You can now send your WordPress.com posts to Facebook.

Joining our Yahoo and Twitter features is the latest in WordPress.com’s Publicize family: Facebook.

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Facebook account.

These connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Facebook accounts separately.

More details can be found on the Publicize support page.

Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

We’re often asked when we plan to make our intelligent proofreading technology available for more languages.

We’ve been hard at work and today we’re announcing After the Deadline proofreading for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

These languages feature After the Deadline’s smart contextual spell checking. We’re also using a great open source project called Language Tool to check French and German grammar.

If you’re on WordPress.com and your blog language is set to French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish–you’re ready to use our multi-lingual proofreader.

Click in the visual editor or in the HTML Editor.

We realize many of you blog in multiple languages and we have not forgotten you. Visit your WordPress.com profile page and select Use automatically detected language to proofread posts and pages.

With this option enabled, our proofreader will guess the language of your blog post and apply the correct proofreading technology for that language.

The WordPress.com Proofreading technology is available as the After the Deadline plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Enjoy.

Here at WordPress.com we like to keep stats on the various features and resources available to our users. So as part of the release for rssCloud on WordPress.com I added internal stats to see how it was being used. It tracks things like the number of subscription requests and the number of sent notifications (pings) that get processed each day.

That’s where the numbers for my rssCloud Update post came from. It’s been three months since that post so I took another look at the numbers to see how things were going. The first thing I looked at was the number of subscription requests per day. I was a bit surprised by what I saw:

Turned out we’d had a bit of a spike

Things were pretty consistent before that spike, getting between 160,000 and 200,000 subscription requests per day. Then, for a few days towards the end of January, subscriptions really started coming in. At the very tip of that peak there were 1,548,657 subscription requests in a single day. And as quickly as they came, they went, dropping to a daily average below what we were seeing before. Then this week we saw another (much smaller) spike back up to 359,759 requests in a single day.

Now I was curious, what did the numbers look like for pings sent out? Turns out there was a spike there as well, though not nearly as big:

The daily numbers were again pretty consistent, between 65,000 and 110,00 pings sent per day, with the weekends being on the lower end of the scale. Then, on the same day where the number of subscription requests had peaked we saw a spike in pings sent out; 143,769 (the red arrow). And just like the subscription numbers, after the spike the daily averages fell below their earlier norms. And then another peak this week. This time though the second peak was even higher, at 146,809 pings sent out in a single day.

The reach of rssCloud has been growing too. Back in November there were 135,000 WordPress.com blogs with at least one rssCloud subscriber. Today there are 237,420.

Makes me wonder what the next three months will bring.

February has been a great month for mobile blogging on WordPress.com. In just the past week, WordPress apps for Android and BlackBerry made their official debuts, and the iPhone app reached version 2.2. No other blogging service has this kind of app support across these three smartphone platforms — we checked!

Power and control, on the go

While each of these mobile apps is unique, they share a common design philosophy: to give you the ability to easily update and manage your blog from an optimized smartphone user interface. You can easily create new posts, add media, manage comments, and more. There are small tweaks and differences, but the other thing that is shared is the developers are constantly improving the apps based on your feedback, just like we do here on WordPress.com.

100% free and open source

Each app is released free of charge, and the code is open source. The teams welcome suggestions for new features and even code contributions. One of the coolest things about open source development is community involvement. It makes the code better, and it makes the apps rock.

Developers can get involved here:
Android | BlackBerry | iPhone

If you’d like to give feature suggestions, do it here:
Android | BlackBerry | iPhone

Language support

WordPress.com users come from all over the world. The mobile apps here are available in multiple languages but need volunteers to enable even more people to use them. If you’re interested in helping localize these mobile apps, you can get involved here:
GlotPress

Works with WordPress.org blogs

Each of these mobile apps also lets you publish to and manage your self-hosted WordPress.org blogs.

Now with video

VideoPress is now supported in the WordPress for BlackBerry app, and is coming soon for iPhone and Android.

One more thing

We are very excited to share with all of you that in the coming weeks we’ll be opening up a beta test for the official Open Source WordPress for Nokia app. For developers who are interested in getting involved, we just opened-up a dev blog with details, links to the source code and trac tickets, and an early alpha build. We’ll be leveraging the Qt framework which means will be able to support both the S60 and Maemo platforms.

Blog on!

What are you waiting for? Download WordPress for your favorite mobile device and get blogging on WordPress.com.