April Wrap-up and Monotone Photoblogger Theme

April absolutely flew, I have no idea where it went.

Here’s what you rascals did last month, with a few new and improved stats:

• 240,494 blogs were created.
• 281,729 new users joined.
• 2,533,704 file uploads. (Y’all use the new uploader a lot more.)
• About 740 gigabytes of new files. (Estimated, better number next month.)
• 317 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters. (Compare to last time we published transfer numbers.)
• 3,258,032 posts and 1,330,355 new pages.
• 5,775,721 comments.
• 4,903,485 logins.
• 655,178,604 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 408,359,440 on self-hosted blogs. (1,063,538,044 pageviews total across blogs using our stats system. We broke a billion!!)
• 63,730,680 pageviews in RSS feeds.
• 884,208 active blogs, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 152,005,525 unique people visited WordPress.com-hosted blogs.

Random facts:

• About 30% of pageviews go to blogs with their own domains.
• 43% of pageviews to permalink pages.
• 30% of pageviews go to blogs in languages other than English. The most popular? Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian.
• 63% of our visitors were from outside of the United States.
• About 93% of pageviews were to people not logged in.
• People logged in somewhere using OpenID 84 thousand times.
• Blogs using the Digg3 theme got 5.26% of total traffic.
• There were 475 posts made via the Atom API (234,831 with XML-RPC).
• We sent 3,761,059 emails.

So many of our stats fall along 70/30 lines it’s scary.

Now for the juicy bits. Behold! Monotone.

Imagine a theme for photoblogging where every page looks like it was designed to match the picture. Monotone is a chameleon, it does sophisticated analysis of the image you upload to determine a complementary color scheme. The width of the page also changes based on the width of the photo.

You can see the demo site by clicking either of the images above.

Monotone takes the first (and only the first) image from your post and does its magic. Just make sure to select “full size” when you insert it. (The images must be uploaded to WordPress so we can resize them and extract out the colors properly. It also does best with BIG images.) The rest of the text is put below like a regular post. It only ever shows one post per page, but dig those archives.

A cool new theme, a new uploader, gigabytes of free space — you now have no good reason not to start a photoblog. Show the world what you’ve got. A week from today, if I remember, I’ll link to the coolest blogs using Monotone and will send literally dozens of viewers their way. Noel Jackson was the man behind the magic and we’re continuing to work with him on some top-secret projects.

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