My Short Summary of 2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 27,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Social Gestures and the Social Web – Part I

FROM the Below Article was Copied from the website http://blog.engag.io/2012/04/15/social-gestures-and-the-social-web-part-i/

The Original Author – MR.  William Mougayar

Social Gesturing is at the heart of the social web. Those little signals have a small footprint but a large impact.

The crowd-sourced nature of social gestures adds up to a lot of value. After all, Facebook with all its might was mostly based and founded on 3 basic social gestures: liking, sharing and linking, each taking a fraction of a second to accomplish.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hierarchy of social gestures in terms of value and potential.  And I came-up with the following way to organize them into a taxonomy where certain gestures are grouped with each other according to the objective they are meant to achieve and the purpose they target: People, Interests or Content.

The graph below is self-explanatory. The objective of social gesturing is to a) grab Attention, b) Express yourself, c) Curate interests (or content), d) develop Relationships, or e) Engage with people.

The most commonly used Social Gestures are Sharing, Linking and Liking when it comes to Content, and Following or Friending when it comes to People. But the area that holds the most promise is Engagement with People.

There is an ascending amount of time it takes to accomplish each gesture. If you look at the two extremes, Discussing something with someone is a lot more time-consuming than Clicking on content or Sharing it.

Personally, and for Engagio, I’m very interested in the gestures around Social Engagement. I think we’re just getting started in that segment, and I plan to cover more on that topic in Part II of this post.

In the meantime, what is your opinion on the following 3 questions:

• Are there other Social Gestures that you are seeing?

• Do you see new ones that are emerging?

• Which ones do you use the most?

Related articles

• Engagio: A Canadian Startup Story and the future of the Social Web (startupnorth.ca)
• Engagio wants to be your one-stop social inbox (gigaom.com)
• How to swear in Italian (afrahm.wordpress.com)
• Don’t Export Your American Hand Gestures [Infographic] (communicationstudies.com)
• ShadowPuppets prototype lets you pinch-to-zoom, click, and scroll with shadow gestures (theverge.com)

Engagio: Recognize & Build Relationships On Social Network Easily

Engagio helps you to track your online conversations and allows you to develop meaningful relationships from them. In short, it is your tool to find quality relationships.

Pitched as ‘Your inbox for online conversations and relationships’, it is a tool much like Gmail, but is for managing your conversations in social networking sites and commenting systems. Engagio gives you visibility about the people behind these conversations and reveals their social identities profile. It saves you much time and allows you to connect with others in a much better and deeper way.

Although social media has many advantages, sometimes we fall short of managing our many relationships on social networking sites. With so many friends, family members, colleagues, classmates and relatives in our contacts list, we miss out on building quality relationships with people who matter. Engagio helps you to do that and more.

Engagio believes that commenting and conversations are strong social signals. They are stronger than likes, shares and links. Comments are implicit linkages about people. After all, you only care to comment on somebody’s post and take time to do it when you like that person or what s/he has to say. Like is easy, commenting takes time and thought. Engagio studies all that and more, and give you full visibility into the potential relationships behind your comments and conversations.

The service is frictionless and derives implicit data from your normal, everyday interactions. It does not matter whether your conversations are on social networks or inside your Engagio inbox, Engagio tracks them all. You connect to your social networks and Engagio starts to track, record, analyze and report on your interaction activity.

All you need to do is to signup from the entry page or jump to your inbox. You can easily track your conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Disqus-enabled sites, Hacker news comments, Foursquare and more. This is a wonderful service for everybody who wishes to build up on great relationships without putting in much time and effort.

Chat With Command Prompt

If you want personal chat with a friend

you don’t need to download any yahoo messenger
All you need is your friends IP address and Command Prompt.

Firstly, open Notepad and enter:

@echo off

:A

Cls

echo MESSENGER

set /p n=User:

set /p m=Message:

net send %n% %m%

Pause

Goto A

Now save this as “Messenger.bat”. Open the .bat file and in Command

Prompt you should see:

MESSENGER

User:

After “User” type the IP address of the computer you want to contact.

