Another year has come and gone, which means it's time for us to look back at 2011 and see what happened. This year marks the fifth anniversary of Switch On The Code and so far every year has been better than the last.

In February we saw our first ever month of 500k pageviews, and for the most part traffic has held steady ever since. We ended the year with an amazing 5.6 million pageviews - a 10% increase over the previous year.

While not quite as exciting as Reddit's billions served announcement, Switch On The Code did pass a milestone we've been anxiously awaiting - 500,000 pageviews!

It appears as though our spam filter has been running amok marking anything and everything as spam. We noticed a definite drop in comment volume, but failed to find where our new spam filter was putting all the marked content. Well, we found it, and whereas I tried to release everything that wasn't spam, some things were left irretrievable.

If you've been attempting to comment these past few weeks, we apologize for the inability to do so. The spam system has been essentially disabled while we search for another alternative.

Hey everyone, we're still here and wanted to update our readers with something we changed here on the site. One thing we get a lot of here at Switch On The Code is spam, mostly comment spam on posts. This causes a couple issues, first is trying to put something in place to reduce the amount of manual work done to remove spam. On this front we have long used the hashcash module which has performed decently. It captures nearly all of the spam comments we were getting but has a problem stopping legitimate people from posting comments.

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.