WordPress August Wrap-up: Game, Set, Match

I just came across the WordPress August Wrap-up, part of a monthly summary of WordPress traffic written by WordPress’s own Matt Mullenwegg.

The numbers are impressive. According to Matt’s report:

• 154 thousand blogs were created.
• 176 thousand new users joined.
• 1.14 million file uploads.
• 2.2 million posts and 851 thousand new pages.
• 3 million comments.
• 25 million spam comments blocked.
• 2.5 million logins. (That’s about a login a second.)
• 308 million pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 112 million on self-hosted blogs. (420 million pageviews total.)
• 704,855 active blogs in August, where “active” means they got a human pageview. (New stat!)

Matt goes on to say:

For the geeky among you, WordPress.com is now using about 260 megabits per second of bandwidth average, with spikes as high as 820 mbits earlier today from the Apple Gizmodo liveblog. (Which did up to 941 requests per second all by itself during the keynote.) So last month we used about 80 terabytes of bandwidth.

As you may know, the U.S. Tennis Open is going on now, in Flushing, Queens, just across Roosevelt Avenue from my favorite stadium, the New York Met’s Shea Stadium.

We will all know the results of that tournament in a few days, but we already know the outcome of the tournament to produce the best best blogging software — WordPress.

And don’t forget that WordPress is open-source software.

I’ve been using WordPress for almost a year now. Three recent developments stand out.

First, earlier this year WordPress introduced a new feature: Snap Preview Anywhere Now Available To All WordPress.com Blog Authors.

Snap Preview works as follows. If you add a link to a post, then when the reader reads it, and lets their mouse rest on a link for couple of seconds, then they see a small window with a view of the web site to which you have linked. This feature was a bit slow at first, but it’s become better and better. I find it useful to check that I have entered links correctly; moreover, I find it lends more immediacy to the post.

Second, WordPress recently extended the graphical summary of page views to cover not just days, but also weeks and months: Good charts come in threes.

Third, WordPress recently added a feature for listing code, something that I previously found hard to do. You can see an example of it in my post HTML is Many Things.

Most impressive of all is that during a year of use, a year in which WordPress has experienced phenomenal growth, the software has remained responsive. Yes, there are the occasional slight delays, but I’ve never come close to saying to myself, “That’s it, I need to host my WordPress blog elsewhere.”

The advantages of using their hosting capabilities, including the Akismet spam filter, and in remaining part of the WordPress community are very compelling.

And you don’t have to pay them to do so.

Thanks WordPress. Keep up the good work.

[Added 09/17/07] See Photo Matt: Vote for CMS Award and my comment therein.