After this, you should see this:

Message:

Now type in the message you wish to send.Before you press “Enter” it should look like this:

MESSENGER

User:27.192.168.1.88

Message: Hello SoftIT!

Now all you need to do is press “Enter”, and start chatting!

Mobile Trading

The Procyon Holdings (PROHD) name is expanding again as we push out into another development area — the Android framework. When I abandoned my BlackBerry, the choice to move to the Android platform was an easy decision. Market saturation, the development community, and fluidity between devices make this platform shine.

I’ve been having a few end user problems with the current iteration of our trading website. First, the native Android Gingerbread browser lacks SVG support, an issue that has bewildered me since I read about it. I can solve this issue by using another browser such as Opera, but I would like to use the native one.

Also working with a HTML + Ajax website on a device with a touch interface feels like you are not getting the full user experience. I want to scroll down lists with my finder, click and hold to expose options, and speed around menus.

Mobile Architecture

We had to expand our design and create a few new pieces to get data to the mobile world. New items include the creation of a daemon to simply database population, exposing data via XML, and working with an existing library to enable Push notifications.

Information Flow

The Daemon runs on our server, periodically pulls transactions from the Eve API, and places that information in our wallet table.

Our previous design was that you would have to hit the transactions webpage and it would trigger an update. Getting a page to refresh on a desktop connected via broadband versus a mobile phone is quite the different experience.

Android has a framework called C2DM(Android Cloud to Device Messaging) which enables you to send lightweight push notifications to devices.

Our vision is that when a sell order clears, a large/special sale has occurred, or a significant milestone has been reached, we send a notice. This will be visible on phone’s Status Notification Bar and cause me to act if deemed important. I have been forgetting to buy or trade a particular item after the sell orders have cleared. Forget things — loose profit.

Getting data out of our database required the creation of a webservice to produce XML output from our wallet table.

Here is an example of the sale of one item in our XML feed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>  
<TransactionList>  
<Transaction>  
<transactionDateTime>2012-04-19 06:21:04</transactionDateTime>  
<typeID>21096</typeID>  
<typeName>Cynosural Field Generator I</typeName>  
<quantity>1</quantity>  
<price>1948939.91</price>  
<profit>147803</profit>  
<stationName>STATION</stationName>  
<icon>21096_32.png</icon>  
</Transaction>  
</TransactionList>

Alpha Screenshot

This screenshot is our first proof of concept. We’re able to get information from an XML feed, display it, and get/cache images from the Eve image server. Major credit goes to my trading and corporation partner James, who has been doing the development work and educating me on the Android framework.

There is a lot we want to do with the mobile version. Menus, tabs, charts, reports, and the ability to add items to a shopping cart/wish list are all things on the drawing board.

Future Collaboration

This project is our first exposure to the Android framework and after the initial learning curve, we might perhaps coolabrate with the Aideron Robotics team on Aura. So maybe some of our trading mechanics will make their way into the Aura application.

Getting the Distance between Locations using Google Maps API

Modifying my post on drawing directions in a MapView using Google's API, I have come up with a solution to get the distance between two locations. Considering the same example I modified getDirections() to the method given below which returns distance as a string in kms(or meters).

public String getDistance(double lat1, double lon1, double lat2, double lon2) {
	String result_in_kms = "";
	String url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/directions/xml?origin=" + lat1 + "," + lon1 + "&destination=" + lat2 + "," + lon2 + "&sensor=false&units=metric";
	String tag[] = {"text"};
	HttpResponse response = null;
	try {
		HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
		HttpContext localContext = new BasicHttpContext();
		HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);
		response = httpClient.execute(httpPost, localContext);
		InputStream is = response.getEntity().getContent();
		DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
		Document doc = builder.parse(is);
		if (doc != null) {
			NodeList nl;
			ArrayList args = new ArrayList();
			for (String s : tag) {
				nl = doc.getElementsByTagName(s);
				if (nl.getLength() > 0) {
					Node node = nl.item(nl.getLength() - 1);
					args.add(node.getTextContent());
				} else {
					args.add(" - ");
				}
			}
			result_in_kms = String.format("%s", args.get(0));
		}
	} catch (Exception e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
	return result_in_kms;
}

How to get more page views for your blog

“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we’ve been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of almost 100,000 blogs to perform a regression analysis. Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations. We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggests that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow – It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post, or see your post in their reader, there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Comments, Comments, Comments – The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; holding all else equal, every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: ”have you ever done X?”; “do you think Y is acceptable?”. You can read some more thoughts on how to build your audience  and how to get more comments.

