Engineering Happiness in Brazil: WordCamp Rio de Janeiro and beyond

Karen Arnold and Erica Varlese work on the Happiness Hiring team at Automattic, where they hire new Happiness Engineers who support users on WordPress.com and Automattic products. They met with the Brazilian WordPress community last week and wanted to share their experiences.

On August 29th, 2015, we traveled to Brazil to attend WordCamp Rio de Janeiro and meet the Brazilian WordPress community. At Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, we’re working on localizing our support to those who speak Brazilian Portuguese. Since both of us are part of our Happiness Hiring team, which focuses on hiring new support engineers, or “Happiness Engineers,” we decided to travel to the WordPress community in Brazil to share our new Happiness Engineer (BR-PT) role and talk about our experience with support.

Jetpack booth

At WordCamp Rio de Janeiro, we gave a talk on “Engineering happiness: bridging the gap between developers and customers.” Our talk, which will be translated to include subtitles, focused on tips and tricks from our experience on how to get into the right support mindset and how to use support to create loyal customers. The audience was wonderfully responsive and we had the opportunity to chat with many WordCamp attendees about their thoughts on support, Happiness Engineering, and how education is a part of their day-to-day work with WordPress.

We weren’t the only Automatticians at WordCamp Rio. Miguel Lezama joined us to talk about Jetpack, and the recently launched br.jetpack.me, at our booth. Additionally, Claudio Sanches, from the WooThemes team, was part of a panel on “Mercado de Trabalho do WordPress — Brasil e Mundo.”

Claudio’s panel

After the WordCamp, we got the chance to cowork at a startup incubator, Espaço NAVE, which is part of Universidade Estácio de Sá. Here, students compete to share their startup and product ideas over the course of a semester. We gave our talk to the community at Espaço NAVE, focusing on the importance of support for all products and companies, not just WordPress.

Espaço NAVE

Later in the week, we traveled to São Paulo to meet with the local tech community, including Marco Gomes, the founder of boo-box, and WordPress community members. At the São Paulo WordPress meetup, we saw the incredible community dynamic in action as members shared thoughts and ideas on new topics and talks to cover throughout the year. Anyssa Feirerra gave an excellent talk on women working with WordPress in the Brazilian community before allowing us to take the stage to chat about support and localization.

Our trip to Brazil was packed with tons of productive and fascinating conversations. We were welcomed by an incredibly warm and dynamic community. We’re excited to see the ongoing results of our conversations around localized support, women and children in WordPress, and the WordPress community in South America as a whole.

Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese and English and love supporting users? If so, you might be a great fit for our Happiness Engineer (BR-PT) role. We’re also hiring dozens of other roles globally! Join our team!

On the Run: Blogging the European Refugee Crisis

People all over the world were horrified last week when they saw the picture of a dead Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, being picked up from the beach in Turkey. His family’s attempt to escape the brutal civil war in their country had ended in tragedy.

From Calais to Kos to Lampedusa, the blogging community has been following the refugee crisis in Europe — as well as the conflicts that feed it — as it rapidly escalated over the past two years, and especially this past summer. Here are some of the most powerful voices we’ve come across weighing in on this massive humanitarian disaster.

“A Letter from One Mother to Another“

In a post full of tragic irony, a writer contrasts the plight of a refugee mother with the sanctimonious complaints of a mother who’s safe at home with her kids:

Dear Irresponsible Migrant Mother,

What exactly were you thinking when you woke your children in the dead of the night, picking up the baby still asleep? Don’t you know how important it is for children to get enough sleep?

[…]

That baby you’re holding needs to be warm and comfortable, cocooned and safe, like a tiny bud, waiting to bloom in the morning. Those toddlers won’t be able to walk the miles you want them to in the black night in worn out shoes without a good night’s sleep.

