits of prose, Everyday will rise to the challenge and shine with every post you publish. Read more about it in the Theme Showcase or take it for a test spin in the demo site.

Next is a wonderful free theme named Origin by Galin Simeonov.

Origin is a light, elegant theme with a minimalist look and feel, perfect for a blog or journal. Your photos are the focus thanks to featured images and stylized Sticky posts, and the responsive design makes it a great fit for mobile devices and small screen sizes. A full list of features is available in the Theme Showcase and a demo site has been set up so that you can see it in action.

Back in 2010 we introduced the exciting new ability to Like the individual posts you’ve read all around WordPress.com. It’s been one of our most popular features since then, as evidenced by the chart below that goes up-and-to-the-right as an indication of great success and achievement.

Likes per week since the beginning

Today I’m happy to announce a few enhancements to the way Likes work that we think you’ll really like.

Show Likes on Pages

In the past, we’ve always restricted Likes to individual blog posts. Given the success of Likes, we want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to Like what they are reading, wherever they are reading it. Likes now share the same display settings as your sharing buttons (which you can change from Settings -> Sharing in your dashboard). In addition to showing Likes on single posts, you can now show Likes on all of your site’s content:

Here’s an example of Likes displayed on a blog’s front page:

Do you like naps and puppies? I think I do!

Show Likes on Gallery Images

In addition to making Liking posts easier, we wanted everyone to be able to Like all of the things you publish on your blog, including media. So, we’ve also added the ability to Like photos directly from inside image galleries, like this:

Who can resist liking Paul the Puppy?

What You’ve Liked

Now that it’s super easy to Like everything you see, you need a place to see what you’ve Liked. To make this as convenient as possible, we’ve added a link in the Reader that lists all of the posts you’ve liked across all of WordPress.com. You also have instant access to your favorite posts through the official mobile WordPress apps for all your favorite mobile gadgets.

We think these tweaks really improve the Liking experience, and we hope that you enjoy them!

Did you think I was going to say “like” again? :)

We’re happy to announce three new things that you can embed into your site!

Spotify

Embed music from Spotify by right-clicking any song, album, or artist in Spotify and selecting “Copy HTTP Link” or “Copy Spotify URI”:

Then paste that into your post editor, making sure that it’s located on its own line all by itself. You’ll end up with something like this when you view your post:

Rdio

If you’re an Rdio user, you can embed music from them too. Copy the URL from your address bar when looking at a track, artist, or playlist and paste that into your post editor. Here are a few examples:

If you use the Mac application for Rdio you can copy URLs from there as well. If you click the “Share” button you’ll see a URL to copy right at the top. Paste that in to your post editor and you’re all set.

GitHub’s Gist

We’re big fans of the code repository website GitHub here at Automattic and many of us use their Gist code snippets website. While we already have a cool way to embed code into your site, we realize many of you want to post Gist-hosted snippets too so starting today you can. Again, just copy/paste the URL out of your address bar onto it’s own line in the post editor.

This is a guest post by Kristina Chang, Evan Moore, Tony Xu, and Omer Rabin; students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we’ve been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of almost 100,000 blogs to perform a regression analysis. Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations. We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggests that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow – It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post, or see your post in their reader, there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Comments, Comments, Comments – The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; holding all else equal, every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: ”have you ever done X?”; “do you think Y is acceptable?”. You can read some more thoughts on building a relationship with your audience in this post.

Post Frequently and Regularly – Your readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals. (The Daily Post can help with ideas for this.)

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook (using Publicize), for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!