Five Years of Blogging

Published: So 01 Januar 2012
By mafr

In meta.

tags: web

When I started this blog in December 2006, I didn't think I'd keep going for five years. Now, more than a hundred articles later, there's still no shortage of topics to write about. Five years is like eternity in my line of business, so let's not dwell in the past. Anyway, I'm still going to have a brief look at what happened last year.

These were last year's most successful articles:

  1. Generating DDL Scripts from JPA Annotations with Maven
  2. Reverting a Commit in Subversion
  3. Parsing Command Line Options in Shell Scripts
  4. Generating DDL Scripts with Maven
  5. Ubuntu Natty vs. nVidia

That's pretty similar to 2010, the top four are well linked and seem to contain just the right keywords so search engines send a lot of traffic. The Ubuntu posting is a typical problem solving piece from this year that earned me some serious karma points, judging from the comments.

Traffic-wise, rants linked from link aggregators like DZone generate lots of page impressions in a short amount of time. So do problem solving articles until the underlying issue is fixed. But it's the HOWTO-style articles that generate steady traffic for years.

There was another thing that's interesting from a SEO point of view. Back in July I switched from a wordpress subdomain to my own domain, wondering what this would do to website traffic. Now I know: Page impressions dropped by 50% and it took almost two months to recover. This would have been really serious if this was an ad-supported website (which it isn't, the ads you see are from Wordpress.com, and I don't get a share).

Despite this sharp drop, compared to last year, page impressions have increased by more than 40%. While I'm still a very long shot from running a high-traffic blog, I could have made a bit of money that would more than cover typical hosting costs. But I'm still happy with Wordpress.com, so I won't bother.

So, that's it, enough meta blogging for this year. Thanks for reading and commenting and have a great new year!

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