2nd Birthday

You know, if I keep forgetting WordPress.com’s birthday she’s going to stop returning my calls.

Has it really been a year since I almost missed our birthday last time? How time flies. Next thing you know it’s a million blogs later.

It’s overwhelming to even begin to chronicle everything that has happened, but a year ago we didn’t have domain mapping, custom CSS, private blogs, auto-save, any language-specific homepages, the tag surfer, my comments, avatars, VIPs, friend surfer, space upgrades, Snap, click stats, audio embedding, a blog switcher, LaTEX, OpenID, contact forms, and dozens more features.

Today, the 20th of August, is actually less our birthday and more the date of conception, when the first blog on WordPress.com was created. (This one.) We were in an intense development and testing period, and had an invite system. The invites were being bought and sold on eBay for as high as $90! We opened to the public in December 2005, which we now know is the slowest time of the year, and it began picking up in January. When WordPress.com launched there was a lot of worry that it would suffocate its open source cousin, but the opposite has happened: it’s introduced a whole new audience to WP and WordPress.org is nearing its third major release in a year, a much faster and more mature development cycle than it’s ever had before.

Here are the stats from the last 10 days we published last year. We’ve…

• Created 50,334 blogs
• Added 269,035 static pages
• Tagged 715,905 tags on posts
• Gotten 920,363 comments
• Written 678,842 posts
• Had 96,095,493 pageviews!

Most of all though, we’ve learned a great deal about running a site like WordPress.com where so many of you express your creativity, joys, struggles, aspirations, and desires in ways we would have never imagined. Thank you for sticking with us through thick and thin, and we’ll do our best to continue to delight you as we weather the terrible twos.

If you have a WordPress.com memory from the last year you’d like to share, write about it on your blog and link this entry, it’ll show up as a ping in the comments.

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