It’s now eight months since I started this programming blog, with the Design Patterns in the Wild post. So far I’ve published 73 posts on various topics. I started out just fine, then fell behind in posting during the holidays seasons. When I got back from my vacation I got back into posting occasionally. In February I found the right posting schedule for me, which is two posts a week.

I now post regularly on Mondays and Thursdays. The Monday posts are hands on technical issues with code samples in C#, SQL or JavaScript. The Thursday posts are about software development in general. Even though the subjects varies from in depth technical details to general software project experiences I think that most posts should be interesting to professional .NET developers.

The number of visitors have been increasing every month and are now up to about 500 visits a day with about 1000 daily page views. I think I’ve got about 100 RSS subscribers (There are 45 subscribers through Google Reader alone). I’ve had visitors from nearly 150 countries around the world.

The Programmer Time Translation Table

The biggest success is definitely the programmer time translation table I wrote nearly two months ago. To be honest, I didn’t think it was that good myself and even considered not publishing it. I’m glad I did. When the post was featured at MSDN Channel9 traffic started rising. During the following week the post was linked from a number of sites (currently linked from 60 sites according to Google Webmaster Tools). The post has been tweeted over 500 times and there have been 700 other social network sharings of it. Totally there’ve been over 34000 views of that page.

DZone

I read about DZone and decided to sign up and post links to my content there. It really helped getting traffic and subscribers. After some time at DZone I read about the DZone MVB program and applied. I really didn’t expect to be accepted, but Mitch at DZone liked my writing and approved me. So far 19 of my posts have been cross posted to DZone, with the 7 programmer recruiting mistakes alone having more than 19000 views.

Continued Blogging

I’m planning to continue writing the way I’ve done the last few months, with a deeply technical Monday post and more general Thursday post. I’m of course keeping an eye on the statistics to see what content is popular and what is not. Even though the most successful posts have been more on the opinion side rather than code samples, it is the code samples that attract search traffic. Especially the EF Migrations series attracts new visitors every single day (even though many probably never come back).

Please Give Feedback!

I’m of course interested in feedback from my readers. How did you find my blog? If you subscribed, what content did you subscribe for? Is the mix of technical posts on Mondays and more general posts on Thursdays good or should I focus on one of them? If you have any comments, suggestions or just want to tell me how awesome I am, please leave a comment.

Statistics

When I first started out this blog I found it hard to find statistics of programming blogs to compare my own visitor counts to, so I’ll share my statistics so far. I’m using two major statistics tools, one is based on web server log analysis and the other one is Google Analytics. I’ve included both in the table because they differ quite a lot. The truth is probably somewhere between them. The web server logs include visits by robots (search engine indexing and spam bots) while Google Analytics is probably blocked by many users running ad blocking software.

	Server Logs		Google Analytics
Month	Visits	Page Views	Visits	Page Views
November	116	771	N/A	N/A
December	1190	3005	N/A	N/A
January	1245	3002	N/A	N/A
February	2336	4899	189	400
March	3934	8518	693	1273
April	7768	16547	1977	3075
May	9964	22316	2877	3889
June	34447	73808	20970	25630
July	15713	31857	4971	6578
Totals	76713	164723	31677	40845
Dzone Page Views		60456
Totals, including Dzone		225179