My year

My biggest accomplishment this year is the amount I’ve learned about Chromium project and that I have started contributing back. Unfortunately I haven’t been as active on my blog, primarily due to increased work and personal commitments. Of my 14 posts this year on my blog, only 1 was published in the last 6 months.

External articles

I dipped my toes a little more in writing for other websites, doing two for Sitepoint.

• What CSS Variables Can Do That Preprocessors Can’t
• Speed Index: Measuring Page Load Time a Different Way

New stuff

Just because I haven’t been as active writing posts doesn’t mean nothing has been happening, here are the less obvious improvements I made to the blog:

• Added wide tables that expand past where text is wrapped
• Went from Maruku to Kramdown for markdown
• Integrated abbr-touch.js to make <abbr> elements accessible on touch devices
• Added support for the theme-color meta tag
• Added page title and “ via @Tyriar” to Tweet button
• Tweaking colours, grammar, minor performance improvements, etc.

Analytics insights

Here are some interesting stats on the traffic to the blog, comparing them to last year.

Traffic source

Organic search nearly doubled this year from 43% to 81% of all traffic. This can largely be explained by myself not being as active in both writing posts and on social networks.

1. 81% organic search
2. 9% direct (↑ was #4)
3. 6% social (↓ was #2)
4. 3% referral (↑ was #6)
5. 1% email
6. 0% unknown (↓ was #3)

Browser

Very little has changed with browser usage.

1. 66% Chrome
2. 20% Firefox
3. 7% Internet explorer
4. 4% Safari
5. 1% Opera

Form

Desktop has grown 7%, cutting mostly in to mobile’s portion. Less social activity means less mobile views.

1. 92% desktop
2. 6% mobile
3. 2% tablet

Location

The main call out with location is that traffic from India increased by 50% of what it was.

1. 26.91% United States
2. 14.03% India
3. 5.62% United Kingdom
4. 3.56% Germany
5. 3.19% Canada (↑ was #6)
6. 2.49% France (↑ was #7)
7. 2.23% Brazil (↑ was #10)
8. 2.23% Australia (↓ was #5)
9. 1.99% Russia (new)
10. 1.85% Netherlands (↓ was #9)

Most popular posts

Here were the most popular posts of the year (bold posts were published this past year):

1. Handy adb commands for Android published 14 January 2014 (↑ was #2)
2. ASP.NET MVC display and editor templates published 16 December 2012 (↓ was #1)
3. async vs defer attributes published 26 February 2014 (new)
4. Func<> and Action<> basics in C# published 5 August 2012 (↑ was #6)
5. Triangles in CSS published 11 Match 2013 (↓ was #3)
6. Passing parameters to jQuery event handlers published 14 June 2012 (↓ was #5)
7. Implement a queue using 2 stacks published 13 July 2013 (↑ was #8)
8. Fibonacci heap published 15 June 2014 (new)
9. Integer division without the division operator (/) published 25 June 2013 (new)
10. Binomial heap published 19 January 2014 (new)

The most interesting thing that happened here is that the async vs defer attributes post went viral on Reddit and then Twitter in September which was fun to watch unfold over several weeks time.

My favourite posts this year

These are my favourite posts for the past year:

1. Fibonacci heap - I’m glad this had a showing in the most popular posts of the year as this is probably my favourite post I have written to date. The animated SVGs took quite a bit of effort to throw together and they turned out great.
2. Asking better questions on Stack Overflow - The title sums it up, I spent quite a lot of time on Stack Overflow learning and answering questions. I should break 20k rep this coming year!
3. Making abbr elements touch accessible - Explains a javascript library I wrote to make the <abbr> elements accessible on touch devices.
4. Counting sort - A look at the counting sort algorithm.
5. Sorting algorithms - A new landing page for all sorting algorithms

I was also quite happy with the post on the speed index metric and how to measure it with the Telemetry performance testing framework on SitePoint.

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