One of my favorite things about working on WordPress.com is that improvements get made and pushed out as soon as they’re tested and ready. Just a day after I wrote about manually changing your blog’s timezone to account for Daylight Saving Time, Ryan updated WordPress.com so you can now set your timezone by choosing a city.

Here’s how it works.

Log in to your dashboard, click on Settings > General, and scroll to Timezone. You now have the option to pick a city that’s in your current timezone instead of a UTC timezone. For example, I live in the same timezone as Los Angeles, so I’ve selected that city.

Once you’ve set your timezone this way, you won’t need to change it again to account for Daylight Saving Time. WordPress.com will automatically update your blog’s time settings as needed.

If you’re interested, here’s a full list of the timezones we support for reference.

Ah, spring, when a young person’s fancy turns to … blogging. And time changes. (Maybe baseball too, if that’s your thing.)

WordPress.com blog time settings follow the UTC time standard. This method allows us to keep the stats database lean and fast. That translates into free stats for everyone!

UTC doesn’t change over the course of a year. Because of this, you’ll need to adjust your blog settings to account for Daylight Savings Time manually. If you live in the USA, today – Sunday, March 14 – is the day to spring forward and adjust your WordPress.com blog’s time one hour ahead.

Update: There’s a full listing of when Daylight Savings Time begins around the world in this article on Wikipedia.

To account for Daylight Savings Time, log in to your dashboard, click on Settings > General, and scroll to Timezone. Then change your timezone to one hour ahead of your actual time zone. If you have your timezone set to, for example, UTC-8 (PST), you’ll need to change it to UTC-7.

We’ll make another announcement before the “fall back” change, which is on November 7, 2010.

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and developers are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.

If you’re a WordPress fan attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. We’re getting the BBQ from Rudy’s and the red velvet cake from Central Market. Yum! Come, eat, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress, let us know what we can do better, gossip about Mark Jaquith’s new hairstyle, whatever. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. I’ll be there, lead developers Mark Jaquith and Ryan Boren will be there, core contributors will be there, plugin and theme developers will be there, and basically all the most intelligent and attractive people from SxSW will be there. You should be, too!

Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you’re tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

View WordPress BBQ at SxSW in a larger map

* We’ll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We’ll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry.

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and fans (including many hosted here on WordPress.com) are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.

If you’re a WordPress.com user attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. Come, eat, meet some of the WordPress.com team, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress on your site, let us know what we can do better, talk about some of the new features and themes you’ve been seeing here lately, etc. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. See how many WordPress.com staff you can spot chowing down on Matt’s favorite meal.

Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you’re tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

View Larger Map

* We’ll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We’ll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry.

We recommend open source software whenever we can, and the Firefox browser from Mozilla is one of our favorites. Firefox 3.6 recently came out with persona support, allowing users to skin their browsers with favorite designs and brands. WordPress users everywhere seem to love the W symbol (at WordCamps it shows up on everything from t-shirts to iPhone skins), so it was only natural that WordPress personas would come along.

To kick it off, designer Chad Pugh created two WordPress personas based on the WordPress brand: “Vintage Press” and “Inkwell.” These two designs are a great way to show the WordPress love, even if you’re only showing it to yourself.

	The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of old-fashioned printing presses and the mechanics of working with type. This persona might appeal to WordPress developers and users who appreciate the way things work under the hood.
“Inkwell” is more of a palimpsest* & watercolor hybrid that might appeal to the artists among us. Music, script and spills of color combine…

Okay, I’m starting to feel like an art critic so I’ll stop there. Check out the WordPress personas for Firefox and decide for yourselves.

* I never thought I would have occasion to use the word “palimpsest” in a dev blog post. Never.