After 3 months and 100 posts...

Exactly 3 months ago I have written the first post on this site… this is the 100th post and I will try to present here my impressions after all this time.

1. Blogging is not easy… before starting this site, I thought blogging is something easy. I have learned that this is not quite like that. There are just so many ideas and cool things to write about, but I don’t always have the mood to write. Sometimes I will be really stressed after some work problems and I would just prefer to read something and not concentrate on writing. Definitely writing in English that is not my primary language, makes this a little more complicated. Still I am trying to overcome this and write only when I feel like writing even if this means that I am not posting so regular as in the first days.

2. Do I care what others say? the answer is definitely yes, I do care. After some of my posts were featured on some big sites I have been shocked by how mean some peoples can be. But I have learned that if I want to continue doing this I need to become immune to such things. Now I just don’t care about this anymore and definitely the kind words of peoples that found my posts useful helped me a lot. When you start blogging you just don’t expect to see peoples stealing your content and making really mean and useless comments… this is the downside of having a post featured in many places and read by many different peoples; some will like it and find it useful, other will just trash it without considering the feelings of the person who wrote it. I assume that this is the reason for many peoples that start blogging to stop after just a few months. Anyway myself I moved over this: as noted previously I am not submitting any stories to digg (all my posts that were featured there lately were submitted by someone else) and also I am not reading ANY comments posted on sites outside my own. I just don’t care… I am writing for fun and from the feedback I got so far, many peoples found some useful things on my blog so this is all that matters.

3. Stats: for the peoples who care about this in 3 months this site has served 113,511 unique visitors (with an average of 873 visitors / day) and over 160,000 page views. Also after the second month the site received a good google pagerank (PR6) and one post even PR7. There is an average of 350-400 peoples reading the site using various RSS readers.

4. Advertisements on the site: I must say that I was surprised by the results obtained from advertisements. This is definitely not something to replace my job or anything similar but at least the site pays for its hosting and this is really cool. Actually after seeing this I have decided to move on a dedicated server, were I will consolidate some other projects I am working on. I have tested various other advertisements besides google adsense, but so far they just didn’t come even close to the results of adsense. Once I have seen how they work I have dropped them completely. Google adsense rocks compared to other systems. When you are clicking on advertisements you are supporting this site. I am trying to get as much as possible relevant ads and filter out unrelated or spam sites that might be shown by some programs.

5. New server: as I said before, I have completed the move on a dedicated server. Nothing fancy (this is a Pentium4/1GB RAM/80GB HDD), as I was trying to keep this around 100$/mo. Still I am very satisfied about this move and I have concentrated here some other projects I am working on. After this move I have prepared several posts that document some configurations done on the new server.

6. Changes on the site: I am planning to do various changes on the site in the near future… I am looking to replace the wordpress theme used now but have not found something particular that I like yet (still searching); also I am looking to implement mail subscriptions (using feedburner probably). Also some other small updates and changes in the plugins used. For now I have completed some updates like: the site is now running on my own dedicated server where I am using now Apache2/PHP5/MySQL5 as opposed to the pervious hosting account where it was running on CPanel with apache1/PHP4/MySQL4.1. Also Wordpress is the latest stable 2.0.4.

As a conclusion to this post: I would like to thank to all the peoples that have send me feedback on the site, and also to all the users that have subscribed to my RSS feeds or browse the site daily. Thank you very much. Your kind words made me continue with the site and I hope that you will enjoy my posts also in the future and find out interesting things.

Thank you,
- Marius -

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