I had no idea when I started this blog that it would last past a few months. Now, four years later, I am still blogging albeit a little slower lately. This year saw a typical blogging funk late in the year, mostly due to a lack of time, but also due to fewer big announcements and more smaller product iterations.

So, the top 11 posts  written this year were:

1. 9 Programming Languages To Watch In 2011
2. Traditional Programming Language Job Trends – February 2011
3. Web & Scripting Programming Language Job Trends – February 2011
4. 5 jQuery Scripts To Create a Great First Impression
5. Twitter Stops Whitelisting Applications
6. Google Plus Looks Good But Needs An Application Platform
7. Traditional Programming Language Job Trends – August 2011
8. 13 Free GTD Online Tools For Mac Windows OR Linux
9. As A Software Engineer, Do You Really Like Your Job?
10. Google Sites Becomes A Real SharePoint Competitor
11. 36 Resources To Help You Teach Kids Programming

Why 11 posts? Well, the top post was written one day before the anniversary last year and most of the traffic occurred after the anniversary. The job trends posts continue to have a strong showing regardless of when they were written. The social posts still tend to appear but they are more programming related as well. This continues a trend from last year.

Other posts that were very popular from previous years:

• What Programming Language Should I Learn?
• 25 Free Google Analytics Alternatives
• Traditional Programming Language Job Trends – February 2010
• Traditional Programming Language Job Trends – August 2010
• Google Sites Automation With Apps Script
• Web & Scripting Programming Language Job Trends – August 2010
• 12 Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know
• 7 Resume Tips For a Software Developer
• Why Is Data So Important?

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

• Months Blogging: 36
• Posts Per Month: 11 (400 posts total)
• Words Per Post: 851
• Total Words In Posts: 339528

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

• Months Blogging: 48
• Posts Per Month: 12.3 (180 posts this year, and 580 posts total)
• Words Per Post: 887
• Total Words In Posts: 514328 (174,800 words this year)

This year saw the introduction of my list posts (93 so far) in the Geek Reading category, and the subsequent demise of those posts with the changes in Google Reader. I do hope to restart those posts when I can determine the best way to implement them. Ignoring the Geek Reading posts, my blogging was technically slower than last year, with 87 posts or just over 7 posts per month. I continued the trend of writing far too many words per post, but people keep reading.

The other side of the blog statistic picture is the external statistics. This past year, the blog had solid traffic growth and good subscriber numbers. Technorati continues to change how their rankings work where my ranking in Technology and InfoTech seems to range from 500 to 5000 and 100 to 2000 respectively. Google changed how their search engine worked again, and that seems to positively impacted traffic to the blog. Feedburner finally dropped FriendFeed from the subscriber numbers, and it recently peaked at 3010 subscribers.

The social landscape continues to change as much of the social sharing has been wildly different than previous years. I no longer see traffic from Digg or Google Buzz, but I now see traffic from DZone, LinkedIn and Google+. Facebook and Twitter look to be mainstays in social for any blog.

As always, thank you for your continued reading and social sharing. Hopefully, this blog will continue to be useful to you.