Post Frequently and Regularly – Your readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals. (The Daily Post can help with ideas, as can the advice on how to get more traffic)

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook (using Publicize), for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!

Explore the REST API

I have had the pleasure of working with the WordPress.com REST API over the past few weeks and am very excited to start “dogfooding” this resource everywhere I can.

One cool feature is that all the endpoints are self-documenting. In fact, the documentation for the REST API is built by the API itself! With this information we were able to build a console to help debug and explore the various resources that are now available through the new API. So let me introduce you to the new REST console for WordPress.com.

A word of caution: the console is only available when you are logged into WordPress.com and is hooked up to the live system, so be careful with your POST requests!

At its simplest you can supply the method, path, query, and body for the resource you wish to examine (it’s pre-populated with /me). Press “Submit” to see the response status for your request and an expandable JSON object that you can explore. All links listed under meta are active, so click one to make another request.

To get a better idea of what kind of parameters a request can take, select it under the “Reference” section. It will then provide an interface with some contextual help to let you know which path, query, and body parameters it accepts, what each of those parameters are for, and a field for you to provide the value.

Related articles

• Explore the REST API (developer.wordpress.com)
• How to analyze your Blog Traffic using WordPress Stats API (selvabalaji.wordpress.com)
• Apigee v2 Console: Making learning APIs as simple as possible, but not simpler (apigee.com)
• Phasing out old API, upgrade your WordPress plugins! (flattr.net)
• REST easy with JIRA 5 (blogs.atlassian.com)

How to analyze your Blog Traffic using WordPress Stats API

Analyzing my blog traffic is one of my favorite past times. Seeing traffic surge and strangers using my posts gives me gratification. Initially, my analysis was fairly low tech – checking WordPress stats page periodically. After doing it a few times, I realized I could do more methodically – and I can use the statistics to do some rudimentary data mining.

As you know, I have a WordPress.com blog. WordPress exposes the statistics in two ways : As a flash chart in the dashboard and as API service.
Viewing Blog Stats – Low Tech Way

If you want to take a look at your blog’s stats today , then you can do it in the dashboard. Assuming you are logged into your WordPress login, go to your blog. You will see WordPress toolbar at the top of the page. Click “My Dashboard“. It will show a chart of total daily visits for the past 15 days. If you want more details, hover your mouse over “My Account” and select “Stats”.

This page shows a wealth of information about your blog but it is limited to 2 days – today and yesterday. There are atleast 6 important statistics in that page.
WordPress Stats Sections

a) Views Per Day
This is probably the statistic you are most interested in. This plots the total number of visits each day for the last 30 days. This also has multiple tabs which allows you to aggregate the statistics information. For example you can view the total weekly and monthly visits . This gives a basic view about how your blog is faring.

b) Referrers
Referrers are basically web pages from which visitors reached your blog. There are different types of referrers : pingbacks, related posts, explicit linking etc. If a certain website is driving lot of visitors to your blog , it is time to notice ! Referrers allows you to get that insight. This panel shows the top 10 referrers. You can click on the “Referrers” link to get the full listing.

c) Top Posts and Pages
This shows the top 10 posts for the given day. One interesting thing is that they track home page separately. Also if you have different pages (eg About), then visits to these pages are also tracked. Again, if you want to see the number of visits to each page, you can click on the title link.

