WP.com now accepts Bitcoin! This is pretty rad, actually.

Andy Skelton's avatarWordPress.com News

At WordPress.com, our mission is making publishing democratic — accessible and easy for anyone, anywhere. And while anyone can start a free blog here, not everyone can access upgrades (like going ad-free or enabling custom design) because of limits on traditional payment networks.

Today, that changes: you can now buy WordPress.com upgrades with bitcoins.

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that enables instant payments over the internet. Unlike credit cards and PayPal, Bitcoin has no central authority and…

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Your actual home’s home away from home.

Christopher Finke's avatarWordPress.com News

City administrators: Don’t spend thousands of dollars on a proprietary system for your city’s website. We’ve launched WordPress.com/cities as the go-to place to start a site for your city or other municipal body, and there’s no charge to get started. (“Free” is a price that will get every taxpayer on board, and since WordPress.com has been approved as a hosting site for federal government agencies, you can be sure we take security seriously.)

To supplement the impressive stable of existing WordPress.com features like custom domains (i.e., a .gov or .com of your choosing), we’ve added a couple of new ones to help you build the best site you can for residents and visitors alike:

Starter Content

When you sign up, we automatically create the pages most commonly needed on city websites, such as Parks & Recreation, City Hall, and Law Enforcement, and add them to your site’s…

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More fine work form my WordPress amigos–it’s like strapping *two* jetpacks to your blog!

Matt's avatarJetpack

The past nine releases of Jetpack have started to reveal our vision for next-generation features that will boost WordPress’ incredible success by making it more social, more connected, more mobile, and more customizable.

Over three million downloads later, we’re excited to report that the community has embraced this seemingly impossible vision for combining the best of hosted and non-hosted WordPress. This tenth release brings some of the most-asked-for features into the hands of millions of Jetpackers.

Publicize to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr…

You no longer have to jump through hoops and developer portals to connect your blog to your friends on your favorite social networks. Through Jetpack and your WordPress.com account, you can connect to each network with just a few clicks and broadcast to your audiences and followers across several networks, making WordPress your true digital hub. Activate Publicize from the main Jetpack page in your dashboard, then go…

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BottleMark: Bierkast and LA Ale Works

Some folks love beer so much, they can’t have just one cool beer project—they need two. Such is the story of Kip Barnes, a founding member of both Bierkast and L.A. Aleworks.

Bierkast began as a group of beer lovers and exploded into a blog of tremendous energy. It’s the kind of site that puts 99.9% of bloggers to shame—yours truly not withstanding. While it chiefly spotlights personalities and events in the Los Angeles beer world, Bierkast offers its readers much more than that. It’s slick, it’s entertaining, it’s wide-ranging, it’s personal. It’s passion on a webpage.

via BottleMark: Bierkast and LA Ale Works.

Nice shout-out on the BottleMark Blog (needs more WP) for my friends John and Kip for Bierkast (where I sometimes contribute) and Los Angeles Ale Works. Incidentally, my wife designed both of those sites!