Daily is a free, premium like, WordPress theme that comes with a beautiful design, many great features, and is perfect for daily bloggers. Desk is a very clean and functional theme based of a piece of paper lying on a desk.

Twitter introduced Blackbird Pie back in May of this year, providing the world with an easy way to embed fully functional tweets. Before Blackbird Pie’s introduction, the common way to embed tweets was to simply take a screenshot. Blackbird Pie not only easily embeds the tweet itself, but also leaves the profile link, @-mentions, hashtags, and other links in tact. Despite Blackbird Pie’s usefulness and firm roots in Twitter, it’s received little recognition over the past months. Blackbird Pie will be getting some well-deserved recognition now that it has been fully integrated with WordPress.com, and those of you with self-hosted WordPress blogs can join the party too with the Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin. What do you think of Blackbird Pie? Will you be making use of it on your blog?

New plugins Disable Admin Bar disables the admin bar that now appears on the public side of WordPress 3.1 (beta) blogs. Twitter Blackbird Pie allows you to add awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts just by adding simple shortcodes. WP Event Ticketing makes it easy to sell tickets to an event directly from your WordPress website. wpStoreCart is a free, open source, and full featured e-commerce platform built atop of WordPress. Updated plugins Easy FancyBox enables the FancyBox 1.3.3 jQuery extension on all image, SWF, YouTube and Vimeo links. jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images. WP SlimStat is a simple but powerful web analytics plugin for WordPress.

Development on WordPress 3.1 is well underway, and with the string freeze coming up on December 1st, some key new features are beginning to take shape. Earlier this week, Automattic code wrangler Stephane Daury published a revealing screenshot of the new internal linking feature, while WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith briefly discussed the new post formats feature. What do you think of the internal linking and post formats features thus far? Will you be trying the 3.1 beta when it’s released later this month?

Blue and White is a simple blue and white theme, suitable for any niche. Blue Taste is a blue, clean, fresh, stylish, fixed width, and two column theme. Feed Me, Seymour has dozens of possibilities when it comes to layout. One or two sidebars, multiple site widths, header logo and tons more.

Akismet was one of Automattic’s first projects, and after 5 years of sporting the same design, the entire site has received a major facelift. On first glance, the new site presents Akismet’s benefits in a much clearer way, and offers clearer distinction between the free and paid licenses. Fans of the old spam stats will probably notice that they are no longer featured on the front page, but fear not, they have just been moved to the About page. Akismet’s anti-spam offerings have continue to grow dramatically over the last 5 years. What began as a single WordPress plugin is now available in 24 plugins and 14 libraries. What do you think of Akismet’s redesign? Do you use Akismet on your blog? If not, how do you protect your blog from spam?

New plugins DynamicWP Fisheye Menu will build a Fisheye menu from a list of links. Expiring Content Shortcode provides a shortcode to wrap around content, setting a date and time for it to disappear. Updated plugins All in One Webmaster has options to add Google, Bing, Alexa, Blog Catalog, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code (meta tags). Facebook Members is a WordPress Social Plugin that enables Facebook Page owners to attract and gain Likes from their own website. FourSquare Integration allows you to view your last checkins as a list or on a Google map on Pages/Posts. TagSpace lets visitors browse your WordPress categories and tags by flying through them in 3D. Twitter Goodies shows your twitter profile/search tweets under your Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. WP Archive-Sitemap Generator generates simple Archives/Sitemaps based on your blog’s posts and pages. WP Google-Buzz automatically displays a Google Buzz button for every post […]

Just a few days ago, I was trying to decide what to do with my significantly neglected WordPress.com blog, and I decided that I was going to start a food blog “just like everyone else on WordPress.com.” Well, it looks like I wasn’t alone in that far-reaching generalization. Just in time for the food-filled fall and winter holidays, WordPress.com has launched the simply awesome and hunger-inspiring FoodPress. FoodPress features the best food-related posts from WordPress.com’s network of over 14 million blogs. The posts are hand-picked “by scouring food-related tag pages like food, recipes, baking, cocktails, and more,” so don’t forget to tag your posts! I hope that FoodPress is the first in a long line of GenrePressing WordPress.com blogs, and I hope that technology and photography are next. What do you think of FoodPress, and what kind of GenrePressing blogs do you want to see next? P.S. GenrePress – you […]