State of the Site

Posted by Neil Crosby on January 3, 2005 01:53 PM

I know I’m a little late with doing the roundup of 2004, but bear with me. 2004 was the first year of workingwith.me.uk’s existence, and it’s been a pretty good one.

JANUARY

The site didn’t exist yet, but I knew that I was wanting to create something that would be helpful to people who were learning about the same sorts of things as me. I didn’t want a site that was going to be duplicating everything that was already out there. Instead, I wanted something that would help people with the stuff that I found it difficult to find out about.

FEBRUARY

I bought the domain name. There were many others which fell by the wayside, including “stuffwithin.me.uk”. I also bought “404error.me.uk” in a fit of domain buying madness. I still haven’t done anything with it.

MARCH

This month was pretty much just developing the original look of the site.

APRIL

The first article for the site was released - “Serving the Correct Mime Type with PHP”. This was easily the second most viewed page on the website for the year, after the homepage

MAY

“Serving the Correct Mime Type with PHP” was released. This article never did as well as I’d hoped, but the search term “mod_rewrite example” now gives this as the number one result on google, and its views are steadily increasing.

JUNE

Started blogging properly. Most of the time spent on the site this month was learning how to embed entries nicely from LiveJournal. I’m currently relearning this so that I can use the XML-RPC interface as intended, rather than slurping s2 created pages from LiveJournal. This month, I also released the “Which HTML Tag am I?” meme. This meme got taken about 1000 times in 4 days, which was frankly amazing considering that I’d only posted one link to it in one place! I really was amazed by the power of propagation on the internet - I’d never seen things move so fast for something that I’d created.

JULY

I discovered del.icio.us, and have been waxing lyrical on here ever since.

AUGUST

A very quiet month. The lack of updates caused a downturn in the number of visitors to the site. I learned my lesson.

SEPTEMBER

Made some cosmetic changes to the site, including the style changer. I still intend to write a small article about that.

OCTOBER

A lot of changes this month. I made the resolution that I would update the blog at least every three days. The RSS feed was introduced for the blog, as well as making blog archives available. The article describing How to write a Quiz-like Meme was finally written.

NOVEMBER

November was the month of the iTunes update. Given that I was needing to work out how to get Java communicating with iTunes under Windows, and no-one else had published anything on the web about this, I thought that I’d better do the job. Seems like a good thing that I did too - I’ve been contacted a few times now by people just wanting to say Thankyou for making the knowledge available.

DECEMBER

Released a full article about “Using the iTunes COM Interface with Java and Swing”. Also started blogging about more computer related things outside of workingwith.me.uk.

Now, to keep going as I started last year, and make workingwith.me.uk even more useful and relevant!

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