The npm blog has been discontinued.
Updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog.
Numerically Precise Metrics
We just made a change to the count of “total packages” on the front page; the new number is ~2% lower.
The package count previously used a very simple method for counting that included packages that had been entirely unpublished, of which there were very few. Recently we got a large number of spam packages which we then deleted, which increased this number to the point that it seemed meaningful, so we switched to a more accurate count.