Looking Back on One Year of MSDN Blogging

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Well, today marks the one year anniversary of the start of my blog on MSDN. Prior to this, I had experimented for a few months at blogger.com. But once I realized that blogging was something that I enjoyed and could maintain, I made the transition, and I haven't looked back. It's been a great year, and I've enjoyed interacting with many of you through feedback and e-mail. With my new position, I expect that the flavor of my blog will change a bit to accommodate Avalon and components, but I'll still include some personal insight, since I think that's what gives the recipe a little spice.

As a point of interest, I went back through the logs to determine the top 10 posts. I've presented them here with the number of web views in parenthesis (RSS-only readers are not accounted for in these numbers):

  1. Automated Continuous Integration and the Ambient Orb™ (17,819)
  2. Interviewing at Microsoft (15,279)
  3. Code Review and Complexity (14,829)
  4. Microsoft Fingerprint Reader (14,043)
  5. Half-Life 2 Review (12,931)
  6. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Rocks! (10,815)
  7. Macro Wallpaper (9,983)
  8. Macro Wallpaper 2 (9,417)
  9. Dual Opteron Goodness (8,987)
  10. Ordered A Dual Opteron Workstation (8,821)

I'm happy to see that my two articles show up in the #1 and #3 spots. I've had a lot of great discussion regarding those articles, and I appreciate the dialog that they've prompted.

I can thank Chris Sells for #2. The referral logs show that his Microsoft interview page has sent 7,049 readers my way.

I've been surprised by how many people have enjoyed the macro wallpaper that I've posted. In addition to positions #7 and #8, if the list continued, you'd see two more macro wallpaper posts in positions #12 and #13.

There are a few posts that have generated a lot of e-mail. Although I don't have the exact counts, I'd guess that I've exchanged nearly 100 individual e-mails related to these posts:

Thanks again for a fantastic year. Here's to the next!