Today we present to our beloved stats addicts a new way to perceive numbers: stats tables! Tabular data is arranged in convenient grids so you can easily compare values along two dimensions: columns and rows. Headings along the top and left edges provide context and orientation. Alternating rows are faintly shaded to improve readability. Surely you have seen these things before.

Three new tables are available today: Months and Years, Average per Day, and Recent Weeks. They were modeled after tables Matt created for displaying top-secret WordPress.com metrics. Each one resembles a calendar in its own way. You probably won’t want to refresh these as often as some other stats pages—only a few of the table cells will be updated—but I won’t try to stop you. I know what it’s like.

Business folks and aesthetes alike will revel. The math-minded among you can throw away your calculators: the tables already include useful sums and averages, the results of arcane formulas you’d rather forget anyway. And put away your crayons, artistic types: colorful numbers illustrate percent change for recent weeks and a yellow box highlights the greatest value in each table. The other Matt helped with the colors, despite his colorblindness.

I know how some people cling to their calculators and crayons. If you are compelled to verify my computations, please first read the math notes below the tables. They should explain why the numbers don’t always add up. I hope you find the logic logical.

Ah, but how do you get there? The new Summary Tables button reveals tables for the whole blog. Tables for each post are shown on the same page as individual post charts, so just click the little icon to see those. The new tables are available to WordPress.com bloggers as well as bloggers using the WordPress.com Stats plugin (no upgrade required). Please enjoy responsibly.

Note to 1992: I almost put “Totally” in the title. It was not easy to resist.

Blogging is about more than sharing your ideas. It’s about sharing your discoveries: quotes, images, videos, announcements from awesome blogs like this one. And it’s about doing it quickly.

Collect and share bits of the web easier and faster than ever with Press This, the new WordPress bookmarklet.

Check out this video to see how it works:

For those more textually inclined, here’s the rundown:

1. Drag the Press This bookmarklet to your toolbar from the Shortcuts section to the right of your post editor.
2. Surf the web.
3. Click the Press This button in your toolbar any time you find something cool you want to re-post. Try highlighting text first if that’s what you want to share.
4. Select and arrange text, images, video, or quotes within the Press This window. Add your thoughts and edit at will.
5. Publish (or save) directly from the window when you’re done.
6. Ta da! Your favorite content is now live on your blog, along with your brilliant insights.

“Monkey butt” — a popular search term

A while back we added charts showing how many views each post got since it was written. Some folks noticed that we omitted days with zero views. Now those days are included and the chart correctly dips to zero.

Can you believe it took that long to fix such a little bug? The fix was four lines of code. It was less than an hour of work. We were remiss. To make it up to our faithful Stats addicts we added similar charts for Referrers, Search Terms, and Clicks. Feast your eyes:

This change applies to WordPress.com bloggers as well as self-hosted WordPress bloggers using the WordPress.com Stats plugin—no upgrade required!

You can access these new charts by clicking on the “stats” icon next to the appropriate referrer, search term, or number of clicks.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s already time for our annual WordCamp San Francisco conference.

This year’s speaker lineup is, how to put it? Kickass. Not to mention swiftly growing. Automatticians and other awesome WordPress users will tell you all about:

• The future of WordPress
• How to be a better blogger
• Increasing traffic
• Fun with APIs

And tons more.

Be the first to catch a brand-new rap about WordPress by Chuck Lewis, aka The SEO Rapper. Got questions? Bring them to our version of the Genius Bar. The geniuses are itching to be stumped. Try it. I dare you.

This year’s conference is a one-day event, August 16 at the Mission Bay Conference Center. Signups will be closing soon, so head over to the WordCamp site to register.

There’s also a special event the day after WordCamp: the WordPress Charity Scavenger Hunt.

The team that racks up the most points completing missions and finding weird stuff around SF wins sweet WordPress schwag. All proceeds will go to 826 Valencia, a local non-profit dedicated to helping students advance their writing skills. Register via Eventbrite to participate.

July was an awesome month. We released our Open Source iPhone app and rolled out updates on WordPress.com in tandem with version 2.6 on WordPress.org. Here’s the stats rundown:

• 257,163 blogs were created.
• 271,427 new users joined.
• 3,110,479 file uploads
• About 1,381 gigabytes of new files.
• 395 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 6,245,424 comments.
• 4,868,359 logins.
• 812,287,538 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 567,059,283 on self-hosted blogs (1,379,346,821 pageviews total across WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,102,039 active blogs and 13,216,843 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.

Other interesting stuff:

We signed on The Real Dan Lyons as a VIP blogger (though you may know him as the Fake Steve Jobs).

