Blogging in 2008

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This is my first blog post of 2009 and I just wanted to do a quick review of my past year blogging and also compare it with 2007. My general feeling before doing this, was that even though I have tried to dedicate more time to blogging, work and personal things haven’t allowed me to do this as much as I wanted. But let’s see the raw numbers and then draw a conclusion.

I posted exactly 91 articles during 2008, meaning an average of 8 per month. This sounds very low from the rate I am trying to achieve, but still it is a good improvement compared with 2007 when I had posted only 42 articles. The enthusiasm (and the extra time available I had back then) from my first year of blogging - 2006 - with 139 posts is still far away. I am definitely aiming for 2009 to be my best year in blogging (and not only ;-) ) and this should be doable with a little more dedication.

Ok, let’s move on at some traffic numbers. During 2008 this blog had 677,100 pageviews (+33.00% compared with 2007) from 456,703 unique visitors coming from 225 countries. Most of the users are from United States 33%, United Kingdom 7%, Germany 5.2%, Canada 4.3%, India, France, Italy, Netherlands, Australia, and Spain and many others. 66% use a version of Firefox and only 19% use Internet Explored to see my site. Google is still by far the biggest referral, but there are also other important ones like stumbleupon, linuxtoday.com, tuxmachines.org or fail2ban.org and eaccelerator.net

Feedburner count for my feedreaders was over 1,400 near the end of the year, while in 2007 it was not even close to 1,000 so this is a nice improvement.

As for top content the old posts from 2006 still get the highest traffic, while from the ones written in 2008 these were the ones that got some good traffic:

I have tried to add some more news stories as before (I am not trying to make this a news site) but only the ones that I found very interesting and important from the topics that I am focused on my work: debian, mysql, configuration management, virtualization, cloud computing, etc.. Also near the end of 2008 I started contributing to another blog - Linux System Admins Blog - where I have a weekly post.

To conclude, this was a much better year than 2007 and my extra efforts can be easily seen on the blog, but still I don’t have as much time as I would like to dedicate to my blog. If I will be able to make 2009 better I think this blog will be on the right track and should fulfill its purpose. If you have any suggestions or ideas for my blog as always I am open to all of your comments. Just let me know.

I wish you all a great 2009, and thank you again for being a reader of my blog,
- Marius -

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