In this rare double-post weekend, it is time to celebrate the 3rd birthday of this blog. For a short time this year, I wondered whether the blog could continue as work continued to demand my time. There were periods of blogging funk, typically every late summer, when there is little news to talk about and just as little software development changes. Thankfully, I find blogging fun and an outlet for ideas, so it continues into the coming new year. Conveniently enough, this is also post 400, another simple milestone. I would like to thank all of my readers for making it through the year.

So, the top 10 posts written this year were:

1. 12 Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know
2. Traditional Programming Language Job Trends – February 2010
3. Android Is Apple’s Burger king
4. Web 2.0 Programming Language Job Trends – February 2010
5. 25 Free Google Analytics Alternatives
6. Android vs. Apple, We Have Seen This War Before
7. Web Scripting Programming Language Job Trends – August 2010
8. Traditional Programming Language Job Trends – August 2010
9. Google Sites Automation With Apps Script
10. Get Paid For Your Likes With MyLikes

The job trends posts had a very strong showing overall, and has become an ongoing series of posts. In particular, I will be looking more at trends in specific areas of technology over the course of the next year. There are some interesting technologies like the NoSQL datastores and HTML5 that look to make 2011 very interesting from the software development perspective.

Other posts that were very popular from previous years:

• What Programming Language Should I Learn
• Tools For Unit Testing Java Web Applications
• What Programming Lanugages Do Jobs Require
• Why Is Data So Important
• The Social Network Business Plan: Strategies From David Silver
• 7 Resume Tips For A Software Developer
• Traditional Programming Language job Trends – August 2009
• Web 2.0 Programming Language job Trends – August 2009

My total statistics at the end of year two show that I was already writing long posts:

• Months Blogging: 24
• Posts Per Month: 12.4 (154 posts in 2009)
• Words Per Post: 777 (914 words per post in 2009)
• Total Words In Posts: 231402 (140,730 words in 2009)

I continue to go against common wisdom and write posts that are even longer:

• Months Blogging: 36
• Posts Per Month: 11 (100 posts this year)
• Words Per Post: 851 (over 1000 words per post! tl;dr)
• Total Words In Posts: 339528 (108,126 words this year)

The other side of the blog statistic picture is the external statistics. Last year, the blog had some nice growth and good subscriber numbers. Technorati continues to change how their rankings work, and Google has tried to lessen the importance on PageRank, so I am really only left with Feedburner subscribers which have increased by about 1000.

Obviously, the blog has grown considerably again this year. Much of the growth is due to the various social services that are popular like Google Reader, Google Buzz, Digg, Twitter and Facebook. Even LinkedIn is starting to emphasize the sharing links more.

So, thank you to all of you. I will not make promises about making my posts shorter, I do not seem to be able to make a point in less than 800 words. This will likely get even worse as I get more into analysis of technology trends and job trends. I do hope you stick around as the information will still be as useful as ever, or not but please keep reading.

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