I decided to try it out again now that it hit the big two-point-oh, and was surprised now only by the amount of functionality it offers, but by how many other plugins it can conceivably replace. The Publicize module, for instance, will automatically post links to new posts on Twitter, Facebook and other popular social networks, so you don’t need another plugin for that if you run Jetpack. I also found the Mobile Push Notifications and JSON API modules to be intriguing. The former sends push notifications to your iPhone/iPad when new comments are posted, and lets you jump right over to the WordPress iOS app to manage them, and the latter is primarily of interest to developers looking to integrate a WordPress blog into another web site or application. (Previously I used this plugin, but Jetpack looks roughly equivalent.)

The big new feature in this version is a free service called Photon, an “image acceleration and editing service” which acts as a CDN for your images. It mirrors images it finds in your posts (or ones a theme or plugin developer specifies via an API) on WordPress.com’s servers, which enables them to be served faster and takes load off your server. This would be excellent for blogs hosted on cheap shared hosting, especially if coupled with a static caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

This means that the “WordPress” trademark should theoretically remain separate from the business interests of Automattic. Hopefully the Foundation will refrain from the overprotective practices many businesses and nonprofits practice.

There are several services that can generate thumbnails like that, but most of them place watermarks on the images or place limits on how many API calls you can make in a month. (Amazon used to offer a paid service, but it was discontinued a year or two ago.)

To my surprise, when I was submitting an article to WPVote recently, I found that the thumbnails were served up by a subdomain of WordPress.com. I thought something along the lines of “Eh? I didn’t know they offered a screenshot service…” and continued about my business.

A couple days later, I spotted Ben’s blog post in my feed reader. In it he explained how he discovered a dynamic URL that Automattic uses, in places like the WordPress.org commercial themes page, to display thumbnails. He posted an email to Matt Mullenweg about it and got this as a response:

You can use it and link to it, but it’s not official. It’s not worth the effort to try to make it into a business – we have to support it anyway for our own apps.

Sounds good to me. Obviously it wouldn’t be nice to use it for something huge and high-traffic, but it seems like they don’t object to us smaller WordPress fanatics making use of it.

http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fprothemedesign.com%2F?w=250

There’s now a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to use the thumbnails in blog posts, with a shortcode, or elsewhere with a template tag.