“A Dispatch from a Syrian Refugee Camp“

Lionel Beehner visited the Zaatari refugee camp, in Jordan, back in 2013. He described the chaotic scene he’d encountered there in vivid detail, and his dispatch is even more haunting today, seeing that the plight of Syrian refugees has grown dramatically worse in the past two years.

Photo by Lionel Beehner.

“Heading Off into the Refugee Tragedy in the Med“

Ali Criado-Perez is a registered nurse who has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders since 2007. She recently took off for a rescue mission in Malta, one of the Mediterranean islands that sees the highest numbers of refugee boats off its shores. Here are some of her words on the eve of her departure:

I don’t know exactly what lies ahead of me. I hope I’m prepared, physically and mentally, for this trip. I’ve done a fairly arduous sea-safety training, which entailed me leaping from a height into water, dressed in a survival suit, and clambering into a wobbly life-raft. But I don’t think anything — not even seeing people dying miserably from Ebola — can prepare one for finding 52 people dead in the hold from asphyxiation, as my colleagues did recently.

Quartz: Borders

Quartz, an online business magazine, has put the spotlight on the refugee crisis in its Borders “Obsession” (a collection of related stories). It’s a place where interested readers can find the latest coverage of the news, including some of the more offbeat stories that might get buried in more traditional media outlets — like this one, on an Egyptian billionaire who proposed to buy a Mediterranean island on which to welcome refugees.

Writers for Calais Refugees

Moved by horrific scenes of chaos and dispair in the French coastal town of Calais — a gateway to Britain — a group of writers joined forces to share their poems in solidarity with asylum seekers. Here is an excerpt from Nina Simon’s poem, “Refuge”:

On an airless summer evening
I sit in the garden
remembering how
we came with nothing
but the clothes we wore

to an unfamiliar address
scrawled on well-thumbed paper
dreaming of safety,
a city paved in freedom.

“On Encouragement“

When you talk about “encouraging more of them to come”, you have no idea what you are talking about.

In Sweden, British expat Helen Jones makes the case for the #refugeeswelcome movement, calling on Europeans to educate themselves on the causes behind the influx of refugees into the continent, and to find practical solutions to lessen the suffering of those who keep arriving.

Calais Migrant Solidarity

Makeshift refugee housing in Calais, 2014 (Photo by Gustav Pursche / Calais Migrant Solidarity)

This site is run by activists who support the cause of refugees in Calais. It’s used, among other things, to document the hardships suffered by those still stuck in the no man’s land that the city’s refugee camps have become, including their mistreatment by local officials and police.

“Calais: In the Warm Embrace“

Europe is itself made of transplants, migrants, and refugees — this is a point powerfully made by scholar and writer Claire Squires in her essay, where she recounts the history of her family (her mother’s side had settled in France to escape political turmoil in Algeria), as well as her childhood memories from visits to Calais, currently one of the epicenters of Europe’s refugee crisis.

“Escape to Freedom: Bringing a Syrian Family to Safety“

Russell Chapman, a freelance photographer and writer, recently helped a family of Syrian refugees to safety, accompanying them from Greece through Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary into Western Europe. Read his post for an unfiltered, ground-level account of the harrowing trip through Europe’s eastern refugee corridor.

If you’ve read a powerful take on the crisis by another blogger, please share it with us in a comment.

A Niche of Their Own: Five Sites to Check Out Today

The blogging community is huge and diverse, with thousands of smaller clusters of sites built around shared interests, causes, and passions. It might seem daunting at first — like walking into a party where everyone already seems to know each other — but there are a number of ways to ease your entry into the community, from participating in a blogging event (or even starting your own) to taking one of our free blogging courses.

As the bloggers we feature here demonstrate, there’s another way to find your place in the big, wide world of blogging: zoom in on one thing you enjoy doing, then do it consistently, and well. From parenting to cooking to illustration, these bloggers found their niche and their audience by developing a hook — something unique about their posts that makes you want to visit them again and again.