One interesting thing is that each of the posts/pages in this section also has an addition chart icon near them. Clicking on them gives the stats for that particular post alone. The new page shows a chart detailing how many visits occurred to that page in the last few weeks. Most interestingly , they also show the average visits per day for the last few weeks and months. This gives a glimpse into the lasting popularity of your post.

d) Search Engine Terms
I am not very clear what this exactly means – The instruction says “These are terms people used to find your blog.” . I am not sure if this corresponds to search terms typed in search engines or in WordPress search boxes etc . Anyway, this panel gives information about the search terms that fetch visits to your blog.

e) Clicks
Clicks panel shows the list of links in your blog that your visitors clicked. In a way , you can consider it as an inverse of referrers. In this case, you act as a referrer for some other blog. This post gives some hints about the type of visitors to your blog.

f) Aggregate Statistics
There is also another panel that shows some aggregate stats. This shows the total number of views to your blog so far , number of blogs and posts , email subscribers etc.
A Better Way

Using WordPress Stats page to get your data is fairly low tech. This gives some data which can only give you an instinct of how things go. But it will not give you any deeper insights. For doing more data mining, you need data – lots of data. Fortunately, WordPress makes available a stats API which you can query to get regular data. In the rest of the post , we will talk about the API and how to use the data that you get out of it.
Using WordPress Stats API

The primary url which provides the stats is http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php . You can click on it to see the required parameters. There are 4 important parameters to this API.

a) api_key : api_key is a mandatory parameter and ensures that only owner queries the website. There are three ways to get this information. This key is emailed to you at the time you created your blog. Or you can access it at My Dashboard -> Users -> Personal Settings. This will show your api key. For the truly lazy click this url .

b) blog_id : This is a number which uniquely identifies your blog. Either blog_id or blog_uri is mandatory. I generally prefer blog_id. Finding blog_id is a bit tricky. Go to the blog stats page (My Account -> Stats). Click on the title link of “Top Posts and Pages”. This will open a new page which shows the statistics for last 7 days. If you look at the page’s url, it will have a parameter called blog. The value of this parameter is the blog_id . Atleast for my blog , it is a 8 digit number.

c) blog_uri : If you do not want to take all the trouble of getting blog_id , use blog_uri. This is nothing but the url of your blog (http://blah.wordpress.com).

d) table : This field identifies the exact statistic you want. One of views, postviews, referrers, searchterms, clicks. Each of these correspond to the sections of WordPress stats discussed above. If table is not specified , views is selected as the default table.

You can get more details from the stats API page given above.
Sample Python Scripts to fetch WordPress Stats

I have written a few scripts which fetch each of the WordPress stats. One of them run every hour and gets the total number of views so far for the whole blog. The other scripts runs once a day and fetch the total clicks, search terms, referrer and top posts for that day. All of these store the data as a csv file which lends itself to analysis.

If you are interested in the scripts , the links to them are :

1. getBlogDaysStats.py : Fetches the total views for the whole blog at the current time. For best results run every hour.
2. getBlogReferrers.py : Fetches all the referrers to your blog.
3. getBlogPostViews.py : Fetches the number of views for individual blog posts and pages.
4. getBlogSearchTerms.py : Fetches all the search terms used to find your blog today.
5. getBlogClicks.py : Fetches the urls that people who visited your blog clicked.
How to Collect WordPress Statistics

The first step is of course to collect data periodically. I use cron to run the scripts. My crontab file looks like this :

11 * * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogDaysStats.py
12 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogClicks.py
14 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogPostViews.py
15 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogReferrers.py
16 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogSearchTerms.py

Basically, I run the getBlogDaysStats every hour and other scripts every day. I also run the rest of scripts at early morning so that it fetches the previous day’s data.
How to Use WordPress Statistics

If you run the scripts for few days, you will have lot of data. The amount of analysis you can make is limited only by your creativity. In this section, I will tell some of the ways I use the stats instead of giving an explicit how-to.

1. Views per day : It is collected by getBlogDaysStats.py. The most basic stuff is to chart them. This will give a glimpse of your trend – If it is static or climbing, then good news. If it is falling down it is something to worry about. I must also mention that have a more or less a plateau in your chart happens often. For eg in my blog, the charts follow a pattern – It increases for quite some time , then stays at the same level for a long time and then increases again. Also , worrying about individual day’s statistics is not a good idea. Try to aggregate them into weekly and monthly values as they give a less noisy view of your blog traffic.

