technology, networking and IP telephony
PersonalComputing
State of the Blog 2011
4October 13, 2011
It’s that time of year again… where I review the overall success and cost of running this blog (and forums) and I post some general thoughts about the past year and try to solicit new ideas for the future. I’m totally amazed when I think that it’s been 4 years now since I started blogging back in October 2007 on Blogger. Technology has come a long way in those 4 years as have I both professionally and personally.
Content
While I haven’t been winning any awards for my journalist talent it has been rewarding to hear the feedback from all the wonderful people that I’ve met either on my blog or in the discussion forums. I’m hoping to round up some guest bloggers in the future and try broadening the topics I generally cover. If you’ve got a knack for technical writing and you’d like to see your name in lights please drop me a line.
Forums
The forums have been a pretty big success in my opinion although there’s still a lot more I’d like to see us achieve. I’ve had a lot of help which I need to acknowledge here from Flintstone, Dominik, Paul and Artur. Without these guys the forums wouldn’t be half the place they are today. Thanks guys!
The forums have grown tremendously over the past year, we’ve seen a 359% increase in overall traffic with some 51,116 unique visitors to the forums generating some 81,766 visits and 239,651 pageviews in total. We have a total of 681 registered users with 421 users have made at least one post or more. Over the past year we’ve had visitors from 125 different countries.
Finances
The financials are pretty straight forward. In calendar year 2010 I paid out around $378.42 to GoDaddy, and RIMU for domain names, hosting, etc. I collected around $367.41 in advertising revenue which came from Google Adsense and a few direct advertising sales. So while we were in the red again this year I was only down $11.01 which made my wife quite happy.
Let me say “Thank you” to the sponsors and all those that take the time and effort to follow my blog.
Blog Traffic
There’s been a slow but stead increase in blog traffic over the past 12 months. Looking at some of the Google Analytics data I can see that there has been approximately a 94% increase in visits (23,633), unique visitors (17,944) and pageviews (44,489) comparing the June-July 2011 timeframe to the same timeframe in 2010. Over the past year there were some 159,872 unique visitors to the blog generating some 232,498 visits and 440,725 pageviews in total.
The traffic increase has been steady enough that I’ve had to investigate CDN solutions and deploy caching plug-ins such as W3TC in an effort to keep up with all the traffic. In January we received a free upgrade from RIMU that we applied to the VPS and increased our memory from 480MB to 740MB. With the upgrade we were able to increase the number of web clients we can support concurrently. We were also able to install APC to help with PHP caching and increase the amount of caching within MySQL all in an effort to boost the servers overall performance and decrease the time which it takes to serve up the content to you the user.
Future
I’m not sure what the future holds. The global economy has been all over the place this past year and the uncertainty ways on everyone as people try to “do more with less”. You’ll probably find me here again next year blogging away. Perhaps I’ll make good on my last years claim to start making some screencasts.
What would you like to see?
Cheers!
Home Desktop Upgrade 2011
2October 3, 2011
It was that time again for yet another upgrade to the old home desktop.
I thought I had posted about my last upgrade but I can’t seem to find the post right now. In any case this time it was the impending release of Battlefield 3 that ultimately drove me to replace my aging Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB with a MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB. I’ve been lumbering along with the 8800GTS for the past 4 years so it was time for an upgrade.
While doing my research between the NVIDIA and AMD options I came across a lot of cooling issues between both the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series and the NVIDIA GeForce 560, 570 and 580 series. In the end I decided to give AMD a try since the last few cards I’ve purchased where NVIDIA and I decided to go with the pricier MSI R6590 Twin Frozr II since it had some great reviews and in user feedback it was reported to be one of the cooler running cards on the market.
I also took the opportunity (while the case was open) to replace my dying power supply. I chose a Rosewill Xtreme Series RX750-S-B 750W power supply. I’ve gone through two Antec power supplies in the past three years and last year I used a Rosewill 650W in my wife’s computer and it’s still going strong, despite running almost 24×7.
What am I running these days?
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 @2.83Ghz
- 8GB G.Skill PC2-6400 DDR2 memory (4 sticks)
- Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard
- 150GB Western Digital Raptor SATA II hard disk
- 1TB Western Digital SATA II hard disk
- Antec P180 case
- Rosewill RX750 power supply
- Logitech G15 keyboard
- Logitech G5 mouse
- Logitech C910 webcam
- ASUS 27″ LCD display
I won’t waste to much ink here but let me just say that the map(s) in Battlefield 3 beta are just spectacular with this card. I definitely need to go back and play a few rounds of Battlefield Bad Company 2 with this video card just to see what the maps really look like now that I have the hardware to play it on high settings. It amazing how much eye candy is lost when you need to dial down the settings so you can play a newer game on older hardware.
While on the topic of gaming let me give a shout out to Tactical Gamer.
If you’re a mature gamer looking for some good times and teamwork orientated tactics give Tactical Gamer a look.
I know your all embarrassed to admit it but you can’t be all work and no play.
Anyone else a gamer? If so what games do you enjoy?
Cheers!
Thycotic Software – New Sponsor
0September 17, 2011
I’m happy to announce that Thycotic Software has become a long-term supporting sponsor of this blog. You might have noticed their ad running at the top of the right column for the past few months (I feel like that guy screaming in the ad on a daily basis). You can find Thycotic on Twitter at @Thycotic. Thanks to Jonathan and all the folks over at Thycotic for their past, current and future support.
I’d encourage anyone interested in password management solutions to give Thycotic’s Secret Server and Password Reset Server products serious consideration.
Thycotic Software
Thycotic is a Microsoft Silver Certified partner that has provided secure software products, development and training to the information technology industry, individual consumer and small business markets since 1996.
Thycotic Software leads in the field of Microsoft .NET-based Agile development using Test Driven Development (TDD) and other lean techniques to deliver reliable code that meets the user’s needs. Secret Server, their password management software, has been tested by Veritest, featured on Larkware’s Daily Grind, download.com, and is trusted and depended on by small businesses and large corporations every day.
Secret Server
Enterprise Password Management for IT Administrators.
Manage and protect your organization’s most vulnerable secrets: your privileged passwords.
With Secret Server enterprise password management software, you and your colleagues can control access to critical enterprise passwords in one centralized, web-based repository. Our password management software offers permissioned users secure access to passwords and other privileged information.
Store, distribute, change, audit in a secure environment.
Password Reset Server
Self-Service Password Reset Tool for End-users
Stop wasting your time doing password resets for employees.
Reduce calls to your Help Desk and let employees reset their own forgotten passwords through a series of secure questions and images, and even telephone verification.
A self service password reset, Password Reset Server combines ease-of-use with advanced security, and meets Section 508 compliance standards. And our free 500-user trial means you have 30 days of full access to the kind of self-service software your Help Desk will appreciate.
You’ll find trial copies of both Secret Server and Password Reset Server on Thycotic’s website.
Thanks again to Thycotic Software for their support!
