It’s now two years since I started the Passion for Coding blog. I’d like to share a few thoughts about blogging and also say a big THANK YOU to everyone reading and commenting and sharing my posts. It is strange to know that my writing now reaches to almost every country in the world – to far more places than I have ever been or will ever be able to visit myself.

I would also like to thank DZone for accepting me as one of their Most Valuable Bloggers – without you I would never had got the same number of visits.

Code or Methodology Posts or Both?

Since the start of the blog I’ve published 140 posts about a variety of topics involving software development. There have been a number of posts with code samples (all code is now available in a GitHub repo). There have both been a number of instructional posts about how something specific works, but also a number of utility classes that are ready to use. I do put pride in having test run all the code I publish on the site. I do know that it works (at least until I forget to HTML escape something containing generics and all < and > go missing, spoiling the code).

I’ve also written a number of posts on software development methodology, with a clear focus on scrum. Personally I do like to mix the different kinds of writing. I hope that you enjoy reading the mix too – but I’m very interested on what you think about the mix. Would you prefer more code? Or more scrum thoughts?

Looking Forward

Looking forward the next major milestone will be hitting 1 million visits and 2 million page views (that’s insane numbers). Both will probably happen in January 2014.

If you are a regular reader you may have noticed a slight decline in the number of posts the last few months. The reason is that I’m spending more time on writing pure code as I’m working on my SAML2 implementation. I will probably continue spending some time of the the Kentor.AuthServices library, but I will also try to post more info here on how to use it.

I’m also thinking about collecting some of the utilities I’ve written and publishing them as separate packages (both as code and as Nuget packages) for easy inclusion in projects. From the traffic numbers and comments I do know that people are using things like the unit of work scope. Once more I’m happy if you leave comments with feedback: Would you appreciate having core utilities in a nuget package? Or does it work copying the code off the blog? It’s much more fun to write and publish things if I know that it actually is used by people.

Thinking about Starting Blogging?

In addition to providing useful code I also hope I can inspire some of you to start your own blog. In that case I can only give one advice: go ahead! Make the leap and setup a blog engine an write your first post. The blog engine does not need to be anything special (I’m running WordPress) and one of the standard layouts will do (this is a somewhat customized standard theme). What’s important is the content. It’s just to start writing and find your unique way of expressing yourself. If you are writing regularly on interesting topics, there will be readers. Post links to your posts to DZone or other sites to increase your audience.

The Catastrophy: Google Reader Shut Down

No review of the last years as a blogger is complete without mentioning the shut down of Google Reader. I still can’t understand why they did it, but I’m very thankful that Feedly acted so quickly and got a good alternative up and running. When Google Reader shut down I had a bit more than 200 subscribers and I’m nearly back at that number so it looks like the loss was temporary.

Statistics

As I’ve done before in my blogging retrospective posts[1][2] I continue to share my visiting statistics. The spike in October 2012 is the success of the Programmer Time Translation Table post. It’s still one of the most read posts on the blog and I doubt that I will ever write anything as successful again (but I will keep trying!).

If anyone can explain the huge difference between the numbers, please, PLEASE tell me which one to trust and why.