Last year WordPress created ready-made years end summaries for its hosted blogs, but alas this year I have to do it myself 🙂 Let’s take a look at 2016 and compare it to my post from last January as well as try to make some predictions and goals for 2017.
Stats
First up, lets look at the stats for 2016 as compared to 2015. (Numbers in parenthesis are from 2015)
- Views: 55077 (36106) – up 18971
- Visitors: 44464 (28833) – up 15631
- Likes: 16 (19) – down 3
- Comments: 22 (38) – down 16
- New posts: 28 (41) – down 13
It seems that I have grown my audience by quite a lot but, judging by the numbers, the quality and quantity of my posts are down from 2015. They also haven’t generated as much comments. This is obviously something that I need to work on this year!
Visitor countries – Top 3
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Germany
Posts – Top 3
My highest visited new post in 2016 was “Inline Progress Bar in PowerShell” at #5.
Referrers
The top referrer are by a large margin coming from search engines. Twitter is next best. So it seems that even though I automatically post to Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn every time I create a new post, it seems that most of my audience are people searching for information using search engines. I can only hope that some have saved the address (or know it by heart) and visits directly as well 🙂
I’m fine with this. When I started this blog, it was because I had been using other blogs to help me solve problems for years, and wanted to “return the favor” so to speak. And so, it seems I have succeeded in this at least. I don’t know if any of my post ended up helping someone directly, but I like to believe that they were helpful for some.
2016 resolutions
In the beginning of 2016, I noted down my resolutions for the year. Let’s go through them and see how I did:
Write at least 52 new posts on my blog
This I failed at miserably. My blogging have always been dictated by what I’m working on professionally and how much free time I have, and last year I changed jobs so I think that is in part why I didn’t managed this goal. And perhaps I set my goal a little to high as well? Oh well, I can only try to do better this year.
Attend at least 2 conferences
This I did! I attended PowerShell Conference EU 2016 in Hannover, and NDC Oslo. Both great conferences that I highly recommend.
Speak at a conference
I had three (3) sessions at last years PowerShell Conference EU in Hannover, so – check!
Publish at least 4 modules to the PowerShell Gallery
I published 5 modules to the PowerShell Gallery last year, so this one I also managed to do.
Learn (and start to use) Pester
I did learn Pester, and have already used it several times in customer projects!
Summary
I would say that 4/5 is not so bad! I’m satisfied with that 🙂
2017 resolutions
Let’s try some new resolutions for this year (so we have something to compare with next year):
- Write at least 35 new blog posts (Aiming a tad lower this time)
- Speak at a Usergroup or similar (I’m already scheduled to talk at 2 conferences for 2017)
- Write some posts/articles that are of good quality and that generate some discussions/comments (ref. my bad stats in that area last year)
- Learn, and start to use, containers
- Become more active on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, StackOverflow etc.)
And with that I just want to say “Happy New Year” to all my readers. Please let me know if there are any topics you want me to cover this year.
Communary 