Go against the grain with “Dark Wood,” an eye-catching and playful theme. Bright colors and whimsical icons fuse with dark tones to provide a pleasing and harmonious design. Dark Wood is a three column theme with a rich wood textured background.

Dark Wood

When you’re looking for a theme with some serious character, Dark Wood could definitely be the one. Bright links and header icons give the design some real spice, complemented with a whimsical background.

Dark Wood doesn’t leave out the extras either. There are two sidebars that can be packed with widgets and the search box comes styled nicely to match the design.

Dark Wood's Sidebars

Dark Wood will provide a pleasing and harmonious backdrop for your blog. Give it a spin and see how you like it.

Dark Wood is available for all WordPress.com sites and is available for WordPress.org users over at the Theme Directory.

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, if you blog in the USA, you’ll need to adjust your blog settings to account for Daylight Savings Time manually. Today – Sunday, March 14 – is the day to spring forward and adjust your WordPress.com blog’s time one hour ahead.

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 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.

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* 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.

Titan is a fantastic theme, now available on WordPress.com. It’s a highly readable, clean theme, with lots of options: four widget areas, a customizable header, and more.

Behold Titan!

An enticing color scheme and loads of customization make Titan a wonderful theme for you blog. To start things off the header has some nice social networking and RSS links, making it easy for users to keep up with your blog.

Right below the title is a highly customizable header. There are options to turn on and off categories and pages, allowing you to choose how users navigate your blog.

Titan's Header Options

Aiding in even more customization are four widget areas, including a nice footer widget area.

Titan's Footer Widget Area

Titan was designed by Drew Strojny and is available in the WordPress.org Themes Directory. You can check out Titan for yourself at http://titandemo.wordpress.com