For those interested in monitoring the progress of WordPress.com, Matt has posted the January statistics for WordPress.

Here are the statistics Matt has provided:

• 372,519 blogs were created.
• 393,836 new users joined.
• 4,592,097 file uploads.
• 2,710 gigabytes of new files.
• 553 terabytes of content transferred from our data centers.
• 8,771,891 comments.
• 6,528,657 logins.
• 1,073,421,738 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 945,105,050 on self-hosted blogs (2,018,526,788 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,373,108 active blogs and 18,768,022 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,295,531,829 words.

The progress is pretty amazing and is definitely well deserved.

A few days ago, I wrote a guest post on Pro Blog Design about creating a Stats page for your WordPress blog. One day later, Kyle, who liked the article, wrote a post here on WP Hacks to let you know about my guest post.  One of WP Hacks readers, Wesley, enjoyed the post and decided to create a WordPress plugin to enhance the functionality of my initial hacks.

The plugin, entitled “Blog Stats” makes available a number of statistics about your blog, including number of posts, comments, trackbacks, users and categories, PageRank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and Feedburner RSS count.  To ensure you always have the most up to date values, the plugin automatically update statistics on a daily basis.

How to Install and use the Blog Stats WordPress Plugin

First, you have to download the plugin on Wesley’s website or on the WordPress.org page.

Once you have it, unzip it on your hard drive and upload the plugin file to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress blog.

Login to your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins page and activate Blog Stats.

You now have a bunch of new shortcodes that you can use in pages and posts. If you don’t know what a shortcode is or want more info about it, I wrote some shortcodes-related posts on WP Recipes.

Ready to use Template

Feel lazy? After you installed the plugin, just create a new page and paste the following code in it. It will output all stats available from the Blog Stats plugin.

user_count: [user_count]
post_count: [post_count]
page_count: [page_count]
comment_count: [comment_count]
trackback_count: [trackback_count]
avg_comments_per_post: [avg_comments_per_post]
category_count: [category_count]
tag_count: [tag_count]
link_count: [link_count]
pagerank: [pagerank]
technorati_authority: [technorati_authority]
technorati_rank: [technorati_rank]
alexa_rank: [alexa_rank]
feedburner_subscribers: [feedburner_subscribers]
google_backlinks: [google_backlinks]
yahoo_backlinks: [yahoo_backlinks]
delicious_bookmarks: [delicious_bookmarks]

That’s all. I must say that I like this plugin a lot and Wesley really did a nice job!