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What happened with the Internet in 2009?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way. 
Wordpress has risen to be a powerhouse on the Internet that now dominates the blogosphere. It was started by the (now) 25-year-old Matt Mullenweg. Last week he was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis. On the show Matt revealed that Wordpress has such a strong presence on the Internet that at least one in three Americans online have visited a Wordpress blog in the last month.
Wordpress lets you use thousands of powerful plugins that complement and extend the platform in a variety of ways. I have scoured the Wordpress Plugin Directory to find the very best plugins to share with you in this post.
With the rise of microblogging, URL shortening services have become extremely popular. And no wonder; just imagine sharing links on Twitter without one. Although some of these services have considerably more market share than others (we’re looking at you, Bit.ly and TinyURL), there are plenty of options out there.
One thing that has surprised us a bit here at Pingdom is that we haven’t seen any real numbers on how reliable and how fast these different URL shorteners are compared to each other. After all, adding a layer on top of the target URL (the direct link) means slower access and also adds a single point of failure, so these things should matter. So, we decided to test them.
Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.
Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!
That constant blog companion, the RSS feed, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. These days RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but that wasn’t always the case. The meaning of RSS has changed a number of times since its initial inception in 1999.
Here is a look at the evolution of the meaning of RSS.
A huge number of blogs use Feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. Since the service was launched in 2004, it’s pretty much become the de facto standard for this. With so many bloggers relying on Feedburner, reliability and performance is of course extremely important. RSS feeds, just like websites, need to be available all the time on the Web.
We have tested Feedburner’s RSS feed performance and uptime.
We’re closing in on 500 articles here in our blog (this is number 498), and a fair share of these have been articles that are useful to webmasters (including bloggers). Therefore, here is a selection of our best and most useful articles written with webmasters in mind.
To help you out we have sorted the articles into groups. The index is at the top of the post.
Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.
For this survey we have monitored the websites of nine blogging services for a period of four months to see how much downtime they have. The included services were Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogster, Blog.com, Vox, Squarespace, Windows Live Spaces and LiveJournal.
The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.
Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.
An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.
For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)
But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?
