I thought it important to me that I should mark the first anniversary of my blog with a roundup post of the first year online for NiallBest.com.
My original goal of the site was to record interesting events and answers to difficult IT and programming situations I found myself in. Most of these came from my work environment but some good ones were discovered away from the office.
Another goal of the site was to try and post at least once a month, Something I nearly managed excluding a December holiday. I actually keep a folder with ideas for blog posts on my computer. Some of them translate well into a post while others are far too lengthy and really quite dull.
A year is certainly a long time in computing terms and it’s somewhat of shame that I no longer get to program as much as I enjoy too. With a change of employment I find myself sat in airport lounges a lot more that I sit writing code in Microsoft .Net, which makes me thing I should include more personal programming posts in my next year of blogs.
This has allowed me to explore more of a technology side of computing rather than a straight forward programming solutions blog. I should think there will be a lot more posts in the coming year around the use of new technology and supporting the end users of new technology.
Top blog Posts
Over the whole year I was surprised by how popular some posts were, here are the best of them.
http://niallbest.com/dell-2950-strike-the-f1-key-to-continue/
One of my first posts to the blog but it still gets a surprising amount of traffic, it’s a really nasty issue.
http://niallbest.com/seagate-2tb-st32000542as-cc35-firmware-upgrade/
I never even realised you could (or might have to!) flash the firmware of a hard disk until we suffered the issue with Seagate 2TB disks nearly 12 months ago. This is by far the most read blog post on my site and it’s still receiving comments from people who are flashing their hard disks even now!
http://niallbest.com/using-windows-azure-tables-to-persist-session-data/
It was nice to get a good programming blog post out and Windows Azure was still very much in its infancy at this point. I was lucky enough to work for a company that was working with Microsoft using the Azure stack for a new product. Help at that time was thin on the ground so I hope this post helped a few folks out.
http://niallbest.com/sqlbits-7/
SQLBits 7 was my first real SQL conference; it was a blast and really useful learning resource. I was also lucky enough to be able to catch the train down in one day to attend. I wrote this mainly as a roundup of the conference for myself but also to impress on readers that conferences do work as a learning aid, even if they just spark you interest to go investigate something further on your own.
http://niallbest.com/draytek-vigor-ip-pbx-2820-linksys-spa941/
The Draytek IP PBX 2820 is a constant source of irritation at work and I was sure that other people out there might face the same woe. VoIP shouldn’t be difficult but situations conspire along with time constraints to make things hard.
I must have looked back at this page 10 times or more when doing config updates so for that reason alone it was a very useful blog post.
Stats
Some stats from the year:
- Over 22,000 visits
- 27,600 page views
- 15,800 unique visitors
- More than 50% of visits came from Google search engine
Visits from 144 different countries, top 5
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- Canada
- Russia
Web browser stats
- Firefox 38%
- IE 31%
- Chrome 18%
- Safari 5%
- Opera 5%