August is usually a slow month, but around here it was one of our busiest ever. We kicked off the month with the first ever WordCamp in San Francisco which was attended by 300+ people.
Some free features we rolled out:
- Better more links
- Meebo widget
- New login page
- Private, members-only blogs
- Autosave
- Tag Surfer
- My Comments
- Avatars
Of course there was the first paid upgrade, Custom CSS and the Sandbox theme. It was aimed at you more technical folks, since you have to be pretty savvy with CSS to do anything fun with it, but already over 350 blogs have added it. We’ll be rolling out at least one paid upgrade a month based on your feedback.
This is in addition to dozens of backend, performance, and bug fixes that are happening behind the scenes constantly. (For example we have 6 new webservers coming online soon.)
Not bad for a summer month when many of the team was travelling or taking time off. Podz was off for 2 weeks. I’ve been to Austin (for BarCampTexas and Andy’s birthday), Vegas, and currently in New York. Barry is visiting Houston and Andy is up in Vermont somewhere.
How about some stats? In August you guys created about 56k blogs, 57k users, 1.2 million posts, 188k pages, 1.3 million comments, 3.5k support requests, 196k file uploads, and around 45 million pageviews. (Not counting admin section, images, CSS, RSS feeds, etc.)
The most popular theme is Regulus, about two thousand blogs are using the Meebo widget. The tag surfer is more popular than “my comments”, but both are dwarfed by the number of times you guys look at your stats everyday. About 4200 of you have added avatars to your profile.
That’s a wrap!
WordPress.com News 
Awaiting a September which is as interesting as the August 🙂
Great! Thanks WordPress for all the hard work. You’re the BEST!
What a marvelous progressive of WP. Keep going. I think September wrap-up will have more things and cools!
Wishes and Congratulations!
Best Smile,
Zeezat
Now that’s awesome. What an accomplishment. I’m pretty sure all of the other WP users would think so too.
I hope you keep adding more goody good features. 🙂
ROFL!!!Love the comment about how many times we look at our stats everyday.
Oh, but it’s all about the blogging, don’t get to hung up about your stats, I hear people say!!!
Funny as!
You must chuckle… I am the worst for it!
V
WordPress is the best..:-)
Whenever i see new post on ‘wordpress.com news’ i always overwhelmed with joys and I have never been disappointed…
Everytime you come up with new ideas and new added features…
Still I am waiting for new themes (no themes after sandbox) and new features (mainly flash player)…
I suggest for the next paid upgrade a google adsense widget and you will see a massive migration from blogspot.
Thanks a lot for all anyway.
] marcomkc [
I’d love to know the average number of times a WordPress user looks at his/her stats every day … and what the top count ever is (you can keep it anonymous)!
Thank you all for a great month — I’m definitely appreciating the constant upgrades.
You WP guys, everytime things appear to be settling down, BAM, you kick it up another notch (as the saying goes). I mean what is it about setting such high standards. Tsk tsk. 😉
I love the Autosave feature. Danke.
The first thing when I get to my blog is to check the stats! It’s great seeing how many visitors there are – and the (hilarious) keywords that people use to arrive at my blog. Thanks WP!
WordPress seriously rocks ! I especially like the new pingback system (apparently you lot have beens silent about it!)
I loved the avatar feature and of course…Blog Stats.
Thanks WP
Fantastic stuff, and keep up the good work! It would be cool to see a more detailed breakdown of the most and least popular themes.
you guys are great, and the most important is that u guys are always improving.. keep it up
I got a response (well, two) from Podz concerning avatars in about ten minutes. Thank you for making blogging with WordPress such an enjoyable experience.
I’ll stand and be counted. My name is EclecticGeek and I’m a stat watcher. 😉
I must commend the staff. You never stop trying to improve a good product. That’s impressive! I look forward to the new perks that I sense are right around the corner. Thanks for everything.
No comments!
Your hard work is a proof of your words.
Thank you Gentlemen!
guilty as charged. i am addicted to my ego-pumping stats page.
I Love WordPress
An ‘August’ august for WP!
And these kinda stats might be mere numbers but they do hold a wealth of information! I’d rather you make them available pretty regularly….How about the number of users using a particular theme showing besides it in the ‘Presentations’ page?
