One Year of Blogging
The coming Tuesday (July 20) will be the one year anniversary of this weblog. Time to look back and reflect.
It all started when, on the way back from an OCI Java lunch one day, Eric Burke asked me if I knew anything about blog aggregators. Of course I did not, but with Google I learned all about it pretty quickly. I used nntp://rss for a while. Then I found out about Simon Brown's Pebble while researching my JBoss talk at the St. Louis JUG. I dropped the war file into my JBoss server, configured it in a few minutes, tweaked the stylesheet a bit, and started blogging.
During the year, I wrote 176 entries, totaling 353K bytes and 44K words, as reported by wc(1). I spent an estimated 100 hours composing those entries.
Most of the hits come from Google, and JavaBlogs, which I joined in January. There are 124K page views recorded. The most popular entries are:
- Subversion: Two Weeks Later (1020)
- NetBeans 3.6: Still Annoying (1015)
- JDK 1.5 Beta 2 Tidbits (877)
- JARPATH (828)
- Subversion: First Impression (684)
- IDEA 4.0, J2SDK 1.5.0 Beta 1, Generify, ... (674)
- The Desire to Make the Light Green (609)
- Fedora Core 2, nVidia GeForce 4 MX, Windows 2000 Dual Boot, ... (595)
- nXML is Fantastic (582)
In the early months of blogging, I constantly worried about things like "What am I going to blog today?" Brad Shuler helped me by constantly point out "There's your blog!" during conversations.
The referrers pages and the web server logs has been a source of amusement. I learned quite a few new country codes while reading these log files. The Google search words that lead people to my pages sometimes is just unbelievable. ("Did I write about that?")
All in all, my experience with blogging has been a really positive one. My thanks go to everybody who bothered to subscribe to my feed. I guess I'll just keep on blogging.
BTW, my aggregator of choice now is Bloglines.