SendGrid of Boulder, Colorado has raised $5 million in a round of funding from Foundry Group and Highway 12 Ventures. SendGrid develops e-mail software that helps ensure delivery and monitor analytics. Angel investors involved in this deal include Postini founder Scott Petry and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. [TechRockies]

Blog hosting website WordPress.com went offline for about 110 minutes. This caused 10.2 million blogs to go offline and deprived them of receiving about 5.5 million pageviews. The reason why WordPress.com went offline was because of a core router change by a data center. All of the data is safe, but just could not be served. “The entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again,” stated WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. [WP Company Blog]

Automattic has acquired After The Deadline, a WordPress plugin startup company.  After The Deadline designed a solid grammar and spelling plugin for WordPress.  Matt Mullenweg, the chief developer of WordPress called up Raphael Mudge, the only After The Deadline employee to find out what it would take to buy out his entire company.

The deal was made this past July and now After The Deadline was made accessible for all WordPress.com users.  Automattic has around $30 million in funding and purchased the blo.gs pinging service from Yahoo! this past April.  Automattic also bought out PollDaddy in October and Intense Debate in September.

Blogs that run on WordPress.com now automatically have the RSSCloud feature integrated into them. WordPress.org users can download a plugin from here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsscloud/.

RSSCloud is a service that adds a cloud feature to RSS feeds. As soon as an author writes a blog post or news story, an update ping is sent to a cloud server. The cloud will determine whether that post is being subscribed to. If someone is subscribing to them, then the RSS aggregator is updated. This all happens within a second. The RSSCloud protocol was made by Dave Winer, the inventor of the original RSS specification.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress wrote about the changes on the company blog. “There’s only one reader so far (River2) that supports RSS cloud, but we expect there to be more in the future. We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible, making blogging a more real-time experience. Since RSS Cloud is so easy to add to RSS, it seemed like a good place to start,” wrote Mullenweg