Zounds, Alack, and By My Troth

From “Act 1, Scene 14 — Othello in Five Easy Steps“

There are thousands of humor blogs out there, at least as many illustration blogs, and a respectable number of sites devoted to William Shakespeare’s work. Ben Sawyer, the illustrator behind Zounds, Alack, and By My Troth, made his witty web comic a cross of all three, distilling the Bard’s work — sonnets, scenes, entire plays — into well-executed, smart panels.

From Henri IV retold to the tune of Semisonic’s “Closing Time” to Othello explained in five easy steps, Sawyer’s comics (and commentary) make you look at Shakespeare’s corpus in a fresh way — not an easy feat when it comes to the most studied English-language author of all time.

Read an Interview

Every Monday, readers can expect a fresh, wide-ranging interview conducted by Johan, the blogger who runs Read an Interview.

The interviews span a wide range of topics, and feature an eclectic gallery of subjects — from a police canine trainer to a designer of figure skating costumes. Regardless of who he engages in conversation, Johan’s curiosity, patience, and respect for his interviewees is evident everywhere on his site.

Things We Like

Who doesn’t love lists? Author Jessica Gross came up with a neat idea: a site dedicated exclusively to lists of things people like (you can send her yours, too — she accepts submissions).

A list by blogger Lindsay James

Succinct and digestible, these lists, full of quirks and offbeat details, give a surprisingly good glimpse into each list maker’s psyche.

My Least Favorite Child Today

The web is full of wonderful parenting blogs, covering a wide spectrum of topics and writing styles. Stephen Hurley‘s dad blog, My Least Favorite Child Today, belongs firmly in the humorous end of that spectrum, with hilarious posts on the shenanigans of his young twin boys. (How hilarious? His irreverent post titles — like “He’s Not Teething. He’s Just An Asshole” or “Breaking: My Sons Have Perfect Weiners!!!” might give you a hint.)

Beyond the great writing, the blog also has a great hook: each post ends with a (mostly fabricated) rating of the twins, letting the readers track the always-changing state of Stephen’s affections. (If you care to know, Charles and Arthur are currently tied at 36 days each as least favorite child.)

Cooking in the Archives

If you’re a history buff, a baking fanatic, or any cross of the two, you’re bound to love Cooking in the Archives, a site where two literary scholars, Alyssa Connell and Marisa Nicosia, make their way through the outré (and often surprisingly appetizing) recipes found in early-modern cookbooks.

Eighteenth-century beer cakes, recreated.

Full of fascinating commentary, lovely images of old books, and honest reviews of the results of their cooking, Marisa and Alyssa’s site is a niche blog that appeals both to fellow ancient-cookery geeks and to the wide, uninitiated public (so much so that it’s been featured on CNN, the Washington Post, and elsewhere).

Does your blog have a unique hook? Let us know in the comments.

New Themes: Colinear and Franklin

On this Theme Thursday, we have two new free themes for you: Colinear and Franklin.

Colinear

Colinear — our update to the older Coraline — is a squeaky-clean theme featuring a custom menu, header, background, and layout. Colinear supports featured images and six widget areas — up to three the sidebar and three in the footer.

Primarily designed for magazine-style sites, Colinear is a flexible theme that also suits any personal blog or content-rich site.

Check out Colinear on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site.

Franklin

Franklin is a lightweight blogging theme, designed by Michael Burrows.

A flexible combination of elegance and readability is evident in Franklin’s design, which can be extended by adding widgets to the sidebar and footer widget areas.

Check out Franklin on the Theme Showcase, or give it a spin on your site.

Introducing: Our New Action Bar

We strive to make all aspects of using WordPress.com streamlined and intuitive, from following a great new blog to editing a post on the go. Today, we’re happy to present the new action bar, which allows you to do all this (and more) no matter what device you’re on.

