Ending a Good Year

8 Months ago, three gentlemen decided to share their knowledge by writing tutorials about anything they could think of. Since then, we have written numerous tutorials and have had a couple pageviews - and have gotten to discuss some cool things and cool people. I must also say that we have seen much more traffic than we thought we would ever get. We really like being very open about what is going on so we thought that we would talk about some of the stats of the blog and where we are going in the future.

Year 2007 in Review

The Switch on the Code blog ended 2007 with 112 posts in 19 different categories. All of these were written by one of three people. Digging in a little bit more we see below that the most popular written category was C# with 31 posts and Javascript coming a close second. In total there were 96 tutorials written.

The three gentlemen who have written these (The Fattest, The Reddest, The Tallest) have all written a decent amount. But with the most posts we have The Tallest taking a lead late in the year with 43 posts, followed by The Reddest at 40 and myself at 29 (my 30th went up today). We average one post every 2.2 days. With almost every post being written as a complete tutorial. The community has started to flourish also with 486 comments and 174 registered users, we are really looking forward to expanding the community in this next year.

Most of the traffic that lands at this blog is from Google and is search traffic, which we both like and dislike. How many visits do you ask? Well from April 29, 2007 to Dec. 31, 2007 we received 125,000 visits (85,000 different keywords) from Google searches. Not a super huge number but nothing to shrug at. And, you're probably asking what are the most popular keywords being searched for. The list below is of the top ten most popular search terms, with #1 sending over 2,000 visits our way.

• flex tutorial
• flex tutorials
• javascript settimeout
• javascript setinterval
• flex datagrid
• settimeout javascript
• silverlight tutorial
• datagridview tutorial
• c# image draw
• flex php json

We also ended the year with 36,000 visits from referring sites with the top referrers below.

Here are a couple more tidbits; we had a whopping 178,397 visits and 279,751 pageviews giving us 1.57 pages per visit with an average time on site of 1 minute 36 seconds. The #1 post of 2007 on the blog was ... Flex & Javascript Tutorial - Simple Interaction with 12,800 pageviews. That pretty much concludes 2007.

Looking Towards 2008

Now, there are many new and exciting things going on around the blog this upcoming year. I don't want to give everything away but I will tell you all about some things. First, I will say that the tutorials will continue to come at the same rate as they always have. One particular post which I enjoyed was our interview; I would guess that there will definitely be more of these in the future. We are also going to try to expand the categories a little bit more, but haven't quite decided what else to write about yet. I might also guess that there may be a surge in Flex tutorials in the next month or so (if any of you have a Flex tutorial requests, drop a comment).

On a different note, everyone might see a major visual refresh of the site sometime in the future. There are no guarantees when this is going to happen or at all but the outlook is promising. There are a couple new features people can look forward to, also, including forums for programming questions, a better commenting system, and some shiny new post types.

One more item we are thinking about is getting into video podcasting to have a show about programming and well what ever else comes to our mind. If anyone has a thought about any of these things please let us know. We actually do listen to the people who read this blog and care what they think; after all we don't write the tutorials for ourselves. Ohh and Happy New Year.