2011-08-05

Das U-Blog Turns 2!

Wow. It has been two years since I started this blog! I started it at my internship at NIST (where I'm working again this summer, though I feel like what I'm doing now is far more interesting that what I did then, and that's why I started the blog anyway) on a particularly boring day after seeing that one of my friends had started a blog too. Initially, I focused a lot on politics (aside from a few posts here and there about happenings in my own personal life), because I thought it would be cool and interesting, and only posted marginally about science or technology. After about 2 months, I became a bit more focused on writing about Linux and other technology-related stuff, as well as stuff that sites like TechDirt cover. But really, it wasn't until August of last year when I started to really get serious about Linux distribution reviews, and that's also when (1) this blog went from getting virtually no traffic to quite a bit of traffic and (2) my writing style became essentially what it has remained since then. I've looked back and some of the older posts and laughed at (1) how naive I was (specifically regarding a couple of my politics-related posts), (2) how bad a writer I was (relatively), and (3) how shallow I was when reviewing Linux distributions.
(2010) 0 in July, 544 in August, >20000 in September

Here's a graph of how my blog's statistics have changed over time:
As you can see, it wasn't until 2010 August/September when this site started getting lots of page views, because that's when I started submitting my stories to Linux Today (and later LXer), and those later got featured on sites like Tuxmachines (and later DistroWatch, if they were reviews). That's also when the comments went up from 1 or 2 every few weeks to at least 5-10 every post or so. That was exciting for me to see.

I want to thank everyone who has read and commented on these posts. 99.9% of the time, your comments are greatly appreciated. I also want to thank those who are "fans" of this blog's Facebook page, follow the associated Twitter feed and retweet posts, have subscribed via RSS and/or email, and have shared these posts in other ways as well. It has been a lot of fun doing this for 2 years now, and I look forward to doing this for the foreseeable future as well! Happy reading!