2011

Around new years eve, Automattic’s Data team sends out an annual report — a summary of your blogging in the year that passed. It’s a verbosely written summary of which posts had the most traffic, which images had the most views and overall what happened to your blog. This year we bumped the design and featureset quite a bit and included lavish JavaScript & Canvas based fireworks (built, tweaked, made beautiful and open-sourced by Andy Skelton). We even managed to include Jetpack users this year (counting stats for as long as Jetpack has been installed and active).

A lot of hard work went in to making this happen, and as always it’s such a pleasure to watch my co-workers make magic happen. I invite you to see this blogs 2011 annual report:

Annual report: Noscope 2011 in blogging

Put a Jetpack on your WordPress

Exciting times at Automattic. We’ve just launched Jetpack, a brand new plugin for your WordPress blog. It brings you features that were previously WordPress.com only. A lot of features, actually — you should visit jetpack.me to find out all the nitty gritty details — but my favourite features are these:

All new, iPad friendly WordPress.com Stats
Some unannounced upcoming features!

I’m so completely proud to have played a part in the team-effort design of the Jetpack experience. We really, really hope you like it.

Abstract helper monkey paintings for WordPress.com Stats

Not many days ago, WordPress.com sent out annual recap emails to a number of WordPress.com blogs, including TechCrunch. Part of that email was an “Attractions in 2010″ list of 5 top posts of the past year. This section included an image, chosen from one of those top posts. Not all blogs we emailed had such an image, however, and for those that didn’t, I painted a number of “abstract helper monkey paintings inspired by the stats”. Here they are:

I’ve joined Automattic

Exciting news today! I’ve joined Automattic, the company that makes WordPress.com. I’ll be a full-time design wrangler.

I’ve done some consulting for Automattic in the previous months (most recently with regards to Stats), but the offer to join the company full-time came out of the blue. I wasn’t actually looking for fulltime employment, but the possibility of working with these supremely talented people on improving my favourite platform, while staying in Denmark which is near my favourite country (Sweden), was a combination offer that was simply too good to pass up.

I don’t have any more specifics at the moment, but feel free to question me up in the comments and I’ll try and answer if I can.

Overhauled WordPress.com Stats

It’s something I’m completely proud to have been working on for the past few weeks (along with the incredible Automattic team!): WordPress.com has a new overhauled stats page. This first round of the overhaul brings sortable dashboard-esque boxes to the stats page, and a revamped non-Flash, iPad compatible histogram bar chart.

On the whole, the community seems to like the new look, but a number of people miss the old line-chart and a few others find the new design boxy and uninspired. Which is their prerogative and I won’t spend too much time defending it, other than say that a lot of thought been poured into the revamp, and personally I think and hope it’ll grow on people. As for histogram charts, there are a lot of good, semantic, reasons for going with them. But my personal favourite is the large hit area each bar provides, for when you want to look at individual day stats. Penny for your thoughts?

Limbo

Launched yesterday is a brand-spanking new-material-laden WordPress website for Limbo, an artistic, sidescrolling platformer. Limbo is engineered by Copenhagen-based Playdead Games which I’m proud to call my neighbours. As you can see from the screenshot above, the game is absolutely gorgeous, and it’s even better-looking when it’s moving, so you should definately check out the newest trailer on the website, and this gameplay footage from Gametrailers.com.

Dejligt Means Nice In Danish

Just a week ago, I finally jotted down the last lines of code for what’s about to become my only “corporate” website: Dejligt. There’s all sorts of new stuff there which I’ve been working on for the last year. It even sports an ajaxified version of WordPress which is totally less userfriendly but should hopefully wow a few clients.

Most interestingly to you readers I imagine, is the fact that once again I’m separating work from play. As the name indicates, the most customers I get are Danish, and so English is now optional. For this blog, that once again means a focus on “snacksized portions of pointless stuff”. I’ll be removing all traces of dull work stuff and merely advertise “dejligt” for those looking for it. I’ll be looking forward to working on a small redesign which could hopefully breathe some life into the things about this I enjoy the most; thought on usability, B-movie reviews and otherwise awesome stuff. Sure, I’ll need some new shelves but thank science I know a danish webdesigner that can help me out.

Work: !Solid Underworld

I recently put the final touches on one of the biggest projects in my freelance career so far: !Solid Underworld. Don’t let the name fool you, this is no full Flash-site—this was a requirement for my undertaking of the project. No, despite this being a new danish avant-garde clothing brand, the !Solid Underworld website is an XHTML/CSS website, powered by WordPress. This ensures open standards all the way from the frontend and backend to usability and accessibility.

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