Post 100 - Blog Stats and Post Highlights

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I was digging around recently and came across an interesting fact... My blog gets more views per month (~150%) than Microsoft official site for my team's product, VSTS Team Developer.  Cool.

This is post #100 on my blogs.msdn.com blog.  So I thought is was a good time for a blog recap post.  Though I've only made 166 posts total (including the 66 on msmvps.com) (as compared to Scott's or Jeff's 1,000s), they seam to have made a reasonable contribution to the community.

A Google search for "serial C#" brings up my article as #1 and follow-up blog post as #3 (alternates slightly day-to-day).  The article, Serial COM Simply in C#, was written well before blogs were popular.  Googling "rs232 C#" brings up my post as #1.  These posts have generated a steady stream of several e-mails a week from people asking for help over the last few years.

Here are some highlights though the years...

Whitepapers / Articles

Reference Materials

Code Examples

 Tools & Reviews

 Visual Studio Team System

Life Hacks

Personal Stuff

Old Blog Tags: C#, General, Personal, Scripting, Tools, VSTS, XML

Favorite Bloggers

Blogging Lessons Learned

Some tips I've learned while blogging...

  • Fresh original content is a must!!  You've got to have good innovative thought provocative stuff to keep people coming back for more, otherwise you're just aggregating info.
  • For me, blogging comes in spurts.  So if I write a few posts, I save them and publish them once-a-day at the most.  That way new content keeps coming out and is not overwhelming.
  • A picture, even if it's not really relevant, makes a post more enjoyable to read.
  • Nicely formatted and colored code always looks nice in a post.
  • People ask "how much time do you spend on a post?"  My answer, 20min to 3hrs.
  • It's good to keep a list of topics for posts when an idea pops up.  Sometimes I'll start writing a post with just an outline and finish it later.
  • An offline writer is very handy.  I use Windows Live Writer.
  • You've got to post what you're interested in.  Otherwise it won't be interesting to the reader either.  A blog is a personal perspective on the world.
  • When posting code examples, its always nice to include a downloadable example that can be quickly and easily run by the reader.

There you have it, a recap since my first post 3 years ago.  It's been a fun, thanks for coming alone for the ride, and get ready because there's only more good stuff coming up!