Celebrating 500ᵗʰ post in this blog Joymon v/s Code

The last post was the 500th post in this Joymon v/s blog. Thanks, all the readers for your support and comments. Of course, the number of readers and comments are not in millions or even hundreds. But feels like a big achievement as this was not done as a full-time blogger.

History

This blog has started to collect my own knowledge and experience for my own purpose. When we are continuously working in one company we never realize the need as most of our knowledge is with its own source control repository. But when we change we lose a lot of things unless kept somewhere. It was clearly my thought and mentioned in my first post that readers can expect more links.

http://joyfulwpf.blogspot.com/2007/04/welcome.html

By the way, Joymon v/s Code is not my first blog. It was JoyfulWPF. At that time I was in a world that WPF is the end of technology. Another reason that someone who works in web technology told me that we should include the keyword in site to get better SEO reach. Later I realized that WPF is not the last of technology in the software world. Hence started a new blog generic to coding.

https://joymonscode.blogspot.com/2007/06/call-private-function-method-using.html

This reflection was a groundbreaking thing to me in my early days of .Net career. It is simply allowing to call a private function which is opposite to what I learned about OOP concepts in college. Though I had heard several times from many people that the industry is different than college, this was the time I realized it.

Though the main aim was to post technical coding posts, it got non-technical posts as well. Some notable posts are when I completed 10 years in the industry, I switched from architect to developer, interviewing developers for legacy application codebase. Only one post I had to remove contents was the review of 2019 & plans for 2020 as a software engineer.

Appreciations

Though it started as a personal knowledge base, happy to hear that it helped many people. First appreciation came when I was at offshore India location and one of the topmost coders from the onsite team (USA) called me and thanked me for my post in the JoyfulWPF blog. Later when I came to the USA, it happened multiple times. One time from the client itself. I don't have any words to explain the happiness I felt those times.


https://joymonscode.blogspot.com/2015/12/10-years-in-software-industry-what-i.html

Below are some interesting facts about this blog.

These are some facts may or may not be interesting. Taken from the blogger stats section and includes data from 2010 onwards. Lost 3 years.

• The highest number of views is not even reached 100,000
• Most of the traffic comes from google. 
• Lack of promotion of my posts or they are coming in search results.

Expanding one more

• Half of the users are from the USA where mass development happens from India and other developing countries due to offshoring. Somehow I am not able to help them.
• Fewer views from Mobile though it is optimized for Mobile.
• 82% of the views are from Windows machines. It is expected as the main topics are about development using Microsoft tools.

Acknowledgments

• Family for allowing me to spend extra time for blogging.
• Blogger for the free platform
• The companies, managers, and clients I worked with who continuously throw challenges. Those are the trigger for my blog posts than just plain tutorials.
• Grammarly for helping me write.

Future plans

As seen in the first image in this post, there is fuel in the form of drafts for another 500 more posts. The original plan was to write one post per week but now it seems I am behind that goal. 13 years should have seen 676 posts but its only 500 posts.

Though the blogger provides a good platform, it doesn't feel like modern especially with the publishing technologies from GitHub. Mainly static site generators. The features I feel missing are as below

1. List of headings in the post which people can easily navigate
2. How to show the time to read.

These may be possible using Blogger. They revamped the authoring interface but it is very difficult to use especially when we want to insert an image or do align etc...

Another consideration is the text v/s video platform. When I started blogging streaming was just a word. It was 2 years YouTube had started. Now it's part of life. The plan is to put a video-first strategy and post a link in this post.

One small tip

If you ever wonder how did I achieve superscript in the title of this blog post (500ᵗʰ post) without any HTML technique, the answer is the support for superscript and subscript in unicode.

Happy learning and sharing...