A Look Back on 2008

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!).

Year 2008 Roundup

To get things rolling I am going to spit out a few of our larger numbers. First and foremost, the number of pageviews for 2008 was 1,634,200 which when compared to the previous year, 279,751, is a increase of 484.16%. That isn't too shabby. Now, we started the blog in the end of April 2007, so when your take those numbers and turn them into a monthly number we get 136,183 and 34,969 for 2008 and 2007 respectively, a measly 389% increase. Visits increased by about the same about to 1,157,570, this gives us an average of over 3,171 visits per day. Our pages per visit fell to 1.41,decreasing about 10% from 2007.

Our largest single day came on September 10th when a post, How Google Chrome Stores Passwords, made it onto the reddit front page pushing us to 27,740 visits for the day. The most popular post of the year was Flex Fun - Advanced DataGrid Topics by The Fattest with 54,365 pageviews.

In this past year we managed to post 148 articles, which gives us 1 post about every 2.4 days. Most of these were tutorials, but we have started trying other types of informative posts such as book reviews and interviews. Our tutorials and various articles where spread amongst 33 different categories with the following breakdown. Notice the total number in the combined categories will not add up to 148 because some posts are in multiple categories.

From a search standpoint we had a fine year with 809,190 visits from Google search via 385,160 keywords. The most popular search terms were:

• flex tutorial
• javascript settimeout
• javascript setinterval
• c# dictionary
• wpf listview
• flex datagrid
• c# datagridview
• flex javascript
• wpf tutorial
• javascript fade

Our referring traffic grew by 390% from 2007 to 140,649 visits. The largest contributing sites are listed below.

All the statistics used were acquired from Google Analytics.

2009: A Year for Progress

I am truly excited to say that the next version of Switch on the Code is nearing completion and just about ready to be shown. The new site has taken way too long to complete, but sometimes our own work gets put to the side. We have a lot of ideas for the new site and this first release will just be the tip of the iceberg. I think I can safely say we have another year's worth of features we hope to add. As for writing we really hope to release about an average of 3 tutorials a week and other interesting posts. We think that 3 tutorials a week on a variety of topics will give everyone something interesting to read.

A major priority for us this next year is working to get you (the community) involved more. I won't say too much about it now but plan on seeing exciting new items on the site to facilitate this. And lastly, I just want to say again thanks everyone for a great 2008 - we are really looking forward to this next one. I will also say that we would love to hear from everyone about how we could help improve your programming learning experience. Until next time, keep programming.