Following and more

When you visit a site you’re not yet following, look to the bottom-right corner of the screen and you’ll see this:

Clicking on Follow will make it so new posts from that site will appear in the WordPress.com Reader. Becoming a new follower has never been easier, whether you or your visitors enjoy reading posts on a desktop computer, laptop, phone, or any other device.

Click on the three dots and you’ll see more options. If you like the theme you’re seeing, you can now get it for yourself. Feel like sharing a particularly moving post? Get the shortlink and spread the word.

Make changes to your own site

When you’re on any page of a site you manage, you’ll have the option to customize your site. If you’re visiting one of your published posts or pages, you can also opt to edit the content you’re currently viewing.

Clicking on Customize will take you to the Customizer, where you can tweak your site’s appearance, change themes, modify theme settings, and more. Select Edit, and you can quickly make any changes you wish to your content from adding another image to fixing a typo.

Here, too, clicking on the three dots will expand the menu to reveal the same extra options, like getting a shortlink or managing the sites you follow.

Good to know…

The new action bar will follow you from your desktop to your tablet to your smartphone — all of these options are available regardless of the screen size you’re working with. We also know that some of you prefer as clean a slate as possible, so you can minimize the action bar at any time by clicking on the three dots and selecting Collapse this bar. (You can always change your mind and expand it later.)

We hope you enjoy the new action bar!

We love that you’re passionate about WordPress.com iterations, and most importantly, that you share that passion with us. If you’ve got feedback, we’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to share it with us in our support forum.

Get Up to Speed at learn.wordpress.com

If you just started a spandy new WordPress blog or site and want to work on setup and configuration in your spare time, we’ve recently refreshed a resource that might be just the thing for you: learn.wordpress.com.

Have you just created a blog or website to:

• Showcase a personal project? Maybe you’re working on a photo-a-day project, some short stories, poetry, or a memoir?
• Highlight your business’ offerings and attract new customers?
• Promote an organization and want to know how to get connected to potential supporters on social media?

No matter the reason you created that new site, learn.wordpress.com is standing by. Here’s a bit of what’s on offer to help you create a site that is uniquely you.

Get Started: passwords and profiles

Regardless of whether you’ve got a blog or website, you’ll want to have a strong password and complete your online profile. Get Started, in addition to telling you a bit about our paid plans, will walk you through both.

Get Personality: picking a theme

You want your online home to reflect your personality or in the case of a business or organization, its brand. WordPress.com has over 350 themes (some paid and some free). In Get Personality, you’ll learn how to search and filter themes based on their aesthetic qualities and features. You’ll also learn how to preview themes and activate the perfect one for your site.

Get Configured: headers, fonts, and colors

Once you’ve got a theme that’s “you,” you might want to make that theme unique by creating a custom header, revamping the color scheme, and choosing some custom fonts that add precisely the right touch. Get Configured will show you the ropes.

Get Flashy: the wonderful world of widgets

If you’re not sure what a widget is and what it can do for you, Get Flashy‘s got you covered. You’ll learn how widgets can enhance the form and function of your site, from allowing you to add custom touches such as your Twitter Timeline and the Facebook Like Widget to photos and follow buttons.

Get Published: hello, world!

Post or page? Menus, oh my! Check out Get Published to learn how to create custom menus, the differences between posts and pages, and how to create and publish all three on your blog.

Get Connected: adding social media

When you publish a post on your site, you want your followers to know about it. In Get Connected, we’ll introduce you to Publicize. It allows you to broadcast your blog posts across Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Path, and LinkedIn — automatically. You’ll also learn about tagging your posts and how it can attract visitors from the WordPress.com Reader.

A checklist and glossary, to boot

Or, if this isn’t your first blog or website and you’d like a setup and configuration refresher, check out Get Going Fast: A Checklist. If a WordPress term has you scratching your head, check out our glossary.

Next Stop for Accelerate.LGBT: Dublin, Ireland

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is committed to diversity: providing a platform for everyone to publish on the web and building a diverse, distributed workforce around the world.

