Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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raanan.com 2010 in review

Pretty cool summary below, which each user of WordPress.com received recently. Interestingly, I posed 42 times in 2010, with my overall goal of posting once per week — so a bit off that pace — but fairly close.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 41,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 259 posts. There were 26 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was October 9th with 1,772 views. The most popular post that day was Two Factor Authentication.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, ma.tt, automattic.com, twitter.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for google apps personal, google apps personal use, blackberry numbers letters, raanan bar-cohen, and gps.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Two Factor Authentication September 2010
5 comments

2

Quick Tip For BlackBerry Users When Calling Phone Numbers with Letters February 2008
21 comments

3

Sync Skype Chat History on Multiple Machines With Dropbox June 2009
11 comments

4

Switched to Google Apps for Personal Email January 2008
37 comments

5

Upgraded to iPhone 3GS from 3G. Veridct: Worth it ! June 2009
4 comments

Paul Maiorana Joins Automattic

I’m really excited that Paul Maiorana, formerly CTO of Mansueto Ventures (FastCompany & Inc Magazine), is starting his first day today at Automattic as Director of Platform Services. He’ll be working to help expand and support the fast growing WordPress.com VIP services program.

For those who are wondering, as part of the VIP program, we support and (for about half of them) host WordPress sites for amazing organizations such as CBS, Time Warner, Conde Nast, Linkedin, New York Times, National Post, NFL, NBC Sports, Yahoo News, Dow Jones, Red Hat, and many others who are using WordPress for all their blogs and vertical sites, and increasingly to run their entire sites, as CBS is doing.

Some of these VIPs are hosted with us on the WordPress.com grid, and others run their own WordPress in-house or at a 3rd party providers such as Rackspace or Amazon.

Paul is based in NY, and as a current Drupal user promises to launch his own WordPress site soon 😉

And yes, to answer the obvious question, I will be relaunching this blog on WordPress (but only because I want to, not because I have to!)

New Linking Feature in WordPress.com

This morning WordPress.com users woke up to a handful of new features including a linking feature that is something I’ve wanted to see in WP for quite some time.  The idea now is that you have a nice little tool to assit you in linking to content that you’ve already created inside your WordPress by simply searching using keywords:

These new features are part of WordPress 3.1, which is still being tested, but as a developer you can grab via SVN, or just fire up your WordPress.com site to see it now.

WordPress for Nokia Live in the Ovi Store

Coming out of beta, the new official Open Source WordPress for Nokia mobile app is available to everyone via the Ovi Store. I’ve been using it on my N8 and it’s really slick.

Big thanks to everyone at Nokia, especially Sanjeev Gil and Anssi Mäkelä and the entire dev team at Futurice.

Check out the video below to see the app in action:

And more info is available on nokia.wordpress.org, including how developers can get involved.

Fareed Zakaria on The American Dream

One of the better, more sober shows I’ve seen lately on a range of issues including education, investment in R&D, and global competition. I wish there was more programming like this:

Fareed has gathered four of the top businessmen in America to tell us what’s at the heart of the job problem — how some many have been lost — and what the solutions are — how America can re-gain what its lost:

– Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO Google
– Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola
– Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO of Alcoa
– Lou Gerstner, who ran three American giants — RJ Reynolds, American Express & IBM

And Fareed will present solutions of his own — both for the nation and for the American worker.

Really recommend watching this: How do we fix the American dream? CNN Fareed Zakaria reports. Summary of show and clips here.

SMS Two-Step Authentication Now Live on WordPress.com

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how Google and PayPal support two-step authentication on their services, allowing you to use your mobile phone to add an extra layer of security to your username/password login.

Today, some exciting news — we’ve announced on WordPress.com that we are adding SMS two-step authentication to our offering, as well as other text messaging features including comment moderation, theme change notifications, and post publishing notification.

Check out all the details on the announcement post on the WP.com news blog.