Unless you’ve entered “100th blog post” into your favourite search engine and clicked on pot luck (or whatever it is) you’ll know that I pretty much always blog about SQL Server. Not this time!
Today, I thought I would share a little bit about me and my blogging experiences. I’ll probably do an update post at 200 and compare what has happened.
Why do I do it?
Why I blog is a very good question, I wrote something on it a little time back, you can read about it here if you’re interested.
What motivated me?
There seems to be something in me that wants to help others and give something back. For years I played the trumpet and wanted to be a brass teacher, I used to be in the cubs and then scouts and went on to become an assistant Scout leader for a while.
It seemed innevitable that once I was settled in a career in SQL Server that something like this would raise it’s head again.
How did I get started?
Blogging was becoming more and more popular and it started seeping though into search engine results for problems that I was experiencing. At that point I started to follow a couple of people including some chap called Brent Ozar.
Brent wrote a series of posts on How to start a blog. I mulled it over for a while, quite a while, and then some. Eventually I decided that I should give it a go. If you are thinking about blogging then do have a read. I found it a big help and probably wouldn’t have taken the plunge without it.
Has it proved popular?
To be honest I have no idea, what is good is people saying I really enjoyed that post on X or I didn’t know that about Y thanks. Feedback means a lot, not just to me but every blogger. It can be hard creating content and wondering if anybody is gaining anything from it.
If you find something useful, then please leave a comment and/or share it with others though social media. Far too many bloggers stop writing great content because they think that nobody cares!
Some metrics
Due to the fact I syndicate my blog in a few places I don’t have a complete picture of the number of people that read content that I create (another reason why comments are so important). What I can share with you are some of the metrics from my site via Google Analytics.
As you can see from the number of visits, things have picked up over time. Hopefully that’s some encouragement for people just starting out.
It’s hard to tell from the image above just how many visitors my blog has received. I included this just so you knew it wasn’t all me hitting F5 !
To my surprise, I seem to have had visits from readers all over the world.
You might be able to tell from the shading that the top 3 locations are the U.S., the U.K. and India.
The image below shows the top 10:
Well, that’s it for my 100th post. I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
I’d love to hear back from you on your experiences of blogging or if this has inspired you to start your own blog.
If you want to contact me about a SQL Server problem or blogging a little less publicly than leaving a comment, you can always Contact Me using the Menu at the top of my website, or the page list at the bottom.
Here’s to another 100 blog posts!
