I started this blog on January, 1 2009 mostly out of curiosity. I had no prior experience with blogging, I just wanted to give it a try. Never did I expect it would be this much fun and excitement: the writing, the attention, the response, … When I activated my blog I thought of attracting a 100, maybe a 150 visitors in the first month, but I didn’t expect it would reach 1639 unique visitors.

Data Jan 2009

Four days after my blog came online my post about Running PHP CLI shell scripts got picked up (on a Sunday) by the Zend Developer Zone, resulting in 255 visitors in 1 day, and another 2 days later by PHPDeveloper, with 177 visitors that day, without any intervention on my part. Two of the most important RSS feeds for PHP developers syndicated my post, waaw, I mean WAAW!
I can really recommend entering the blogosphere, writing is fun, you meet new people with a common interest and the response is (mostly) welcome. Some people just say thank you and others point to something you’ve overlooked … well I live and learn. Before you start blogging, know that it does take a lot of time to write a review or step-by-step how-to.

Statistics

Chart Jan 2009

Not only does my host provide me with stats for my domain and subdomains, but there is also a plugin for WordPress, namely StatPress Reloaded, that does a very good job at this. In this post you will find a screenshot of a spreadsheet with the stats on operating systems and browsers, including versions and distros and another screenshot with 2 charts based on the same data, but grouped per OS and browser, regardless of version and distro information. I do not think that my blog attracts the attention of the average surfer, but it does show that there is diversity out there. Something that doesn’t show up in these stats, but that I’ve noticed, is that when I publish a new post the share of Linux and Mac OS X is higher than average (not a majority, just higher) during the first days and then Windows users seem to catch up. A possible explanation is that Linux and Mac OS X users are more alert and/or that the use of RSS feeds is higher among the users of those operating systems. StatPress Reloaded doesn’t offer these kind of statistics, but this information must be available in the database somewhere, so maybe I will try to extract it with some custom scripts.

Conclusions:

• Windows is the dominant OS
• Mac OS X is more popular than Windows Vista
• Firefox users keep their browser (software) more up to date
• FireFox 3 is the most popular browser
• Firefox and Internet Explorer (excluding version info) have the same market share
• almost 2% of the visitors used a cellphone, PDA or other mobile thingy, mostly iPod Touch or iPhone
• Ubuntu is the most popular linux distro
• almost 3/4 of the IE users use an outdated version versus only 1/9 of the Firefox users
• there are more linux users than Mac OS X users
• there are more linux users than Windows Vista users

Finally!

I have my own blog. ‘Having’ meaning that I installed it myself, I host it and intend to use it.
The first two steps were easy, now comes the third one. What will I write about ? What stories will I tell ? Will anyone be interested ? On the other hand, that never stopped anyone from blogging, right ?

Screenshot blog

Likely subjects for this blog: BeBook ebook reader, linux, PHP, birdwatching, Tao, SF & Fantasy, … time will tell. This is a personal blog so I do not have to restrict myself to one particular subject.

Some credits: the current theme (December 2008) is based on iNove by mg12. I have removed any references because first I modified some fonts, then some margins and paddings, then the width of the sidebar, then I had to modify the backgrounds, then I changed the footer, then I removed some of the hardcoded widgets, … Well it is no longer his theme, but I do not want to take credit for making it either. It looks challenging to make my own theme in 2009, but for the moment this will do.

Most posts will be in english, but I probably will translate some of them into my native tongue, namely dutch.