Somehow in the rush of all the development that’s been going on lately we forgot the birthday of our favorite baby, WordPress.com.

However Lorelle remembered and wrote a great post. It seems fitting that our birthday post should come from one of our bloggers!

I don’t think I can add a whole lot on top of her post, so here’s some Automattic and WordPress.com trivia:

  • Donncha was the first employee
  • I had never met him when I hired him
  • The main blog has a registration date of 2006-07-20, about a month after Donncha started
  • Some early testing of MU was done at wordpad.org
  • Andy was the second employee, starting August 28th (ish)
  • The first server that ran WordPress.com cost $82 a month
  • We still have that server around, it hosts webstandards.org and themes.wordpress.net
  • When we launched it was invite-only, we got a few thousand people through that system
  • The early days were rough, some pretty major bugs and downtime
  • WordPress.com opened to the public in December 2005
  • But we got virtually no signups until January, I don’t remember why

Now for some stats! Don’t forget to compare these numbers from those about 3 months ago.

In the last 10 days, WordPress.com users have…

  • Created 18,329 blogs
  • Added 63,198 static pages
  • Tagged 231,267 tags on posts
  • Gotten 501,111 comments
  • Written 416,602 posts
  • Had 16,621,767 pageviews!