Another common thing to do is to analyze per hour traffic. This can be easily derived from the output of the script. Basically, if m is the number of views at time a and n is the number of views at time b , then you received n-m views in b-a hours. I usually calculate it for every hour. This gives a *basic* idea of peak time for your blog – You can also infer your primary audience , although the interpretation is ambiguous. As an example , I get most of my traffic at night – especially between 1 AM – 9 AM. Morning time traffic is pretty weak and it picks up again in the evening. Interpreting this is hard as my blog covers a lot of topics – but if your blog is more focused you learn a lot about your visitors.

2. Referrers : This is a very useful statistic if you do some marketing for your blog. For best results, you may want to use just the domain of the url instead of the whole url for analysis. Using it you can figure out which sites drive traffic to your blog. If it is another blog, then it is a good idea to cultivate some friendship with that blog’s owner. For eg, for my blog , I found that digg drives more traffic that reddit. Also facebook drives some traffic to my blog – so I use WordPress’s facebook publicize feature. I also find that I get some traffic due to WordPress’s related posts feature which means that I must use good use of categories and tags. Your mileage may vary but I hope the basic idea is clear.

3. Individual Post Views : This is probably the most useful set of statistics. Basically , it allows you to analyze the traffic of individual posts over a period of time. I have a file which associates a blog post with extra information : For eg it stores the categories, tags, original creation date, all modification dates etc. (If you are curious , I store the information in JSON format). Once you have this information lot of analysis is possible.

a. You can figure out your audience type. If for a post, you have lot of audience in the first week and almost no audience from then on – then most likely your audience is driven by subscription. If it keeps having a regular traffic, then probably it has some useful stuff and traffic is constantly driven to it by search engines. For eg, my Biweekly links belong to the first scenario : When I publish one, lot of people visit it and then after a few days it gets practically no visits. In the other case, my post of Mean Shift gets a steady stream of views every week. If you want to sustain a good viewership, you may want to write more posts which can attract long term views.

b. If you use categories and tags wisely, you can tally the number of views per each category. This will give you an idea of the blog posts which users prefer. I noticed that my audience seems to like my Linux / Data Mining posts than other categories. So it is a good idea to write more of those posts.

c. You can kind of see a pareto effect in your blog posts. For eg, my top 10 blogs account for atleast 70% of my blog traffic. So if I could identify them correctly, I can write lesser posts but still maintain my blog traffic 😉

You can do lot more than these simple analysis but this is just a start.

4. Search Terms : This is another neat statistic. You can use it to figure out the primary way in which users access your blog. For eg, the ratio of total blog post view for a day and number of search terms for the day is quite interesting. If the ratio is high, then most of the people find your blog using search engines. In a way , this a potential transient audience whom you can convert to regular audience. If the ratio is small , then your blog gets views by referrers and regular viewers. This will assure you a steady audience , but it is slightly hard to get new people “find” your blog.

This statistic also tells you which keywords the viewers use to find my blog. You can gleam lot of interesting things from this. For eg, almost all of my search terms are 3-5 words long and usually very specific. This either means that the user is an expert and has crafted specific query. It may also mean that user rewrote the query and my blog was not found in the general query. I also use the terms to figure out if the user would have been satisfied with my blog. For eg, I know that a user searching “install matlab to 64-bit” will be satisfied while some one who searches “k means determine k” will not be. You can do either of two things : augment your blog post to add information that users are searching , or point users to resources that satisfies their query. For eg, I found lot of people reached my blog searching for how to find k. I found geomblog had couple of good posts on it and updated my blog to link to these posts. Some times, I may add a FAQ if same search query comes multiple times and if my page contains the information but is obscure. Eg : lot of people reached my blog searching for Empathy’s chat log location. My post of Empathy had it but not in a prominent fashion. So I added a FAQ which points the answer immediately.

