First off, welcome to the 1,321,980 new sites and blogs that decided to fly with WordPress.com this month! We're glad to have you aboard, and beverage service will begin shortly.

Wondering what you've gotten yourself into? Here are some January highlights:

Taking the 35,000-foot view

All across WordPress.com, your blogs racked up over four billion pageviews, representing 9,510,203,530,649,226 bytes of data.

(If that number is too big to make much sense, think of it this way: that's a whole lot of bytes -- 1.3MB for every single person on the planet.)

Those bytes represent the 39,705,625 posts you published this month. You shared 15,711,317 with your Publicize connections, and we featured 190 of them on Freshly Pressed, which intrigued you enough to click on them 174,650 times.

You were equally forthcoming with your feedback, leaving 49,931,074 comments on those posts. Something was in the air on January 22nd, your most prolific commenting day -- you left 1,806,114.

Please make sure your carry-on bags are stowed

Along with your words, you put a whole lot of other content and media into your posts, to the tune of:

  • 33,275,362 embedded tweets,
  • 7,162,761 Google docs,
  • 23,373,755 Flickr images,
  • 17,600,757 YouTube videos, and
  • 83,764 SlideShare presentations.

You traveled anywhere and everywhere

One of the things we love most about skimming the Reader is the infinite variety of topics and perspectives -- there's no subject you don't take on, and no angle you don't explore.

In January, you published 82,849 posts about music. The most popular day for music posts was January 27th, the day after the Grammys, when you wrote 5,838 posts on the awards.

The rhymesters among you also had a big month, publishing 57,712 posts on poetry. Some forms...

were more popular than others...

(Sadly, there were no palinodes or elegiac couplets. You're on notice for February, poets!)

As ever, humor was popular, with 23,810 posts. Satire accounted for 2,999 of those, while knock-knock jokes brought up the rear with 28.

Look out kittens: we're coming for you. (Photo by Tom Doeppner, CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Look out kittens: we're coming for you. (Photo by Tom Doeppner, CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Not surprisingly, new year's resolutions were a popular topic for January -- 21,925 of you put yours out there for the world to read. The freakish temperature changes caused by the polar vortex also got some love, with posts from 2,137 of you.

And because we know some of you are keeping score, dogs once again got the best of cats, with 9,195 and 6,111 posts, respectively. Look out in February, though -- the 192 posts on turtles suggest that there might be a new internet animal darling in town.

Your mechanics were also hard at work

Behind the scenes, 239 Automatticians worked to make your blogging experience as good as possible. (Want to be #240? We're hiring!)

Our Theme Team announced twelve new additions to the Theme Showcase -- our in-house team built the free themes Motif, Suits, Bushwick, Syntax, Sorbet, and McKinley, and we added the premium Poly, Moka, Ampersand, Studio, Outspoken, and Gallery themes thanks to our awesome partner theme shops.

The hardworking Happiness team posted 12,766 responses to your questions in the support forums, helping you understand the inner workings of your blogs and shape your themes to your whims. They also helped figure out where things could be improved, which our engineers did with the 9,082 fixes, big and small, that they made.

On the VIP side of WordPress.com, we welcomed new VIPs The Bloggess, Grantland, and Consequences of Sound (among others).

You've set the bar high for 2014! We can't wait to see where you take things in February.