Techstacks Sites - 2010 Year in Review
With 2010 drawing to a close, this post is simply about documenting accomplishments, failures, observations, and statistics for the past year. 2010 brought the number of web sites I personally run to four:
- Techstacks Tools - A Google App Engine, Groovy, and Gaelyk framework experiment, which initially started at as an online version of my Bling blog pinging script written in groovy.
- Techstacks Promos - Another experiment, this time with blog promotions. My main blog started to feel like it was becoming heavily advertisement-oriented and full of promotions. Since I didn't really understand whether or not this was providing any value to visitors of the site, I decided to consolidate most of the promotions and advertisements into a promotions-only mini-site.
- Techstacks HOWTO Guides - A mini-site dedicated to providing instructions for specific system administrative tasks in Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, etc.
- Blogging Techstacks - This blog.
Statistics
Using data from Google Analytics, for 2010 this blog has had a little over 79,000 Visits and about 101,400 pageviews. For 2009, there were 52,074 visits and 73,608 pageviews. One item of note however is that my bounce rate got worse in 2010 as opposed to 2009, with more people visiting the site for one specific item then leaving.
The geographic breakdown is pretty neat as the United States accounts for about 38% of visits. Visits from 168 countries including 32 countries in Africa indicate the blog certainly has a global reach (although no visits yet from Greenland or from Antarctica).
Firefox accounted for almost 48% of traffic. Internet Explorer came in second with about 28% of traffic. Google Chrome zoomed past Safari at number 3 with 16% of the site's traffic. Safari accounted for about 4% of site visits, which is relatively unchanged from last year. Rounding out the top 5 is Opera.
RSS/Atom Subscribers rose from about 45 on January 1, 2010 to an average of about 79 and I increased my number of followers on Twitter to 41 and many of those twitter accounts following this site are real people!
The HOWTO site has about 14,700 visits and 17,400 page views—this past week, the site reached its 20,000th pageview milestone. Launched this year, the Techstacks Promos site had about 640 visits and a little over 1,000 page views. Finally, the Techstacks Tools google app engine-hosted site has has about 600 visits and about 2,400 page views. If measuring strictly based on bounce rate, the Techstacks Tools site is the most successful web site with an average of 4 pageviews per visit.
Accomplishments
As previously mentioned, 100,000 pageviews in a year for an independent, open-sourced web and app server blog from a no-name systems engineer seems pretty great!
CryptoNark was updated several times throughout the year and it was very gratifying to see it get used as inspiration for a similar tool that tests for Australian DSD ISM compliance as well as seeing screenshots of its output posted on other sysadmin sites. In addition, cryptonark was highlighted on the PenTestIT site as a useful tool.
This past year, I also wrote EVNark, which is a groovy script that parses an X.509 certificate and outputs whether the SSL certificate securing a web site is an extended validation one or not.
October 15th was this blog's best day ever due to a JBoss vs. SpringSource post getting submitted to DZone. One day total visits was 670, which is over twice a typical weekday.
Failures
Advertising. I've written about it before so there isn't much more to say. AdSense ads typically pay out the best but they are not clicked on more than two or three times a month. Affiliate ads and links are clicked on much more frequently but no one buys. It would be great to see this turn around but I suppose I just need to assume that these sites are not going to generate advertising revenue.
Barring any huge news item coming out in the next 7 hours, this will be the last post of the year. Happy New Year everyone!
