Some thoughts on this 2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

This past year saw a lot of changes here at WordPress.com and a lot of my time was spent in the Community Forums fielding user reaction and questions to those same changes.

Hello, World! My name is…

WordPress.com continues to be a very popular destination for new bloggers to open a website, but those same new bloggers seem to be overwhelmed with the amount of information available to them that doesn’t always make sense because they are new bloggers. According to Matt Mullenweg in an interview on Brian Krogsgard’s PostStatus at the end of November, 96% of new signups on WordPress.com abandon their site within a short period. To try and help turn that tide, WordPress.com’s companion site, The Daily Post, has been running BloggingU*, which should be the first stop for any new blogger here. Beyond the nuts and bolts, BloggingU gives you a firm ground into why blog or set up a site. There were 40,000 BloggingU “grads” last year and 2016’s courses are expected to be even more popular (January and February’s Blogging101 are already full!). Announcements about available courses come out regularly, so if you aren’t yet following The Daily Post, you’ll want to do so.

On a personal note, 2016 will be a milestone year for me and during the coming months WPcomMaven will be undergoing a transformation from a reactive site to a proactive site. More on that later.

Wishing all my readers a happy and fulfilling 2016!

(*Note that BloggingU, while no longer active, still offers several topical, self-study courses by email. For anyone wanting to learn the ins-and-outs of blogging, say hello to WP Courses.)