We kicked off July with an open vote on new media features. Thanks to all of you who voted and submitted comments. Your feedback determines the future of WordPress.

Later in the month we introduced PollDaddy ratings and polls, the Gravatar widget, and the archives shortcode (one of many you can check out here).

Here are July’s stats:

• 394,609 blogs were created.
• 5,666,839 posts were published.
• 418,946 new users joined.
• 6,594,795 file uploads.
• 3,762 gigabytes of new files.
• 839 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 7,890,707 comments.
• 6,681,646 logins.
• 1,253,217,900 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,289,187,116 on self-hosted blogs (2,542,405,016
  total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,146,576 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,419,364,230 words.

Plus:

,035 posts via the new WordPress for BlackBerry Public Beta.

WNET.ORG published a whitepaper about their experience launching multiple sites with WordPress MU.

Telegraph blogs relaunched using WordPress MU; FADER relaunched using WordPress; and Tasty Kitchen launched a community site on the BuddyPress platform.

WordCamps in July: WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp UK.

WordCamps coming up in August: WordCamp New Zealand and WordCamp Huntsville.

You publish a lot of quality content (trust us, we know). And so we understand that making it easily accessible to your faithful readers is very important for you as a blogger. Sure, our Categories, Tag Cloud, and Archives widgets do their parts, but we’ve come up with an extra little something that you may vehiclee to use.

Enter our newest shortcode – [archives].

This little guy will allow you to quickly and easily add a post index to anywhere on your blog (page, post, or text widget). Use the shortcode as is, and it will output a listing of all posts ever published on your blog. But it’s your show, so you get to decide what and how the shortcode generates your post index using a variety of options. Check out a number of examples of the shortcode being used here.

Ever want to see your weekly archives displayed in a drop-down menu? Now you can. Here’s ours:

[archives]

Enjoy!

Say goodbye to messing around with HTML in a Text widget just to get an “About Me” in your sidebar. With the new Gravatar widget it only takes a few seconds to achieve this and stamp your blog as your own!

If you’re not familiar with a Gravatar it’s a graphical representation used to identify yourself, an avatar, in WordPress blogs and other sites.  It’s already built in to your WordPress.com account and can be found on your profile page.

This Gravatar widget allows you to quickly and simply add a Gravatar onto your blog.  You can select the Gravatar image, size, and even add a description about yourself or your blog. If you have multiple authors you can add several widgets – there’s no limit.

Setup is easy – go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, drag the Gravatar widget from Available Widgets into the desired sidebar, and choose your settings.

You can choose the Gravatar of an existing blog author from the dropdown menu, or enter a custom email address if necessary.

You can choose one of four sizes for the Gravatar image itself, all of which fit easily into the sidebars of WordPress.com widget-enabled themes.

You can align the image to the left, right, or center, deciding how the text flows around the Gravatar.

Choose the URL you want the image to link to, if you want it to link to an “About Me” page or some other place, or leave this field blank if you don’t want the image to link anywhere.

Finally, enter the text you want to display below the image.  Include HTML too, if you want. Click Save and you’re finished!

And if you feel like it’s time for a new Gravatar remember that you can always modify your Gravatar from your profile page by uploading a new image or even using your webcam.

So what are you waiting for?

Step-by-step instructions for the Gravatar widget can be found on the Gravatar widget support page.

PollDaddy joined the Automattic team last year, and we have been working on adding some of our great features directly into the WordPress platform ever since.

Ratings

The PollDaddy rating feature that was enabled on WordPress.com last week has really started to see some use. Over 100k blog posts, pages and comments on WordPress.com are now being rated. If you need some help getting started, check out our support page for ratings.

This excellent demo video from WordPress.tv gives a good overview of how the service works.

We are working on a new sidebar widget to show your top rated posts, pages and comments which should be live by next week. We will have all of this available as WordPress.org plugin soon too.

Polls

Our polls feature has been available on WordPress now for about 8 months. About 40% of all polls created on PollDaddy are now created here on WordPress.com. You can read more about how it works over on WordPress support.

If you are a WordPress.org user then you can download our plugin from the .org plugin directory. If you have not used our polls before, this video shows you how to create a poll,  courtesy of WordPress.tv.