2007 roundup

2007 was the second year for this web site. I started it in 2006 using Mambo as the CMS and mostly writing longer articles and guides. This proved impractical after a while.

My work lends itself to writing more quick fix posts for rare or obscure problems. I fill in the rest of my posting time with a little news or a quick look at a new product. So it made sense to move the site to WordPress instead, which I did at the start of the year. WordPress is now the platform for all of my web sites.

Visitor Growth

According to AWStats my visitor numbers have increased quite a bit over the course of the year. January saw only 23 visitors. I was overseas most of February and March so things stayed quiet, had a burst in May, and then grew strongly in the later half of the year. This month I reached a record number of visitors for the site, which stands at 1552 today.

I’ve just started using Google Analytics for this site to get familiar with it. It gives me slightly different numbers than AWStats but it hasn’t even been running a full month yet so I trust AWStats for now.

Popular Posts

Most of the visitor growth was thanks to a few popular posts. The posts deliver a healthy flow of search engine traffic each month.

Event ID 2095 and the USN Rollback Adventure – this is my post popular post and tends to rank in the top five search results for “event id 2095”, right behind the Technet articles and the popular EventID.net.

Event ID 104 when upgrading to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – this is the next most popular post, and also ranks well in search results for “event id 104”. Its kind of embarrassing though because it is based on a foolish endeavour – you aren’t supposed to upgrade WSS 2.0 (running http://companyweb) to WSS 3.0 on Small Business Server 2003. Instead, you are supposed to follow this guide to a parallel install.

Whirlpool forums founder sued by 2Clix – this was a hot issue at the time. Whirlpool users were outraged and the world’s news (from blogs, to major tech sites, and even mainstream news) picked up on the story of a web site owner being sued for refusing to remove posts by forum members. Pledges of donations to a legal fund to fight the case went flooding in and people were all set to see a landmark court decision take place, before 2Clix eventually withdrew the matter (but not before causing themselves a massive PR nightmare).

How and why I stopped using Windows Vista – this post is less than a month old and already has brought in half the traffic that my most popular post (written in June) has brought in. It is also responsible for my biggest single day of traffic because even though it failed to catch much interest on Digg it managed to get Stumbled by someone which sent a lot of visitors to the post that day.

Site Development

Aside from the change from Mambo to WordPress I also bashed together a customised theme for the site, experimented with a bunch of plugins, and even tested out Google Adsense here for a few weeks while developing another web site. I think the ads paid for a can of Coke in that period.

Plans for 2008

Work offers no shortage of things to write about such as technical tips and fixes, new product reviews, and even some material for the odd Visio comic. I will try to keep up my posting rate for this kind of material in the new year.

I have a couple of projects to complete in the new year, and so in the spirit of Aaron’s Diary of an Exchange 2007 upgrade I’ll write about anything interesting along the way.

This WordPress theme, which is a hacked up version of the default Kubrick theme, needs more work. The main column is too narrow for screen shots and code snippets and needs to be made wider. I’d also like to make use of two sidebars to bring some more of that information above the fold.

Happy new year.