Happy New Year, Plans For 2015

Happy new year to all!

First a few stats regarding mbedded.ninja in 2014.

• Total num. visitors in 2014 = 158,915 (up 83% from 86,679 in 2013)

• Total num. of comments in 2014 = 31 (down 52% from 64 in 2013)

• Most popular pages (views)

  1. Altium Tricks And Standards (22,229)

  2. Component Packages (17,921)

  3. Altium Bugs And Things To Watch Out For (15,079)

  4. Home Page (7,966)

  5. BLDC Motor Control (5,554)

  • Most popular referrers (num. of refers)

    1. Search Engines (99,257)

    2. Wikipedia (1,985)

    3. DigiKey (697)

    4. Disqus (382)

    5. blog.mivia.dk (240)

And here is a screenshot of the number of visitors by month up to Jan 2015 since I started logging:

Things I hope to attempt this year:

1. Finish moving all component packages onto the own, separate pages. Currently most are still on the one giant page. Although it seems to work well to rank highly in the Google search engine, this poses problems for readers as the page takes a long time to load and navigate. I have finished the first 10 or so packages, but given there is over a 100, this will be a long and painful process :-D.
2. Improve the SEO of more pages (most are not optimised).
3. Improve the menu structure. Many of the menu icons don’t make sense, and I am considering the possibility of making the menu sticky to the top of the page.
4. Stick with a domain and not get bored of it. If there is one thing I’m guilty of it is changing the domain name of this site too often. In 2004 it was first http://homepages.inspire.net.nz/~hunter/ (which still exists!!!), then www.undergroundmadlabs.com, then www.cladlab.com and now blog.mbedded.ninja. In part it reflects the changing nature of the site’s content, but also my ability to choose names that I get bored of quickly. I think I’m on to a winner with blog.mbedded.ninja, so let’s hope it stays that way!
5. Publicise more! Haven’t worked out how I’m going to do this…
6. Improve load times. I have just started looking into this, as I have had a feeling that the load times have not been spectacular. One monitoring service reports that the average load time for the home page is currently around 7-9s. Ouch! I don’t know what is ’normal’, but this seems too high!
7. Automate the adding of child pages to a TOC (table of contents) on the parent page. This will be especially useful for pages with a high number of child pages, such as the Component Packages page. Currently the only way to view child pages is through the main menu (which can get overwhelmed).
8. Continue adding to and improving the existing content (as always).