Its been about 8 months since I have been blogging on WordPress.com, and its only today that I observed a tiny smiley at the bottom of my Dashboard. As curiosity gets the best of us, so did mine, and I set out to find about what is this smiley face, and why is it there?

As it turned out this question has been asked in many ways over the WordPress forums. Some even thought that their blog had been hacked!

This smiley face is called “Angela” and its there to track the stats of your blog. If this image is on a page of your blog, it means that the stats of that page are being recorded.

In general its found on all WordPress.com themes.

If you right-click and check the URL of the image, it should in fact be pointing to stats.wordpress.com.

The image size is 6 px by 5 px and it’s really very tiny. Here’s the enlarged version of the smiley,

Can you remove the smiley face?

The smiley face is really small and is hardly observable except to the most scrutinizing ones! No, you can’t remove this smiley.

I found this smiley at the bottom really intriguing! Did you notice this smiley yet, if not, look closely and you’ll surely find Angela somewhere!

Do you have any more tid-bits, tips or suggestions, do mention them in the comments.