So this is post... I actually went and counted... forty-one for the year, if you don't count the one about my broken space bar that I deleted an hour after publishing because rereading it made me cringe. Forty-one posts, a handful of them decent, most of them fine, a couple I'd rather not think about. Figured since it's the last week of December I'd do the thing every blogger does this time of year and look back at it.
The site started as basically a link dump in January. I'd find something on Hacker News, paste the link, write two sentences, done. That got old fast, and also nobody was reading it because there's no point reading a worse version of the thing I linked to. Around March I started actually writing real posts, the how-I-fixed-my-Apache-config kind of thing, and that's when people (well, a few dozen people) started showing up. Small wins.
The biggest thing that happened to this blog this year wasn't anything I did, it was Steve Jobs dying on October 5th. I wrote something that night, fast, not overthought, and it's the single most-read post I've ever published, by a mile. I keep going back and forth on how I feel about that. Half of me is glad something I wrote resonated with people during a moment like that. The other half feels a little gross that my "best" post of the year exists because of someone's death. Anyway. The iPhone 4S had shipped the week before, on October 14th, and I remember thinking Siri was neat for about three days and then I stopped using it because half the time it just told me it couldn't connect to the network. Still use the phone every day though.
What worked this year, concretely: short posts with one clear opinion did way better than my long "comprehensive guide" posts, every single time. My 400-word rant about how Ubuntu 11.10's Unity launcher moved my window controls to the wrong side of the screen got more comments than my 2,000-word walkthrough on setting up a build pipeline. That's a little depressing if I'm honest, because the build pipeline post took me like six hours and the Unity rant took twenty minutes typed straight through a second coffee. But that's the internet for you, I guess. People want opinions, not homework.
What didn't work: I tried doing a weekly "news roundup" post for about two months in the fall and it was a slog every single time. Nobody commented on those. I'd sit there Sunday night trying to summarize the week's tech news and it always felt like I was just repeating what everyone else already said better. Killed that in November and don't miss it. If you're reading this and you also do a roundup post, genuinely, how do you make it not boring. I couldn't crack it.
December's been a weird month to close the year on. The Carrier IQ stuff broke right at the end of November and it's still not really settled, this whole thing where a piece of logging software was sitting on a huge number of phones doing who knows what with keystrokes, and it just kept escalating through the month. Then the SOPA hearings happened in the House Judiciary Committee on the 15th and 16th, and half my Twitter feed was just people live-tweeting congressional testimony about DNS, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type. I didn't write a proper post about either one, mostly because I felt like I didn't have anything to add that ten smarter people hadn't already said, and I think that's actually fine. Not every big story needs my two cents.
On the plus side, I got a Kindle Fire the week it came out, $199, and it's been sitting on my nightstand ever since doing exactly what I wanted, which is basically nothing fancy, just Netflix in bed. And I finally got a Galaxy Nexus running Ice Cream Sandwich a few weeks back after months of being stuck on an old Gingerbread build, and the difference is honestly kind of stunning, the whole thing feels like it was designed by people who'd actually used an iPhone once, which older Android never quite felt like.
Goals for next year, loosely: write less often but make it count more, stop apologizing in every post for not posting enough, and maybe actually finish that jQuery Mobile thing I started in November and abandoned around the third paragraph. We'll see. Happy almost-New-Year, whoever's still reading this in a browser tab somewhere.