tatiyants.com My 2012 in Blogging

With 2012 coming to a close, I wanted to take a moment to review another year in blogging. So, let’s dive right in!

Stats

First, some traffic stats: In 2012, I had over 94K visits and over 77K uniques. These are certainly not earth shattering numbers, but I’m pretty satisfied with the traffic. As far as individual posts, I had four 10k+ posts this year:

Good Devs Don’t Like Magic (14K reads)
“DevOps is Ruining My Craft” (13K reads)
How to get IE8 to Support HTML5 Tags and Web Fonts (11K reads)
Guilt Driven Development (10K reads)

The first post on this list got a lot of traffic from Reddit, while the second got a bump from Hacker News. The third was almost entirely organic (thank you Google!), and the forth was a mix (by the way, I actually wrote that post in 2011).

Posts

Even though I assumed I’d get tired of it by now, I continued writing geek humor articles in 2012. Here are some of my favorites:

Another type of posts I started this year are “How to” guides on various technical topics. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Highlights

There were a few highlights this year as well:

I wrote my 100th post
My blogging lead to an interview on the Code Project
Some of my posts started getting republished on a Brazilian developer site called iMasters.
“DevOps is Ruining My Craft” hit the front page of Hacker News and was referenced by Martin Fowler in one of his posts (not bad for what I thought was a throw-away post).
My post on Continuous Delivery was re-tweeted by the Lean Startup guru Eric Ries:

Redesigns

For whatever reason, I redesigned my blog three times this year:

Design 1:

Design 2:

Design 3:

Though the goals I originally outlined for a redesign remained largely the same, I learned some stuff along the way which impacted future iterations. For example, I used to have Google ads displaying on the blog. However, since they netted just a hair over $10 for the entire year, I decided to remove them.

By the way, I should note that the color scheme for the latest design was inspired by this picture of the Bank of China.