2009 - In Review Crazy year...but that seems to be the norm. Is crazy my normal? I wouldn't be suprised.

Numbers

• 289 - Number of posts this year.
  • 37 - September had the highest number of posts.
  • 18 - February - lowest
  • 24 - Average posts per month
  • 76 - Number of days not covered by a post. In reality though, there were numerous occasions where I posted 2 or more times.
• 439 - Number of posts it took to get to the magical $100 mark with Google AdSense. I don't even want to do the math on that. BTW, I reached the $100 mark on December 28, 2009. Here's to perseverance.
• 94,998 - Pageviews according to Google Analytics
• 66,313 - Visits according to Google Analytics
• 465,963 - Page Requests according to my web server (GoDaddy)
• 1,015,934 - Server Requests according to my web server

I'm not sure what the disparity is between the web server stats and Google Analytics. I tend to put more faith into Google Analytics though. (Of course seeing that 1 million is cool, even if it is only server requests).

Pretty Pictures
Here's a screenshot from my Google Analytics page...in July, I hit 5,000 Visits for the first time



I'm still not real clear what happened here



That was a 2,000 visit jump. I originally thought it had to do with my shameless pining to go to OOW 09...but that was late August, early September.

And to give you an idea of the progression since I started



The 2,000 hit jump is much more dramatic in that picture.

Guest Authors

Back in July (well, technically in May), I opened up the blog to guest authors. Mainly I wanted to give people of all experiences an opportunity to try out their writing skills...to see if they would like it. I didn't exclude established bloggers though. Of the 5 who participated, 4 already had blogs and 1 had been considering it.

• Ted Simpson - Ted was first, and now owns a ORACLENERD T-Shirt! His angle is more high-level; the decisions concerning IT implentations and how to do more with less (using Oracle of course). He's written 2 articles so far
  • Large-Scale Solutions for Small Enterprises: a Brief How (and Why) To
  • Intelligent Business Intelligence: 4 Keys to a Successful BI Approach
• Gary Myers - I owe Gary a T-Shirt...if he didn't live in Australia it wouldn't be so difficult, but it's like a million dollars to send it there (plus, I haven't had a steady paycheck in some time). He'll get one though...as soon as we get back on our feet.
  • How To Kill a Code Review
  • How Do You Normalize a Tweet
• Kellyn Pederson Kellyn was either contemplating or had just started her own blog, DBA Kevlar (she has the domain name too, just hasn't migrated over yet). She had a great response on the oracle-l mailing list and I asked if she'd like to write something up. I'm glad she did. She gave us UNDO Brain Damage. Yes, I owe her a shirt as well. Thankfully she's in the States and it won't cost 1 million dollars to send it.
• John Piwowar John has a T-Shirt already, but I suppose I could send him a black one. Though now that he resides in BFE, it probably costs 1 million dollars to send it there too. Not to disparage the other guest authors, but John has been killing me. Three posts in December...really 4, but I delayed that one until after the holidays. Let's not forget the 3 (4) companion pieces that he's written on his site. I consider this my own personal guide to installing the E-Business Suite, even if I haven't gotten it installed quite yet.
  • EBS Install Guide - Part 1
  • EBS Install Guide - Part 2
  • EBS Install Guide- Part 3
  He's also the proud father of The EBS Challenge (though he didn't know about the birth)


• Tiffany Morgan came with a writing piece, Top Ten Grammatical Errors That Make People Look Stup-Silly...., which shows up at number 22 for the year in terms of visits.

I know Ted's got one (almost) ready for posting and I'm trying to talk Jeff Haynes and Brad Tumy into doing guest spots as well.

Thanks to all of you who participated...I can't say that enough.

So I hope you enjoyed 2009 as much as I did. I'm not sure how long I can keep this up...it's a lot of work. I think it's worth it though.

Labels: 2009, gmyers, jpiwowar, kpedersen, tsimpson

  ¶ 1/03/2010 12:23:00 AM   4 Comments Links to this post

  2009 New Year's Resolutions I was tagged by @crisatunity here, so I'll do this. Hopefully The Curmudgeon isn't reading...

These are professional resolutions, not personal (I'm fat, so guess what #1 is on that list).

1. No brainer here. Go the entire year without losing my job. If I leave voluntarily, that doesn't count. I'm just shooting for no firings, no layoffs and no furloughs.
2. Become proficient in OBIEE. I've been given a second chance so to speak. Our DW guy decided now would be a good time to start his own consulting company and I am the lucky recipient of his job. Bonus: Datawarehousing is all the rage. OBIEE is a great tool to have in the tool box so I consider myself lucky on more than one front.
3. Build a PL/SQL only test harness. I don't really know why, but I want to give this a go. I've used SQLUnit (and like it) and a little bit of utPLSQL, but I think there's a lot to learn here. Specifically, how to generate and run code. I've never really done that, except for a small DROP <OBJECT> script now and again.
4. Contribute something tangible to the Oracle community. So I blog, cool. I've done an ApEx presentation, sweet. I would love to be able to contribute an application (a test harness perhaps?) or some sort of library. I don't know exactly what it is yet...

Four is good enough for me this year. One will be the one I focus on most...I just hope it doesn't become a self-fulfilling prophecy. ;)

So, who shall I ask to join us? Jake has already done like 33 end-of-the-year posts...I'm sure one of them included some form of resolutions (predictions actually, it qualifies though). Here we go:

1. Bradd Piontek || (twitter, blog)
2. Don Seiler || (twitter, blog)

I've paired those 2 guys together because I'm pretty sure they know each other. Watching them on Facebook and Twitter go at it keeps me laughing all day. For instance, tonight on Facebook Bradd posted a picture of him drinking something out of a brown paper bag and asking the community to guess what he was drinking. Mr. Seiler said something along the lines of "shame and disappointment?"

3. Dan McGhan || (twitter (loser), blog)

Dan was my "co"-presenter in September on ApEx. I made him do the whole thing, mostly because he heckled me (i.e. answered all the questions) in my first presentation.

*No drinking went on during the writing of this post.

Labels: 2009, funny, work

  ¶ 1/02/2009 11:16:00 PM   5 Comments Links to this post