It is just about that time again… time for a 2009 wrap-up post. 2009, what a year. Quite the mixed bag really. On the economic front, I feel very lucky that I am where I am. Many were struggling this year. My family and I faired very well, and I have nothing but gratitude for that. I’m hoping that 2010 will be better for most in these respects.
As far as the blog goes, 2009 really has been a great year for my blog. I didn’t see the stratospheric rise to the top that I expected deserved hoped for, but you know, you can’t have everything I guess! Overall though, I definitely had a solid year, beating out my 2008 number pretty handily. I’m still not getting very much search engine love from Google, but I’m hoping that this might change in 2010. In case you’re wondering, I got about 263k pageviews this year. Some people seem surprised when they hear it is that low. For some reason people think my blog has crazy high traffic, but the reality is that I just have really awesome readers who love to post comments and interact. 🙂 Just goes to show you, you have to fake it til you got it! Ha. I think reality is that I often post about topics which are more niche, and less interesting to the community at large. One of my plans in 2010 is to try and keep that focus on the niche hardcore topics, but to also provide more content to the larger developer community. But when it comes down to it, I blog about what is interesting to me so we will see how this new strategy goes.
I did get a huge surge in RSS subscribers this year though. At the end of last year I was hovering just around 1200 blog subscribers, but this year I am right around 2600 blog subscribers. A serious thanks goes out to all of you who regularly read my blog and comment!
And per the usual year-end recap, here are the top 10 most popular posts of 2009:
Beginning Mocking with Moq 3 – Part 1
The Most Intriguing Concept in Google’s Go Language
ASP.NET MVC – Think Before You Bind
The Most Powerful Development Tool Ever Made
Today I’ve Realized How Far We Have To Go
Ten C# Keywords You Shouldn’t Be Using
Beginning Mocking with Moq 3 – Part 3
Beginning Mocking with Moq 3 – Part 2
Some of my favorites of 2009 (which didn’t make the top 10):
The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Code Generation Should Be The Nuclear Option
Ditching The Micro Optimization Fetish
What Part Of The Process Are Your Tools Optimized For?
What is really interesting to me is the breakdown of traffic sources for 2009:
Only about 9.5% of my traffic comes from searches. The rest comes from direct traffic and referring sites. Thanks! The search traffic numbers were actually a drop from my 2008 numbers. The direct and referral went up a good bit though. I’m hoping that 2010 will be the year of the search engine for my blog:
This is a direct result from Google not liking me as much. Here are my 2009 search engine numbers:
And here is the numbers from 2008:
Google has some hatred for me, and that is evident in the traffic they are sending me 🙂
The browser breakdown for 2009 is also very telling:
Firefox lost a little bit versus 2008, but Chrome is the big winner here! Internet Explorer and Firefox both took a bit of a tumble from a percentage standpoint.
I love it that Chrome is edging up on Internet Explorer among the tech crowd. And Firefox is just killing.
As far as where my traffic comes from, there are no big surprises:
Most of my traffic is U.S. based, but the rest of the top 10 have a strong showing! These are about the same as 2008, except that Poland edged out the Netherlands for the number 7 spot! And the number 7 spot in my heart.
And one last thing that I thought was interesting, 1024×768 finally dropped out of the top 5 browser resolutions:
Check that out! Those resolutions account for over 75% of the traffic on my blog. Pretty impressive.
Overall it was a great year. And I am extremely confident that 2010 will be even better! Cheers!
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