With an incredible stroke of luck and happenstance, this is my hundredth post and my last post of the year. It seemed to me the perfect time to step back and assess my first year writing the DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog.

A Look at the Numbers

Just today I passed 186,000 hits on 99 posts. My best month in terms of hits so far was last month when I had 36,035. My most popular post was Alfresco-Adobe Pact Push Open Source Toward the Main Stream, which passed the 8200 hit mark this morning followed by Google Exec Hints at Future Open Platform, which sits at 7940 as of this writing. Both of these posts, not coincidentally, were picked up by Slashdot.

Some posts jump out of the gate and find an audience immediately, while others take time percolate and live on in search engine traffic. Among my personal favorites were not necessarily the most popular. At the end of May I wrote a piece after going to a conference on global warming called Can Technology Save Us From Global Warming. It started out very slowly, but has built up over time to over 1300 hits.

A Brief History

I began this blog in April, only knowing that I wanted to write about technology topics, and while I write about many subjects, I concentrated for the most part on the big three: Apple, Microsoft and Google. These three companies have a profound impact on technology in general and all are extremely active, making them easy targets for writer like me looking for regular content. I also covered open source quite often.

My distinctly unscientific counting survey found these four items break down as follows:

• Microsoft - 21 posts
• Apple - 21 posts
• Google - 16 posts
• Open Source - 9 posts

Of course, several posts had some combination of these items mixed in such as Computer Industry Giants Wrestle for World Domination. I also wrote about Adobe several times, social networking and internet marketing and more recently the RIAA and copyright. I did a series on cloud computing, which I think will have a big impact in the coming year.

Thanks for Coming

All in all, I'm very proud of my first year at DaniWeb. It took me some time to figure out my general direction and to find my voice, but now that I have, I find that I get fairly steady traffic and much better traction, even on the weakest traffic posts, than I get on my personal blog, By Ron Miller. Every post passes 500 hits and over time most pass 1000. The best ones go much higher. I'm still looking for that grand slam that gives me 10,000 or more. Who knows? Maybe it will happen in 2009.

I want to close by thanking you the people who read this blog. I never know what's going to catch on or what you'll like reading, but I'm grateful for all the people who keep finding this blog. Happy New Year to all.