5. Clicks : This statistic is tangentially useful in finding out which links the user clicks. One way I use it is to gauge the “tech” level of my reader who visits my blog using search engines. I usually link to Wikipedia articles for common terms. If the user clicks on these basic terms often ,then it might mean that I write articles at a level higher that the typical user and I have to explain it better. For eg , in my post of K-Means , this was the reason I explain supervised and unsupervised learning at the start even though most people learning k-means already know it.
Other Resources for Blog Traffic

There are other locations that give some useful information about your traffic. Some of them are :

a. Google Web Master Site : This is arguably one of the most comprehensive information about your blog post’s performance in Google. You can see it a Google Webmaster Page -> Your site on web -> Search queries. It has information like impressions, click throughs, average position etc. You can download all of them in a csv file too ! Literally a gold mine for data lovers.
b. Feedburner : Even though, WordPress has a feed, I switched to FeedBurner. One of the main reason was that it gave me a csv file detailing the number of views by my subscribers.
c. Quantcast : Useful for aggregate information. It has multiple charts that detail the number of views, unique visitors etc. The Quantcast data might not be accurate as it is usually estimated – but it gives a broad gauge of your blog. It also has some statistic which says how many of your visitors are addicts , how many are pass throughs etc. Quite useful !
d. Alexa : Similar to Quantcast . I primarily use my Alexa Rank for motivation to improve my blog ranking.
Pivot Tables

I primarily use Python prompt to play with data. If you are not comfortable with programmatic tweaking, use spreadsheets to do these analysis. If you have Windows, you can do lot of powerful analysis by importing the statistics obtained by the scripts into Microsoft Excel. Excel has a neat feature called Pivot tables. It is also an advanced topic that I will not discuss here. You can do some fantastic analysis using pivots. They also give you the ability to view the same data from multiple perspectives.

In this post, I have barely scratched the surface – You can do lot of amazing analysis using WordPress Stats API . I will talk about more complex analysis in a later post. Have fun with the data !

Related articles

• WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records (lorelle.wordpress.com)
• Blog Referrers: DesignSponge vs. WordPress (projectpalermo.com)
• To Use WordPress or Blogger… That is the Question (wisdomofjen.wordpress.com)
• WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org (bradyszabo.com)

Reblogging is Back!

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As we mentioned last week, you can like and reblog posts directly from your reader, which displays a stream of all the updates published on all the blogs you follow from your WordPress.com account.

We’ve also brought the reblog button back to the toolbar that appears at the top of the screen when you’re logged into WordPress.com. Note that you’ll only see the like and reblog options while you’re looking at individual posts.

For example, you’ll see this on the left side of your toolbar while viewing http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs:

And your toolbar will look like this while you’re browsing the home page of en.blog.wordpress.com:

How does reblogging work?

Reblogging is a quick way to share posts published by other WordPress.com users on your own blog. People have been reblogging others’ posts since blogging started, but our new reblogging system enables authors to retain greater control over their content.

When a post is reblogged, it shows up with a link back to the blog it came from, the first image in the post, an excerpt of the post’s introduction (if it contains text), and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains. It also shows any comments left by the person who reblogged the post:

Reblogs published on blogs you follow will also appear in your reader:

<h3>What happens when my posts get reblogged?</h3>

An excerpt of your post will be published on the reblogger’s site (with a link back to your original post), and you’ll receive a reblog notification in the post comments (you might need to approve it first):

14px;line-height:1.4em;color:#444444;font-family:”Helvetica Neue“,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;margin:0 0 1em 0″>You’ll also receive an email notification of the reblog.

Do I get credit when someone else reblogs one of my posts?

Absolutely! All reblogs contain a link back to your original post, so the more people reblog your posts, the more likely it is that you’ll attract new visitors (and perhaps new followers, too!).

What happens if I reblog a reblog?

If, for example, Stephane reblogs a WordPress.com announcement on his site and Lori reblogs Stephane’s reblog, Lori only re-publishes any comments Stephane made about the announcement. If Lori wants to share the original announcement, she should reblog the post from en.blog.wordpress.com, not from Stephane’s reblog. But if Stephane leaves a really clever comment, Lori might want to share it by reblogging his reblog on her site.

