Neil Leifer on WordPress.com VIP

You may not recognize the name, but you’ve seen his photos.

Neil Leifer, iconic staff photographer for Sports Illustrated, Time, and LIFE magazines (and one of Matt’s favourite photographers), now has a beautiful new home on WordPress.com VIP.

Here’s a snippet from Neil’s bio:

Leifer eventually became a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated before leaving in 1978 to become a staffer for Time magazine. In 1988 he was made a contributing photographer at LIFE magazine and spent the next two years dividing his time between Time and LIFE. When Leifer left Time Inc. in 1990, his photographs had appeared on over 200 Sports Illustrated, Time, and People covers—at that point, the most ever published of one photographer’s work in Time Inc. history.

Want to see his most memorable photos? Head on over to http://neilleifer.com.

New Liveblog Features: Editing Posts, “Smart” Updates

Have you seen our liveblog premium add-on? Since we launched it in September, we’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback.

A quick re-introduction: the liveblog plugin allows you to quickly update a post on the fly from the front-end of your website. It’s super simple, no outside embeds necessary. You can even drag-and-drop in photos, and embed tweets by pasting in the tweet URL. Take a look at our full documentation of liveblog features.

The WordPress.com VIP Liveblog Add-On

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Below are the new features we’ve added this week. Download the liveblog plugin here.

Edit Previous Liveblog Posts

The ability to edit posts was the most-requested feature from VIPs. We’re happy to announce that this feature has been added. To edit a previous post, all you need to do is scroll back in time, click “edit” on a post, and you’ll be able to rewrite history.

“Smart” Updates

This feature makes it easy for your readers to enjoy your liveblog without being overwhelmed with updates.

If the reader’s browser is sitting at the top of the post, new updates will automatically appear, highlighted in yellow.

However, if your reader has scrolled down the post to catch up on previous updates, liveblog will wait to update with new posts. Instead, a notification bar will appear at the top of the screen. When the reader clicks on the bar, the new updates will resume loading at the top of the page.

Post times are also now relative, which means it will display as “2 minutes ago,” with the time updating every minute.

Archive Liveblog Posts

Once the event has wrapped up, you can archive your liveblog. This means that visitors will still be able to see the blog, but the editing tools will go away and the post will stop polling for updates.

You can archive and re-enable a liveblog from the Edit Post page.

When a liveblog is archived, your editors will see a notification that says the liveblog must be enabled to accept new posts.

We’ve loved watching our VIPs use the liveblog premium add-on. National Post used it to cover Lance Armstrong’s interview last night, and TVLine used it for the Golden Globes on Sunday. Big Ten Network liveblogs games every Wednesday, and Time.com has used it to cover high traffic events like the iPhone 5 announcement.

Special thanks to Matt and Zack at GigaOM for their help with the smart updates feature, and everyone else that has submitted bugs and feedback. You can see GigaOM’s use of the liveblog with the recent Facebook event.

For VIP SaaS Hosting clients, the Liveblog Premium Add-On is $500 USD per month, with an annual subscription. This includes unlimited liveblogs, and an unlimited number of users visiting, viewing, and receiving updates — all powered by our massive WordPress.com cloud infrastructure.

If you’re interested in giving the liveblog a try, please get in touch!

Easier Twitter Embeds with WordPress.com

Did you know that you can embed tweets into your WordPress.com posts by simply pasting in the tweet URL on its own line?

That’s all there is to it. The content of the tweet will magically appear in your post, complete with the avatar, clickable links, and the date.

Photo Blogging 101: Build your photographic following. wp.me/pf2B5-2Ng—
WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) May 21, 2012

 

You can do the same thing when embedding YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Hulu clips, and Spotify songs.

No more screenshots or messy embed codes. Easy peasy.

A New Plugin Directory with New and Updated Plugins

It’s a new year, and we have a new VIP Plugin Directory for you to explore. Because we know you’re busy, here’s a curated list of new and updated plugins for you to check out.

Column Shortcodes

Sometimes you just need to divide your page into different columns. With this plugin, you simply select a column shortcode and it will add the column to the page.