Even if you don’t care about the stats, per se, there’s still a certain pleasure in seeing that people continue to stop by. It’s also great to see old posts revisited in sudden clumps, or discover the links that are sending these clumps to you. (Generally, folks with good taste….) 🙂
Since I do podcasts of public domain literary works, I also get a lot of pleasure in seeing, at certain times of the school year, sudden clumps of people who’ve discovered they can get assigned reading done with less boredom by listening to me. (If I could figure out more stuff that I could read for ’em, I would. Some things just work better _off_ the printed page, and others are undeservedly more referred to than read.)
OTOH, it is also funny as heck to see certain unsavory search terms gone so very, very wrong as to arrive at my page.
Heh, yeah I love to see weird search terms get to my blog. As far as checking up no STATS endlessly…yes.. I’m guilty as well. But I wonder if you count the MiniWordpress widget too, that would probably increase the number exponentially.
WordPress rocks because of the things you guys keep creating to make things interesting and fun. Keep it up!
I do love checking out my stats, I love to see what people use to search me and also to see how my blog comes up for stuff I’m sure is not at all related to what they are looking for 🙂 So happy with all that stuff. I was wondering about the css paid upgrade, I’m not tech savvy at all, but I plan on being tech savvy, through reading and doing, is there a way to just practice at the stuff without paying? I have to go to a specific theme right? anyway, thanks for the good working in August!
Awesome, now for a party where you go and along with you millions of WordPress users go – Cheers!!
Kudos guys!! Amazing!! Makes me wanna quit my job and join you guys! :-D!
You guys create a great sense of community. It has made blogging on WordPress a tremendous pleasure! Not only is this the best software blogging platform I’ve come across so far, it’s also being constantly improved by you guys.
In my mind, you are all heroes! 🙂
Though I haven’t been with you since the launch, I anxiously followed the growth of wordpress.com, and for the last several months have been testing it out. Congratulations! You have a product that is reliable, consistent, and as far as hosted services rank; second to none. I’m proud to say when my contract expires at Typepad in a month, I will maintain my blog here.
Thanks again.
I think WordPress.com has become one of the best blogging services available 😉 (for me the _best_).
Good job, guys.
Great!
We love you blogging system!.
Most of those stat views are actually me. Just thought I’d fess up.
Maybe those of us who are stats obsessive, well…. maybe we could start a support group.
Stats Annonymous!
Whose for that!
V
Well, I would join 😉
The thing is that the stats could be improved, and I would pretty much like that. Like to be able to see the stats for all time since I signed up for wordpress, to see them for different months, weeks, years, hours, and so on.
Or a feature to add other specific stat systems from other services, like the google stat tool. This could be realized with add on widgets which someone could buy.
So if the most popular theme is Regulus, I wonder what the least popular one is?
So many new features all the time. Help! I can’t keep up!
Just kidding. WordPress.com rules
😎
Thanks so much. WordPress..
I use Regulus and its the best theme. Can’t think of using another. You’re right on the blog stats thing too! 🙂 Can’t thankyou guys enough!
How about a best blog contest (based on content and not on hits) so that smaller bloggers get some of the main action too?
Keep it up!
I am now to WordPress, but I can say it is the best blogin service I’ve seen on the market. All the new feature are standard to me, I just signed up, but I can not imagine, WordPress without them!
Good going, keep it up!
teen, pingbacks have been around since we first got started.
Elsie, if you go to the “Edit CSS” tab under presentation you can preview CSS changes as much as you like for free. You only need to pay to save the changes live to your site.
Hope you toss in surveys as well soon! And yes! Regulus is absolutely the best theme for me. Tried the other but nothing came up to par. Hope the people developing Regulus would add more stuff in the near future! Thanks for all the awesome work, guys!
Why dont you have a poll to see what new widgets you could add to wp.com?
Great job! Excellent! Something I neglected to mention in the favorites reply? You guys give absolutely great customer service and that beats all else 🙂
One of the avatared, meebo using, stat-addict bloggers saying great job WP.com team!
PS Sorry; I don’t have Regulus; I have Andreas04 for the two sidebars on the right.
Keep it up!!
Cool. Thank you.
I PITY THE FOO WHO DOESN’T USE GABBLY – Mr. T
Why can’t we have gabbly? Meebo sucks as a tagboard. Seriously, go work it out with them.
Jeez. http://gabblywidgets.com