<h3>Can I edit a post I’ve reblogged?</h3>

You can go back and edit the comments you left when you reblogged a post, but you cannot edit any parts of the original post excerpt (including the post title). If you like, you can add categories or tags to the post. Reblogs show up under Posts → All Posts in your dashboard, and they can be edited the same way you edit your own posts.

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</div>

Related articles

• Reblogging is Back! (360hcopa.wordpress.com)
• Reblogging is Back! (gojaimas.wordpress.com)
• Reblogging is Back! (debpentland.wordpress.com)

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Two New Apps for WordPress.com

Image via CrunchBase

Earlier this summer we launched a few tools to make it easier for developers to create new apps for WordPress.com. Starting today, you can integrate your WordPress.com blog with Feedfabrik and Empire Avenue.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

Have you ever wanted to publish your own book, or a collection of your favorite blog posts?

Feedfabrik makes it easy to convert your WordPress.com blog into a book format, and even allows you to customize the cover design and book contents. You can order a hard copy of your book, or a digital PDF edition.

To try it out, head over to Feedfabrik, choose Bookfabrik, then select “I’m on WordPress.com.” Receive a 10% discount on all September orders with the code “WORDPRESS-INTRO”.

Grow Your Social Capital Online

Empire Avenue is a Social Stock Market, where your social networking activity and engagement earn you virtual currency and determine your virtual share price. It also helps you discover new people and brands, and allows you to invest virtual currency in their profiles by buying shares on the Social Stock Market.

Along the way you’ll have a bit of fun, make new connections, and learn about social networking and the value of your network! Empire Avenue is completely free and deals in virtual currency. Sign up today to get started.

These integrations are made possible because WordPress.com supports a protocol called OAuth2. OAuth2 allows developers to build applications that securely communicate with WordPress.com. We have also launched a developer portal to help developers to get more information about our platform. 

 If your service wants to build with us, don’t hesitate to contact us through the developer portal.

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2010 in review

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:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 126 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 285 posts. There were 110 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 13mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was September 10th with 244 views. The most popular post that day was Boss Engira Baskaran Movie Review.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.search.wordpress.com, en.wordpress.com, google.co.in, search.conduit.com, and ifreestores.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for raavan video songs, robo release, rajini robo stills, mukesh ambani house, and robo rajini stills.

Attractions in 2010

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

1

Boss Engira Baskaran Movie Review September 2010

2

Raavan Behne De Video Song April 2010
1 comment

3

Rajini’s Robo release Date!!! October 2008
4 comments

4

Vijay Sura Mp3 Songs Free download March 2010
4 comments

5

Vinnaithandi Varuvaya Movie Review March 2010

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Add New Twitter Share Button In Your WordPress Blog

Image via CrunchBase

Hi Friends, Recently Twitter has released new twitter share buttons to share stories on twitter like Tweetmeme , So I have integrate it in my wordpress blog via using sharethis service. Today I got one mail by shrethis that they are providing twitter button services, So I have checked their tutorials and integrated twitter tweet button in my blog, You can see that button in this post top in social networking icons area in center. So I thought that It would be good if I share this on my site, So this can help anyone.

First you have to register with sharethis  . After register just login to get your unique publisher key. When you logged in sharethis you will see your unique publisher key at right side top. Just copy it because we need to enter this publisher key to show twitter button. Now below is the code by which you can show new twitter tweet buttons on your website.

<span></span>
<span></span>

// <!–[CDATA[–>
javascript” src=”http://wd.sharethis.com/button/buttons.js”&gt;
// ]]>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
stLight.publisher=”123456″;
</script>

Now as you see in the above code, green part is for facebook  count button, means If you want to show facebook count also then you should have green part else you can remove it. Now number in RED, Just replace it with your publisher key which you got after logged into sharethis.Save your file and enjoy new twitter tweet button.

Let me know if you have any problem with this, I can try to solve it out.

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