Document Feedback

Document Feedback helps close the loop between documentation writers and readers by appending a simple feedback form to Pages (or other post types that you specify). Readers are asked whether the document answered their question or not.

Taxonomy List Widget

This plugin creates a list (bulleted, number, or custom) of non-hierarchical taxonomies as an alternative to the tag cloud. Numerous formatting options are provided, including maximum numbers of terms, term order, truncating of term names, and more. List styles are fully customizable, with built-in support for bulleted lists and numbered lists.

NBCS Advanced Blacklist

Handmade by the VIP Community! By NBC Sports

This plugin adds two new blacklists to WordPress’s blacklist feature: one which blacklists only complete words in comment content, and another which will be checked only against usernames, e-mail addresses, user sites, and IP addresses (but not comment content). In addition, the plugin features a user-friendly interface allowing administrators to see exactly what effect each blacklist would have if a given term were added to it.

Updated Plugins:

• SEO Auto Linker helps you automatically add links into your content. The latest updates include support for nofollowing links, the option to use unicode word boundaries, and a few bug and performance updates.
• WP Help allows site operators to make documentation for the site’s authors and editors, viewable in the WordPress admin. The latest update includes drag-and-drop reordering of the documents list.
• Safe Redirect Manager lets you safely and easily manage your website’s HTTP redirects. The latest updates include the ability to bulk delete redirects from the manage redirects screen, and wp-cli coverage including subcommands for creating, deleting, and listing redirects, and importing .htaccess files.
• EditFlow introduces editorial team collaboration tools to WordPress. The latest update includes “scheduled” as a status you can see in “Posts At a Glance,” and a few bug fixes.
• Co-Authors Plus assigns multiple bylines to WordPress content. The latest update allows you to add your own columns to the guest authors table, and includes a few bug fixes.
• Ad Code Manager allows you to manage ad codes through the WordPress admin in a safe and easy way. The latest update allows you to set operator logic for conditionals on a code by code basis.
• Add Meta Tags automatically adds HTML meta tags to your site. The latest update added compatibility support for Yoast meta keys, Google News support (contributed by VIP Metro UK), and new filters (contributed by VIP BGR).
• Uppsite helps convert your website into an application for smartphones with just one click of a button. The latest updates include improved support for galleries, media, and other customization options.

Only 5% Of Publishers Use The Google News Keywords Meta Tag

Danny Sullivan reports on Search Engine Land that only 5% of news publishers are using the Google News Keywords tag, which Google introduced back in September—are you one of them? If not, it may interest you to know that WordPress.com VIP comes with support for the news_keywords tag built-in, via the Add Meta Tags plugin available from your WordPress dashboard.

Google introduced the new tag a few months ago to help publishers make their content more easily discoverable, without having to modify their headlines to inject keywords:

The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.

Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text. News keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood.

Head over to VIP -> Plugins & Services from within your WordPress dashboard to activate the Add Meta Tags plugin and the Google News meta tag on your site—happy SEO’ing!

And thanks to our friends at Metro.co.uk who added the support for news_keywords to Add Meta Tags!

Getty Images launches blog on WordPress

Famous stock photography agency, Getty Images, has launched its blog on WordPress! The design of course displays the beautiful photos Getty has in its collection to their best advantage and the site highlights content aimed at the Getty Images communities around photography, technology, and music.

Visit the Getty Images blog.

Are you an agency or publisher using WordPress? We want to hear from you.

Want WordPress for your site? Get in touch.

Liveblog 1.2: Compatibility with WordPress 3.5, bug fixes, and more

We pushed a new version of the Liveblog plugin this week. Liveblog 1.2 includes some compatibility updates for WordPress 3.5 and various feature enhancements and  bug fixes.

• Introduce many new hooks and filters, which help customization without changing the plugin code.
• Allow shortcodes and OEmbed in liveblog entries.
• Fix JavaScript errors on IE8, props @pippercameron.
• Fix issues with entry preview.
• Compatibility with plupload 1.5.4, props @borkweb.
• Translations:
  • Spanish by @elarequi
  • Dutch by @defries
  • Catalan by @gasparappa
  • German by @cfoellmann

Download the update from the WordPress.org plugin repository or send get involved in the development on Github.