You added more tags and categories than ever before: more than 8 thousand tags and 19 thousand categories.

You made great use of our new caption feature: more than 75 thousand in its first month.

Writers for Maclean’s, Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine, now blog with WordPress VIP.

It’s 10 o’clock on a Saturday. Do you know where your WordPress support team is?

Logged on and answering your questions!

Blogging on WordPress is easy, but sometimes you need a hand. Enter the Happiness Engineers, a team of support staff dedicated to answering your questions and tackling any problems you may have.

Not long ago, our team was online 9 a.m to 4 p.m. PDT to answer your questions and keep your blog running smoothly. That was lame. Soon after, we brought it up to 24-hour support, five days and week, so those across the country and across the globe wouldn’t have to wait for their answers. Better, but still lame.

The time has come for help without delay. We hereby announce 24-7 support on WordPress.com.

We’ll try our best to reply to every request within 24 hours — usually much less. How fast can we really go? Send us a request to find out (but please only if you have a question).

Cheers! And happy blogging.

Tags and categories are an increasingly popular means of search and discovery. If you tag it, they will come.

That’s why we rolled out updates to include the display of tags and categories alongside posts — a task that’s now been completed on the few themes that we missed.

The result for you is increased traffic to your blog and a way for readers to find related items, which keeps them coming back. The result for your readers is easy navigation and a richer, more coherent experience throughout our more than 60 themes.

And because consistency is just as key as customization, we’ve also added the image alignment CSS classes to all themes so the images you lay out in the editor more closely match the results of your published post.

We’ve always been vigilant about keeping your data backed up and up-to-date. You deserve to have that kind of control, too.

That’s why there’s Post Revisions, which keeps a copy of the post or page you’re editing each time you save it. Even cooler, it allows you to look back at the five most recent saved changes and revert to an earlier version if you need to.

Post Revisions originated as a plugin called blicki by Ryan Boren. We improved the code and user experience for inclusion in WordPress 2.6, and have now enabled it for everyone on WordPress.com.

Post Revisions improves several things in WordPress…

Multi-author blogs: You can see who made changes to posts, and when.

Undo: If you accidentally delete a paragraph and then hit the save button, don’t worry! That old information is still there for you to reference or revert to.

Autosave: Autosave is now enabled for all posts and pages, not just drafts.

And it’s got pretty colors, too.

To try out Post Revisions, select a revision date in the Post Revisions section under the text editor. Select another date in the revisions list, click Compare Revisions, and you can check out the two versions of your post side by side, with changes clearly highlighted.

If you like what you see in a prior post better, just click Restore for that date and the post is reverted back (with a new version stored next time you save, of course).

WordPress bloggers love to share their photos and images with each other, so perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that when we removed the boring, old image icon that you wrote to us lamenting its disappearance.

But if you haven’t noticed already, there’s nothing to fear, for in its place is the Add an Image button in the Media Toolbar, which has been around for a bit but is now more robust than ever — making it the only thing you’ll need to add and organize photos.

Among its newest features is an easy-to-add caption tool. Just write your caption in the caption field before inserting an image and, voila, the caption displays below the photo inside a tasteful frame.

Adding an Image and Caption

Image as it Appears in the Post

To add captions to an image you’ve already uploaded, select the image in the Visual Editor and click the landscape icon for Edit Image. You’ll be presented with the Image Editor, which lets you resize, realign, edit the title, add a caption, and change the image link URL.

The Image Editor

Prefer the HTML editor? There’s a shortcode* for it, too.

*(Check out this page of the FAQ for a definition of “shortcode” and a list of more handy embeds.)

If you’re an iPhone user — and I expect there will be a few more of you on July 11th — these latest updates are for you.

First we’ve updated our mobile interface, which you can reach at m.wordpress.com, to be much more iPhone friendly. It’s still not sexy, but it’s quite snappy and is great for checking your stats, posting an entry, or posting a bookmark on the go.

Second we’ve updated the Prologue theme to be much friendlier to iPhones both for browsing and posting. We now have about half a dozen Prologues that we use internally at Automattic to coordinate our development, support, and even communication with contractors, so I’ve been testing this out pretty heavily over the last few days and it’s quite handy.

I think the iPhone is a pretty exciting new platform, and I think we’ll do more to embrace it in the future. Having such a powerful browser available on the phone really opens up what you can do. I recently picked up a N95 because I’ve heard people compare it favorably to the iPhone, but the web experience is terrible! Once you get used to that touchscreen, it’s hard to go back.

Here are two snapshots of the features in action: