Human self-expression and communication through art can be dated back to 32,000 years ago with the earliest of cave paintings. ROCKiTspace is a non-profit organization dedicated to making music and art available to its Beacon Hill, Seattle community.

In this three-part video interview Jessie McKenna discusses their vision of becoming a community hub and services, which range from a full music practice music and art studio to hypnotherapy workshops. She also discusses how they built their online community using Ning. Much of their equipment was donated by community members, such as a Rhodes keyboard from Day Moon Press across the street.

***ROCKiTspace is also sponsoring a Beacon Rocks! live music summer concert series next to the new (beautiful) Beacon Hill Light Rail Station.

What is ROCKiTspace?

Building an Online Community with Ning

Tour of ROCKiTspace

A few years ago, when we began to offer domain mapping—serving a WordPress.com blog on your domain, like example.com—we omitted DNS control because we didn’t count on many people needing it. Soon we tired of saying “no” to users wanting email on their blog domains so we added limited support for Google-hosted email. Recently we tired of saying “no” to users wanting DNS control so today we deployed a DNS editor for custom domains.

The Edit DNS link is on the Domains page.

This free enhancement is available to everyone who uses domain mapping on WordPress.com. The ability to add some common DNS records (MX, TXT, CNAME, A) opens the door for services hosted elsewhere to work under the same domain as your blog. Integrating other hosted services with your domain, such as email (you@example.com) or other kinds of web content (wiki.example.com), can make your dot-com a more powerful branding tool. We hope it makes WordPress.com a better choice for bloggers all over the internet.

Media is a big part of my life. Showing friends a slideshow of a weekend excursion is a common occurrence. When blogging these photos, displaying them in a long gallery doesn’t always make sense.There wasn’t any other option to show off the images uploaded to your WordPress.com blog until now.

Today, we’re rolling out 100% JavaScript powered slideshows. But, why did I bother to mention that they’re JavaScript powered? Most importantly, because we’re consuming the web in different ways. Our JavaScript powered slideshows will work in any browser that supports CSS and JavaScript – even the iPad and iPhone!

The slideshows are simple and straightforward. Upload your photos as a gallery, then click the “Insert slideshow” button, or use the [slideshow] shortcode. The slideshow automatically adjusts its dimensions to fit your blog’s theme.

Without further ado, here are some pictures I took while visiting some zoos over the years.

This feature is a WordPress.com feature. A WordPress.org/self-hosted plugin will be available soon.