2021 is almost behind us, so it’s time, to sum up, what happened during this year. And believe us, a lot has happened.

This year was… different. We became parents and this flipped our world upside-down. Was it difficult? Yes, but we made it. We had to micro-optimize some processes, but overall we didn’t miss an issue. Releasing WP Owls became a routine.

Some numbers

Let’s start with some numbers, as they are quite interesting.

This year we published 51 issues. In those issues, we published 977 unique links (last year the Polish version published 571 unique links). As you can see this number had really increased.

Those links came from about 379 domains (266 last year). Those were our favorite sources:

• WebDevStudios
• WP Tavern
• wordpress.org
• Delicious Brains
• github
• Speckyboy
• Kinsta

Thanks, everyone for creating interesting content – we couldn’t do our job without you.

We finished last years’ summary with “As you see, this is our first article on WP Owls. We hope to publish more!” – and we made it – we published 12 articles. While it’s not much, we’re very proud of this number as we mostly concentrate on finding news, rather than creating content from scratch. Of course, again, we wouldn’t do it all by ourselves. Big thanks go to:

• Olga Glecker
• Leon Stafford
• Konstantin Kovshenin
• Matt Watson
• Vinny McKee

If you would like to help us beat this number next year and write something for us – feel free to DM us on Twitter.

We also had some luck on Twitter. We finished 2020 having a bit over 300 followers. Now over 1300 people are following us. We couldn’t be happier. During this year we’ve surpassed two big milestones – 500 and 1000 followers.

Guest editors

We mentioned this year ago, but let us repeat ourselves: “we recognize that we live in a bubble. To broaden our view, we decided to invite guest editors who brought in a lot of fresh air. What’s more, they have inspired us incredibly”.

Can you imagine that we had 25 guest editors this year? We really don’t know how to thank you all apart from listing you all here and saying THANK YOU.

Here are our heroes:

• Jonathan Bossenger
• Joe Casabona
• Tammie Lister
• Bob Dunn
• Angela Jin
• Alex Standiford
• Rich Tabor
• Joost de Valk
• Iain Poulson
• Leon Stafford
• Milana Cap
• Keith Devon
• Sergey Biryukov
• Chris Lema
• Brad Williams
• Nick Adams
• Igor Benić
• Oana Filip
• Leonardo Losoviz
• Raphael Sztwiorok
• Lesley Sim
• Tomasz Dziuda
• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Marieke van de Rakt
• Francesca Marano

The podcast

This year we did a short experiment – we recorded 4 episodes of WP Owlcast. We were quite happy with the results. It was really fun talking with Birgit, Greg, Lesley, Nate, and Dan. On the other hand – we only have 24 hours each day thus we need to decide if we have the resources to record some other episodes.

Some fame

In the 2021 we had the honor to be a media partner of some really incredible WordPress events:

• WordFest
• WPMRRR
• WordUp Warsaw
• WordUp Lublin

Next year we hope to make this list a bit longer.

We also had the pleasure to talk about WP Owls in a few podcasts:

• Joe Casabona
• Matt Medeiros
• Joe Howard

This was really an honor. Thank you for all the opportunities. If you would like to invite us – DM us on Twitter.

Plans for 2022

Overall 2021 was a bit chaotic for us. That’s why our main plan for 2022 is to do some cleaning up of the back-end of WP Owls. Thanks to those changes we want to save some precious minutes while creating each issue.

Apart from this, we want to continue what we are doing already – finding interesting articles and inviting great guests.

I also hope that we’ll have at least a few chances to meet some of you in person during some WordCamps.

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