I have only really had a couple of personal sites in my fairly lengthy time using the web. I had a personal programming site from the tender age of 14 showcasing my (at the time questionable) skills as a C++ programmer. It also came with what I rather gloriously called a graphics library written in C using mode 13h, a DOS based 320×200 256 colour graphics mode. I called it dang.h (Dan graphics). It featured such oddities as hand written straight line drawing algorithms (Bresenham‘s if you’re interested). I also featured my favourite games of the week, notably Blood and Carmageddon.
Then came the ill-fated (although technically still running) thewatchblog. To be honest I should make more of that site, it explores very briefly one of my other passions, watch collecting. However I could never find the commitment to post regularly to it and lost interest.
But one of the best moments I remember as a web host was one day receiving an email from a chap using my dang.h library. He expressed his gratitude and asked for some pointers for some new development work he was considering. It was only a small, and possibly the only, piece of feedback I ever received from that website. However I remember being immensely pleased at the concept. Traffic has been relatively slow on this blog initially. I’ve had 6 comments … all spam so far (and one genuine from a friend). But, I was very pleased when looking at my natural traffic today I saw the following:
My first natural search traffic
Promising, but what was even better were the search terms that led them here:
- acl 9 rails
- actionscript prevent focus out
- adobe flex determine component focus
- restful_authentication
I’ve still got a grin on my face looking at those. That encourages me to the fact that people might stumble across this site for knowledge and find what they are looking for. And it has certainly given me a boost to carry on publishing my tech findings. Now, just waiting for that elusive first comment… (no that’s not a plea)!
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