It's probably a little late, but happy belated birthday to WordPress.com. The first thing I probably said the moment I knew about it from Lorelle was "Has it been that long already?", but it has been one year and what an interesting one year it has been. I remember the days when I heard Matt mentioning around somewhere about WordPress going "dot com", all I could do was shrug my shoulder and keep to whatever stuff I was doing to my WordPress.

Of course, then came what some of us still remember as the Alpha testing period of WordPress.com where you had to get an invite and try it out for yourself. Back then, no one but the core people working on WordPress.com knew what was going on. So people like myself had many speculations, we kept the public interested, we gave as much news as we could squeeze out from what we know and guessed. Then the big day happened.

WordPress.com went live to everybody. Sure you couldn't do much with it back then. There were no fancy widgets, you couldn't edit your theme and you barely had any theme to choose from and God there were the bugs because WordPress.com was the unofficial testing ground for the then unreleased WordPress 2.0 Duke.

But now, it has come a long way. We got widgets. We got a growing number of themes you can choose and for a negligible fee a year, edit your sandbox theme to your liking. We got a strong community with great members like my favourite WordPress blogger in the world – Lorelle. WordPress.com is perpetually in development in both what you can see and what you can't and that I don't have to say is a good thing. Who knows what cool features you might have in the future? That's something you can hear about from people who do use WordPress.com…unless you start using it yourself. In any case, for one year of of being here with one foot foward all the time.

Happy Birthday WordPress.com

On a related note, a big congratulations to the standalone version WordPress. They've already surpassed one million downloads as it is and is still continuing. Now I don't know a lot about software, but I think that's usually a good thing. Almost Mcdonalds like even. Still…as a hardcore WordPress user, I think that pretty much goes to say how successful WordPress is as a blogging software. You can't be that successful if there isn't any reason behind it. So why don't you give it a chance and try it out if you already haven't. Who knows?

It just might surprise you.