Donorschoose.org, an amazing nonprofit organization that supports public school teachers and kids, is a finalist in the American Express Members Project. The prize is up to $5 million, and the outcome will be decided by votes of American Express card holders. If we help DonorsChoose.org win, all the proceeds will go to classroom projects in public schools!

This doesn’t require money; just 2 minutes of your time. You could impact hundreds of thousands of public school students by voting now for:

Teachers Ask. You Choose. Students Learn.

Yes, that tag line at the end is the name of the project, not donorschoose.org. Nonetheless, it's not surprising to see why an NFP promoting choice among donors would be popular in a poll among amex cardholders to choose a project to support. It's so circular it destroys otherwise sensible sentences.

Social Entrepreneurship can be a good thing, in that holding people accountable is always a good thing, but it is disconcerting to see NFP's now having to spend considerable time and effort on marketing, and becoming popular with donors.

I like this new 'press this' link (in the blue wp.com bar, top right), despite its odd name.

Apparently the reason we can't have new features is because the staff didn't anticipate people using the same email address for more than one account.  I'm not sure the addition of an FAQ page is really going to grab people's attention, so i'm reblogging this.  (i bet you can count on your 2 hands the number of people subscribe to the feed (or who've added faq.wordpress.com to their friend surfer).

tell your friends:  only you can fix the wp.com database structure!

Customizing CSS is a new trick on wordpress.com, but hosted wordpress users have been doing it for a while.

Alex King has hosted a competition or two based on styling the 'classic' theme.

Here's how to use those great old styles:

1. download and unzip the style of your choice.
2. Go to your wordpress dashboard, and under Presentation, choose the WordPress Classic theme, by Dave Shea.
3. Start Writing a new post. Using the uploader, upload all of the images from the style you downloaded.
3a. for each image, click on it, and make sure the popup says 'using original' at the top. click on 'using thumbnail' if it doesn't. once it says 'using original', click 'close'
4. Open TextEdit on your computer
5. drag style.css from the downloaded style onto textedit
6. click Go > Find (or press cmd+F)
7. search for the name of the first image in the style folder (ex. top.gif)
8. in your new post (on wordpress.com), in the uploader, control+click on the same image, and click "copy image address"
9. switch back to textedit, and paste that address into the 'replace' field.

10. click 'replace and find'. this will highlight the name of the image.
11. click 'replace' and the highlighted text will be replaced with the address of the image you've uploaded.
12. repeat steps 6-11 for all the images in the style.
13. click File > Save
14. click Edit > Select All, then Edit > Copy
15. go to the Custom CSS page in your wordpress dashboard, and paste.
16. click preview to see it in action, and click 'save stylesheet' if it looks good!

FULL DISCLOSURE: i don't have a paid account. i can't test this out.

UPDATE: wank points out that this won't work perfectly, since classic styles are meant to replace classic, not overwrite it. example

I suppose shutting down automatic (that word is starting to look wrong without the extra 't') theme uploading is better than arbitrarily deleting themes depending on the politeness of the designer.  Seriously, though: half an hour in 6 days?  I spend more time deleting spam than that.  I mean, i can't quite hear Shadows laughing all the way across the pond.  Now I'm starting to wonder how much effort can really be spared out of such a busy schedule to run a theme competition.

and by interesting, I mean, full of a bunch of templates not worth downloading, but not technically based on a previous theme. maybe there will need to be a requirement for an options panel or something, to prevent stupidity. via Low End Theory