2008 is done and over with. Before moving on I’ll follow David’s example and post my most popular articles in terms of page views.

Here they are:

1. The State of Java Build Systems
2. Generating DDL Scripts with Maven
3. Generating DDL Scripts from JPA Annotations
4. Parsing Command Line Options in Shell Scripts
5. Controlling Rhythmbox using D-Bus

What’s interesting here is that most of them are HOWTO style articles that got their traffic via search engines and from a few high profile referring sites. The top article is an exception: it’s a rant about build systems for Java that obviously struck a nerve. People submitted it to Reddit and DZone multiple times. It’s a bit sad though that none of my own favorites made it into top 5.

Anyway, this concludes my second year as a blogger. It’s been fun and there’s still a lot of topics I’d like to cover. Thank you for reading and have a happy new year!

I’ve been blogging for a full year now and since the calendar year is coming to an end, too, it’s time for a tiny bit of reflection. One of the main premises of this blog is to keep meta blogging low, so this article is going to be a rare exception.

My blog has been registered in December 2006 at wordpress.com. Their free offer has some limitations, so I can’t make changes to the style sheets but otherwise I haven’t regretted the choice (other than my ugly looking code examples, that is). The website’s availability and speed is pretty good and the admin interface works well, but that’s probably true for all wordpress-based blogs.

Throughout the year I managed an update frequency of about two posts per month. I still have a huge backlog of topics I’d like to cover, but my time is limited and there’s not much hope on improvement. Postings consisting of one short paragraph plus a link to this week’s hottest tool, language, or framework (“everybody, look at X”) is not what this blog should be about.

Since I made no attempt to get articles submitted to dzone or others, resonance through comments has been rather low (though higher than expected). Most of the traffic seems to be coming from search engines where people look for solutions to their specific problems. I covered a rather wide range of topics, so it’s no surprise that the regular readers are mostly friends and colleagues.

Blogging helped me to focus a bit more than usual when playing with new technologies. I often asked myself: What are the key points, what are the important things I want to remember in case I get back to it later? More than once I used one of my own articles as a quick start intro when I had forgotten syntax or concepts of a tool. Now, if that’s no reason to continue ;-)

Alright, enough meta talk for this year. Happy holidays and an interesting, successful 2008 to all of you!