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!