It's pretty incredible, but I've reached a new milestone today... this marks the 1000th blog posting here on Ramblings! Over the course of the past four years, I've had 1000 blog postings, and just under 8000 comments, which is pretty amazing considering the fact that I never really considered myself to be a blogger.
My blogging origins started with the original "Ramblings" comic strip that I started back in 2003. It was a hand-coded site that my friend Adam put together for me. I used to draw all of my comics using The Gimp on various Linux OSes (mostly Gentoo), and I'd write up the blog entries using Vim. For the longest time, I was hit #1 on Google when you'd search for "worst drawn comic."
Then I decided to take the leap into "real" blogging software, and so I started using Word Press. It was really strange to start getting emails from people asking me what happened to the comic strip, especially given the fact that it was so incredibly terrible. It was a reasonable way to go, but had massive problems handling spam no matter how hard I tried. Adam and I ended up putting in a ton of hacks, mostly to close security holes, but they worked. Unfortunately, they also had the annoying problem of making upgrades almost impossible to do!
So then I switched to Movable Type, which is what I'm currently on. Man, that transition was horrible... Adam spent weeks (months?) trying to get my old postings over. And they're all here (except for the very original comic strip posts) -- but we were never able to get them to recategorize properly. That's why it looks like I've only got about 200 posts if you tally up the items from the categories list. ;-) But if you look at the monthly archives list, you'll see all 1000 posts are there.
An interesting thing for me to note is the progression of the blog postings. When I first started, I posted a heckuva lot more than I post now. But I also posted mostly personal topics then, and I hardly ever post any now. When I first started blogging, it was mostly as a way for friends to keep in touch and see what's happening. I never dreamed people from my work life would care to read anything I had to say. When I blogged about RB topics, it was mostly just because it was something to say. ;-) Truthfully, it was just to let people know what I was up to. But then I started to get a bit of a following in the RB community, and so the blog started to tend more towards technical topics. Now I'd say it's pretty much fully technical, while I've moved personal stuff off to my Facebook account. This separation makes it a lot easier for me since I can still be open with friends on FB (since I don't allow anyone RB-related onto my friends list as a matter of policy), and still provide interesting content for the REALbasic community. It's not like the RB community is really that interested in my recipe for pumpkin bars anyway. :-P
I never would have dreamed I'd get the sort of traffic I've seen on Ramblings. At one point in time, I was seeing upwards of 30k hits a month on my blog alone. It's been a while since I've waded through the stats, so I'm not certain what I am getting currently, but I believe it's still fairly high. I average 2-3 posts a week, and about 10-15 comments per post.
Of course, this pales in comparison with the single-day 30k hit record I got with a rather controversial entry I posted about how much I hate militant Mac zealots. That posting also has the blog comment record with over 150 comments (between two posts on the subject), which fantastically proved the point of the entire entry with such insightful comments as "It has to be said, blindly or not:-the Mac way of doing things is always the right way-Now take your virus infested pice of molded ugly plastic and shove it where the sun doesn't shine... :)", among other gems. That blog topic is the only one which I've ever had to lock comments for.
I was asked by someone what my all-time favorite blog posting was, and I thought that was a rather strange question. I guess I don't really have any favorite posting because the majority of them are all business related. It's hard to get that excited about a posting that teaches some programming concept over four years worth of such postings. But, I am pretty proud of my engagement posting, even though I lost all of my engagement pictures during a server transition and subsequent backup drive failure (which is rather heartbreaking to me). And while it's too soon to really call it a classic, I think my wedding announcement was certainly a very happy day!
Thanks for coming along for the first 1000 posts, and I hope you'll stick around for the next 1000 as well! Oh, and since I have to be first on Google whenever possible, I'm the first result you'll hit when you search for "Ramblings", which is pretty cool. ;-)
Congrats on the milestone! I think the RB based blogs are an asset to Real Software. I can't imagine working with RB without some of your posts as they've filled in some gaps in official documentation.
Now go back to work and fix something! ;)
I was hit #1 on Google when you'd search for "worst drawn comic." ?
While that's notable I'm not sure you want to brag about it :P
And, yes, the Mac way is still right :P
Thanks for all the great blog postings Aaron. Don't know what we'd have done without some of them.
As of now, you've had 21 000 visits this month. February was pretty slow, but you've had about 20k visits per month this year. Omitting February from the stats (and counting July as a full month), you get about 22k visits per month.
Having looked at your stats, I'm actually quite surprised by some of the data they produce, such as hits by hour.
@Adam -- thanks for the updated stats! 22k hits per month isn't bad, if you ask me. :-)
Mac Rocks! Now... congrats on your milestone. This place is pretty much a daily read for me. I appreciate it.