So over the last couple years here at Switch On The Code we built up from a very small following to a pretty decent sized web site. Also, over that time frame we have done a few different things with our advertising, to varying degrees of success. Well, we decided it was time to try something new with some of our ads. Specifically, the 125x125 ads on our post pages. We recently moved all of these over to Buy Sell Ads.

It seems that Switch On The Code's traffic has finally surpassed what our poor dedicated machine is capable of handling - or at least I hope that's the problem. A few times last month, especially on weekday mornings, most of our services go down because there just isn't enough memory available to handle them. At the moment, we've been simply restarting the needed services, but that obviously isn't a good solution. We'll be adding some more memory to our machine soon, but until then, please accept our apology if you've attempted to access the site during one of our downtimes.

Another year has come and gone here at Switch On The Code and that means it's time to look back at 2009 and how we did. First I have say it was a great year and we really did a lot of new things here. We started podcasting, doing video tutorials, and much more. A new version of the site was launched built completely in Drupal just about 1 year ago exactly. Now I really hope that this year will bring just as many goodies.

With July ending, so does our month of Silverlight. All-in-all I think it was an enjoyable experience, however we did start to run out of interesting ideas there towards the end. We've spent an entire month with a Microsoft technology and it's time to shift gears. This time we're going Apple with an entire month dedicated to iPhone tutorials.

Instead of randomly throwing out tutorials for whatever language or framework happened to interest us at that given moment, we've decided to try to focus our tutorials into groups - each lasting one month. As you can probably guess by the title of this post, July is the month of Silverlight.

The data center that holds our dedicated server suffered a power loss yesterday morning that unfortunately took down Switch On The Code for close to 14 hours. This incident, however, really showcases the potential of Twitter's real-time search. A simple query for "crucialparadigm" listed a handful of people experiencing the same outage.

That's right, Switch On The Code turns 2 years old today. Hopefully we'll be a little more agreeable than the average toddler, but I can't guarantee anything. What started out as a little hobby site has grown beyond anything we could have ever imagined, and now we're up to over 250 published tutorials and adding more each week.

When we launched the redesign of Switch On The code back in January we still had several features we wanted to implement. Even though we're still not all the way there, we're now a few steps closer.

It didn't cost $6 million dollars, however we were actually able to launch a new version of Switch On The Code. It's almost hard to believe, since we've been talking about it for almost a year now.

First, we would like to say thanks to all our reader, commenters, and emailers for a great 2008 for Switch on the Code. Next we want to say Happy New Year. This is already shaping up to the best one yet. Why? Well, I will touch on that in a short while, but to begin I will go over some stats from the past year (cause who doesn't love stats!).