Top 10 stories in 2010

LuMaxArt Golden Guy Trophy Winner, by Scott Maxwell

Here we are, the first day in 2011, and it’s time to look back at 2010. We’ve seen a steady increase in number of pages viewed over the year, from about 900 pages per month in January to almost 1500 pages per month in December. Year over year however we dropped a couple of percent, having about 14% less visits and page views in 2010 than we did in 2009. Reason for this is a stellar period in 2009, starting in April and ending in early June. We’re coming close to those figures with a few posts in November and December, and hopefully the trend of about 10% growth per month will continue in 2011. Thanks everyone!

Now finally, here are the top 10 stories in 2010:

1. Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows

Date of article: March 27, 2009
Hit percentage: 8.5%

This article describes briefly how to find the name of a particular service in Windows, to add it to the Nagios monitoring platform. It also sparked a nice discussion over faster ways to determine it.

2. Blackberry not syncing with BES

Date of article: September 11, 2008
Hit percentage: 7.3%

This article discusses a simple fix I found to restart the synchronization between a Blackberry phone and the BES server. Interesting that it is more than 2 years old and still heavily visited.

3. Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc

Date of article: January 7, 2009
Hit percentage: 6.6%

Also an article almost 2 years old, this one describes step by step how to set up a VPN connection under Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve since moved to Windows 7 for my main machine, but still run several Linux machines, both at home and at work.

4. Firefox equivalent of Internet Explorer’s Every Time I visit the Web page

Date of article: April 1, 2009
Hit percentage: 5.3%

Once again, an old article, describing the need I had on a bulletin board monitor at work to make sure the pages were loaded fresh every time they’re displayed.

5. Tomcat uses 100% of CPU

Date of article: March 30, 2009
Hit percentage: 4.8%

I think there’s a trend - the older articles are hit more! 🙂 This one describes what caused my fresh installation of Tomcat to use 100% of the CPU, pretty much 100% of the time, and the fix for it.

6. ICVerify: encrypt request and answer files using EncryptionManager

Date of article: February 13, 2009
Hit percentage: 4.5%

Another article from early 2009 that proved popular through 2010. This describes my problems getting the ICVerify encryption/decryption of the request and answer files working. The key was the fact that the .DLL used was a .NET assembly, and needed to be added to the Global Assembly Cache.

7. Ubuntu 8.10 installation – GRUB error 18

Date of article: January 5, 2009
Hit percentage: 3.2%

Early 2009 once again, and this one describes the problems I had installing Ubuntu 8.10 on an older machine with a large drive, and how to create a boot partition for the kernel.

8. NotScripts – The NoScript option for Chrome

Date of article: August 19, 2010
Hit percentage: 2.5%

The first article in the top 10 that was actually written in 2010! NotScripts is the awesome version of NoScript for Chrome, disabling Javascript selectively per site. It doesn’t have all the extra functionality of NoScript, but gets the job done quickly and easily.

9. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit

Date of article: October 11, 2007
Hit percentage: 2.4%

And immediately to offset that 2010 article, here’s the oldest article in the top 10. Since Windows 7 makes the installation of the Bluetooth adapter much easier, this may not be on the list next year, but for now, if you’re struggling with Kensington and Windows Vista, this is your article!

10. Sharepoint 2007 Wiki WYSIWYG editor

Date of article: October 13, 2010
Hit percentage: 2.3%

Rounding out the top 10 is another article from 2010, complaining about the lack of browser support other than IE in Sharepoint 2007, while there are so many other browsers these days (in 2010 42% of visitors here used Firefox and 20% used Chrome - even back in 2008 IE wasn’t the #1 browser for visitors here). It sparked some discussion about WordPress and WordOnWiki.

Conclusion

So there you have it: the old articles still provide a lot of visitors. It shows that articles describing a problem and the solution to that problem are long-lived. Oh and if you want to know the top 10 articles written in 2010, here they are:

I hope to see you all frequently in 2011. Happy New Year!!