A collaborative effort between Accelerate with Google and Automattic, the Accelerate.LGBT conference series is designed to help diverse businesses and nonprofits optimize their web presence, empowering professionals through focused workshops and hands-on, one-on-one support from Automattic and Google employees. We held our first event in San Francisco this past April, which was a great success.

We’re excited to announce the next free Accelerate.LGBT event on September 17, 2015, in Dublin, Ireland. Here’s a sneak peek of the sessions for this afternoon event:

• Get found on Google Search and Maps
• Optimize your website for business
• Engage a younger audience with your brand
• Find the best talent for your organization — inside Google’s hiring secrets
• Unlock your organization’s online potential

If you live in Dublin or plan to be in the area at this time, make sure to join us, follow us, and interact with us (#AccelerateLGBT)!

If you’d like to attend, please register for the September 17 event.

If you’d like Accelerate.LGBT to visit your area, tweet us! We’re also taking a poll to help us decide where to host our next event. Vote now:

We’re proud to partner with Google to offer this Accelerate.LGBT series to help businesses and nonprofits get the most out of the tools available on the web. We hope to see you in September!

What a difference a header makes!

Our websites are our online homes. It makes sense that we want to give them personality and warmth, just like we do with our physical homes.

One of the simplest updates with the biggest impact is a custom header, a completely free feature that’s available to the majority of themes on WordPress.com. A header instantly sets your blog apart — and with free online photo and graphic editing tools, a custom look is accessible to any blogger, no graphic design experience needed.

Take a look at the world of possibilities with these ten blogs:

Text, taken up a notch

A custom header doesn’t require a beautiful photo or exquisite drawing skills. Fonts have personality; just ask the bloggers and writers behind Don’t think just eat, Ellie and Ace, and The Lovecraft eZine. Elegant, quirky, eerie — fonts can communicate all that, and more.

(Bonus points to The Lovecraft eZine for the supremely creepy but on-point use of tentacles as a custom background image.)

Thanks to nifty (and free!) online tools like Canva, a spunky custom text header is only a few minutes away. Our step-by-step tutorial walks you through the process, from figuring out what size your header needs to be, to picking out a font, to uploading your shiny new creation to your blog.

Piggyback on a photo

A photo is a simple way to add both context and color to a header, whether it’s a shot you’ve taken or a free-to-use image you love. Layer a title and tagline over the image, as Stacey Altamirano and Built in Dunedin have done, and you have a custom header that’s yours and only yours:

Canva can help here as well, as can other online tools like PicMonkey and free downloadable image-editing tools like GIMP.

Photos plus

If you spend a little more time tweaking a photo the possibilities open up even further, as Write Wrote Written and re-retro show us:

Use filters to age your photo and text, add cut-outs and other shapes, mix fonts — the photo and text are just the beginning. Interested? Take a look at our tutorial for creating a custom header with an image, and let your imagination run wild!

Graphics front and center

If you’re comfortable creating your own graphics (or have a friend who is), then the header world is truly your oyster. We love the hand-drawn font and bright flowers adorning The Haute Mommy Handbook:

Even if your artistic skills skew more “Stick Figure” than “Sandro Botticelli,” you can add life and quirk to your header, like Viaja el Mundo:

And if putting pen to paper is completely outside your comfort zone, maybe technology can help! Me and My Books created a word cloud to grace the top of her book blog:

Word clouds, maps, screenshots — stop and think about the world of graphic possibilities before you say “But I’m not creative/artistic/a designer!”

Tip: Once you’ve created your custom header, visit My Site → Customize to upload it to your blog. While you’re there, head to the “Site title and tagline” section to turn off the default site title, so you don’t display the title twice (and so nothing distracts from your new creation!).

Does your site need an injection of life, a distinguishing look, or a header that sets a mood? A custom header is one of the best tools in your design toolbox.

