One hundred blog posts!

Happy birthday to me, or better said: happy birthday to my blog, because today I am writing my hundredth blog post! Time for a little evaluation on my tiny space on the Internet…

The past

I have the my domain for a while now: I registered it on April 2005, that’s over 10 years ago! It started with a small personal blog in dutch, went through a couple of redesigns, but it wasn’t until March 2013 that I started blogging from my profession.
As with many bloggers, the beginning is the hardest: you start with an empty canvas and you just start to write, write and write some more. The beginning was the hardest: you write a lot of stuff, but the comments and visits stay low. I tried writing some applications and/or frameworks to try to show some of my skills and try to get shared. Some of these tools include:

• #plygrnd, a tiny framework for canvas animations (github)
• .htTool: a tool for creating .htaccess files (github)
• And some articles with related downloads, like this one.

Needless to say, I didn’t have the drive yet, and in whole 2013 I didn’t come any further that publishing 15 articles.

But then 2014 came…

It was on May 2014 that I decided to become more active with my blog. I switched from jobs at the end of 2013, and working on this new place re-lit my web developers’ spark that I almost lost being stuck on my previous job. It was from that moment forward that I started publishing more often and more frequently.

The present

Like I said, in whole 2013 I published 15 articles. In 2014: I published 53 articles! That’s an average of 1 article every week! But it doesn’t stop there, because in 2015 until today, the counter is already at 31 published articles, with this article being the 32nd, bringing the total published articles to a nice, round 100. Needless to say, I’m pretty proud of myself.

The visitors

You could say that I’m a stats-junky. I check my statistics multiple times a day. In fact, this week I decided to not look at my statistics for a whole week. I wonder if I pull it off. But it’s nice to look at the statistics:

April 2015 of course isn’t finished yet (since this month is not over), but the most interesting about this graph I find the visible growth in visitors. Especially from May 2014, the moment that I decided to pick up blogging again, marks the beginning of a steep growth in visitors. In November 2014 the visitor count slightly stabilizes, but in March 2015 you see a new high score for my statistics. I hope what this month does…

The future

What the future will bring I wouldn’t know. But I do know that I will keep blogging, at least for a while. Lately the topic has been much about Magento but I intent to make it a bit broader about web development, but still keep it interesting for all web developers out there. But to give you an idea of what to expect from me for the future:

• I’ve set myself a target of writing at least 2 blog posts every week. This can vary from quick posts of tiny things I learned and want to share with you, to longer posts presenting more insight on a specific subject. At the time of writing I still have some 40 drafts waiting to be converted into nice, juicy articles, so there’s plenty of that coming your way!
• Each month, I want to select an article I wrote a year ago, and revisit the topic I discussed there. Is it still relevant? Is it obsolete? Have I learned new insights? One thing I always keep telling to myself is: “If today I’m still doing the same stuff on the same method I did it a year ago, I’m doing something wrong”.
• I recently registered a new domain name: So You Want To Be A Web Developer? On this site I want to teach people who are new to the field of web development where to start and how to build websites. It will not be a site like “step 1: register a domain, step 2: install WordPress”, but it will begin with teaching the fundamentals of HTML, move on the CSS and JavaScript and server-side scripting with PHP. But first I have to find some time…

In conclusion

I love blogging. And I love to write about what I do every day as a profession. For me, my blog has three purposes:

• Learning: A place where I can learn new skills by writing articles about new or existing techniques I encounter on a daily base, and forcing myself to gain more in-depth knowledge in it. Also hope for comments and start discussions to learn from the community (that’s you!)
• Presentation: Present my skills as a web developer to the world, and share this knowledge with my readers.
• Reminders: Reminders for myself for various tasks: How did I setup a build script? How did I do that back then in Magento? What was that piece of code that I never seem to remember but did that one crucial thing?

As long as I’m working as a web developer I’ll keep sharing information, articles and knowledge with you. Web development is my passion and I love it. And if you want to comment on this article or just want to congratulate me on my hundredth blog post, please feel free to use the comment section below this article.