Not one for anniversaries but realized today that I’ve been blogging for 2 years as of April 9th.  I started this as side-project to compliment my portfolio, and to establish a controlled public presence as I’m absent on most social networks.

While, I cannot give much credit to my blog, it has helped as I’m working for a much better company than when I started this, in a new city.

Things learned:

Quality not quantity counts: The posts that have the most traction have usually been ones I’ve spent more time on. It’s cliché, I’ve read it before but its true.

Tumblr Likes/Hearts/Reblogs mean almost nothing when it comes to stats.  See Tumblr likes vs Page Views, for a break down.

Web Development doesn’t bring the hits. My most popular articles are mostly Apple related.

Building up traffic takes a long time. I once ran a site that got 150,000 visitors a day, I haven’t achieved one what I’d get in a single day half of that in two years. 

image

Useful Posts tend to attract the most attention. My most popular post by far and away was a list of fixes I discovered when trying to make Far Cry 4 work. I’m not a big gamer, but figured it was worth post. Other big hits have been my recommended list of Mac Pro Upgrades, and my guide to using iFile to upload custom ringtones to iOS. Reviews tend to do alright too, my 9 months with CodeKit 2 has been ever-popular.

Tumblr is a great blogging tool that is used rarely by bloggers. Tumblr is mostly a place for younger people to re-share things they like in a pinterest fashion, but underneath is a friendly and fast interface that has a writer’s heart.

Things I’ve changed:

Less opinions. Quite frankly no one cares what you think, or specifically what I think about stuff. I have a lot of opinions but are they useful? Not really. I’m not John Gruber.

Stop setting goals for X amount of posts over X amount of time. Unless you’re being paid, don’t worry about frequency long as you’re posting more than once a month. 

Write for everyone. Web development is hard enough as it is. As a working professional, I still write for the common folk in mind. Even for the pros, its easier to digest when things are written to be understood by everyone even if it means spending more time explaining every step.