New Theme: Independent Publisher

On this Theme Thursday, we’re happy to announce the latest addition to our collection of free themes.

Independent Publisher

Independent Publisher is a clean and elegant theme by Raam Dev, with a clean and responsive layout ideal for personal bloggers and writers alike. Featuring clean and readable posts, the theme can be enhanced with Featured Images.

Your personal Gravatar can be used as your site logo, which gives your site a personal touch, and icons to your social accounts are displayed prominently. Independent Publisher also adapts to your device, providing a seamless experience at any screen size.

Get to know Independent Publisher in the Theme Showcase, or give it a spin by activating it from your dashboard.

Heather Matarazzo’s Personal Stories from Inside and Outside Hollywood

Actor Heather Matarazzo has only published a few posts on her new blog, but each one has stirred up an incredible response from inside and outside the WordPress.com community.

Her first essay in February, “What the F— Is F—able,” took direct aim at what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood — an industry she’s worked in since childhood, and as a teen starring in 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, which earned her critical acclaim. In her essay, Matarazzo reveals an industry ruled by sexism, and she talks about what it was like to be a teenager working in it while growing into her own self-confidence:

For me, I had to stop sitting shiva, remove the blanket from my mirror and look. I had to look at my gorgeous face, with my piercing blue eyes, my pouty lips, small chin, slightly crooked nose, full teeth and smile. I had to really look at myself and see my beauty, and once I could accept the harsh reality that I was indeed, not only f—able, but f—ing beautiful, everything started to change.

Following the community’s reaction to the post, Matarazzo confessed:

“Originally this piece was a lot angrier. I called people out, and it felt good, but then I realized that this is not the kind of person I desire to be. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently being angry. Theres a lot to be angry about, but sometimes it can cause one’s soul to atrophy into a dark mass of negativity, and that’s not what I want for myself. It’s hard to stay positive in this business — hell, its hard staying positive as a human being, with the state of the world right now — but I see that even after writing this, I feel more more hopeful, and I hope it brings the same to you.”

Matarazzo’s latest piece is a very personal childhood story about her quest to discover who her biological parents were, and how her mother reacted:

Back at home, my mother is leaning against the counter, arms crossed, staring at me. The ice out has begun. I stare back at her, my eyes inadvertently causing her head to look shrunken. I’m waiting for her to say something, anything, but she just continues to stare. Her eyes begin to well with tears as her head shakes in disappointment. When she finally does speak, she asks what she’s done wrong that would make me do something like that. She proceeds to tell me that I have everything, and keeps asking, “What did I do? Tell me.”

She also begins with an admission that will resonate with many writers and bloggers: the desire to be so personal in expressing herself, and the fear of doing so in public: “I have been hesitant to write anything about my life that is deeply personal, because that requires an incredible willingness on behalf of the writer to be vulnerable and honest.”

I spoke with Matarazzo via email about what led her to decide to start sharing these stories. “There wasn’t a specific moment where I decided to start a blog. I had been toying with the idea for awhile, and had no idea how to do it, or where to begin. I talked to a friend of mine (Lexi Alexander) who told me to just go for it. I also have to credit her for giving me the title and suggestion to write ‘What the F— is F—able?’

“I have been writing since I was a child. I make it a point to write every day. It’s not always personal, sometimes it’s a script or a play.”

As for the response to her stories, “I was overwhelmed.”

“In any kind of storytelling, whether it’s film, blog, or fictional narrative, what speaks most to me as an artist and human being is the relatedness of feelings,” she said. “For example, I’ve never been alone on a planet battling aliens, but I do relate with the characters feeling of aloneness, fear, etc. That’s what storytelling is all about. We are continually looking for ourselves in others (subconsciously or not), whether it’s on the screen, in a book or on a blog. And I firmly believe that we all have stories to tell along with experiences to share. That’s one of the ways that we create change. One story at a time.”

Follow her blog here.